US Regulatory Clarity, Tempo Testnet, Tezos, Daylight, and Money Moves Fast EP 13

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[music] How about [music] the [music] >> [music] >> How about [music] JP Morgan, Black Rock, DTCC, Fidelity,

the entire thing was just institutions. [music] It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. [music] I'm bullish. You said it. You finally said it. So bullish. [music] I'm bullish. We're bullish. [music] [music] I'm about [music] to [music]

die. [music] [music] I'm the buffer. [music] [music] >> [music] [music]

>> How the [ __ ] [music] [music] the rollup is headed to the top. If we're not already at the top, we're going to the top. We're on fourth floor today. We're gonna be on floor one and then we're headed straight to the moon, boys. >> Hold the bottom. >> That kid got eyes on him, doesn't he? >> Hold the bottom. >> Yes, sir. We're back. 10 days of green candles throughout the entire year. You can't sell because there's one there's 10 days throughout the entire year when we go up and you don't want to miss it.

So, you can't sell. >> I'm going to go ahead and uh phone a friend here, Mr. Berniski and ask him what he thinks about bouncy balls. You know, maybe not the type of bouncy balls you used to play with with your mind, you know, with the tisms going on with the colors back in the day. You know, I know that probably triggered you, sir, but really the bouncy balls of the of the bearish market phases where >> bouncy balls inside my head. >> You get these bouncy balls >> that those are my They're like heart. They go down and they bounce and it's like, "Oh my god, it looks scary." Then it goes down again. It's like bounce. It's a bouncy [ __ ] man. >> Bounce your horses. All right, let's talk about the four-year cycle because the belief that this is a dead cap

bounce. Maybe we get to 97, right? And then we sort of we sort of go back down into the depths of a bare market, prolonged bare market, something like a year plus. That would confirm the four-year cycle. No, >> I think it would it it would I think what would throw people off the most is if we just keep going higher uh in like a slow fashion but then have like a shorter kind of like not so deep bare market that >> didn't that already happen rips everyone's mind apart >> 120 to 80 >> I mean yeah it's been about a good four a bit a good three month bare market that's kind of where we're at we're going to get these like shorter bursts of speculative uh like trends I think so yeah I think the four year cycle is over it's cooked

cooked. >> Okay. But but the four-year cycle, you you got to there's there's a choice out there right now for people to take. You either have to choose that the four-year cycle is over and we're going to new all-time highs. >> Yeah. >> Or the four-year cycle was right. It's always been right and it'll continue to be right and we're going lower. This is a dead cap bounce. and we get a dead cap bounce and we go lower and the four-year cycle is right. And so I don't think you can get >> I don't I don't think it's that black and white.

>> I don't think you can get it. >> But the four-ear cycle means this is a dead cap bounce and we're going to go lower. The four-year cycle was wrong. We're going to go to all-time highs. >> No, I think see I think you're missing it. I think you're missing the reality. I think you're missing the key difference. not that the four-year cycle is over and that we have to go to all-time highs or it's not that the four year cycle is still on, we have to go into a bare market. I think the more reasonable possibility is the four-ear cycle is not over but [snorts] but the the uh the any sort of downturn or speculative downturn is going to be muted and shorter and any sort of upside is going to be muted and shorter, but we'll get these bursts in between. And

so I think like the situation that you're not accounting for is lower for a shorter period of time >> like higher. >> Yeah. Like what's already happened >> three to four months of bear from 120 to 80 is like what you're talk is what we could consider a mid bear. Right. I agree. >> If we're talking about like like shorter cycles or cycles with a higher frequency >> then >> you know we don't get a two-year bare market. We get like a three-month bare market and then we get a pop, like a three-month bull and a three-month bare, and we kind of flip-flop rather than up for two years, down for two years.

>> Yeah. >> We just kind of flip-flop between like monthly cycles rather than yearly cycles. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, look. Yeah. It's it's a conversation that is like never going to end because it's like uh this and that and speculation. Well, I think if we go alltime highs here, it it basically says that there's the four-ear cycle's done. >> Over is over. Yeah, I agree with that. I >> And I mean, we saw >> what Bernstein put out a projection 2026, they're saying four year cycle over. Uh we've essentially sustained higher levels and we're continuing uh this upward ascent slowly but surely.

>> Yeah. what you're talking about is is that essentially it's like slowly but surely more muted volatility, >> right? So like yeah, we don't we don't get these like bull runs where the entire market goes up at once. We kind of get like a more almost like you treat Bitcoin like the like the S&P. Yeah. >> Like the S&P basically on average is going to go up 2% to the right every day. Like >> not 2% every day, but like very gradually as these companies make money. They're not they don't go through these wild speculative cycles.

>> No, >> like that's kind of where bitcoins are. >> Bitcoins and we kind of knew this was happening. It was like this scurve where as more of the supply came onto the market and the block reward and the inflation schedule of Bitcoin what had less of a significant impact on the market. We were going to gradually smooth out the volatility and the cycles of Bitcoin price movements were going to get less. Well, that's where Bitcoin is. But that that [snorts] that doesn't mean that Bitcoin is not going to have bare markets anymore. And like people calling for like 70 60k Bitcoin. If that's like the bottom of the bare market, then we we we should consider ourselves lucky.

[snorts] >> That would be about a 50% from all-time high, which is probably less than. I think it is less than what we've seen top to bottom in previous Yeah. previous >> like a matter the thing went from 72k to freaking 14K last >> man again if you think that we're going to 60 or 70 then you think the four-year cycle is right you think this is a dead cat and you think that we're going to go to 60 to 70 in the near future >> I think um I think that they're >> that's not muted like maybe that's like from 75 85% downside that's a little bit muted but that's still a bare market.

No, I know. But they're going to stimulate the the absolute balls off this economy. And I just don't know if that's going to happen and have a a material actual liquidity impact because like like guys like Ralph Paul be like, bro, like you got to follow the debt and they're going to refinance the debt and the liquidity is up only so it's only a matter of time. I think that's probably right. I just don't know if that's Q1 2026. Is it Q3 2026? Is it >> I think we get maximum >> speculation going into Q1 of 2026. Fed is uh Trump's gonna replace a Fed share.

This is already starting to get priced in. Yeah. >> Like we know he's going to cut the rates and pour stimulus into the economy. >> I think we get a slow I think it's a sell the uh buy the rumor, sell the news. >> Yeah. >> I think when the Fed chair does get in, >> yeah, >> that is when we're gonna see a slowdown over like the summer and then we're gonna have midterms at the end of next year. And we know that they're going to try to pump the markets ahead of the midterms. Basically, show that they're doing a great job. >> Yeah. All right, guys. We got um I mean, look, man, you go ahead and trade your book and let me know how it uh >> you like to play it both ways. I I I'd love to hear straight straight take from

you on where you think things are heading. Maybe uh maybe we'll after our first we'll have a >> I just I'm in the privileged position of being long, strong, and feeling amazing about my core holdings while also not really while also the day-to-day fluctuations don't really matter, man. We we made it. We we did it. Like I no longer like we're we're we're we're chilling, you know? >> You sold the bottom. Let Let's get our first guest up. Uh we've got the co-founder of Tezos. Tezos has been around for so long. Oh my god.

>> One of the OG projects. >> Arthur, what's up, man? How are you? >> Arthur is here. He's on the show. Welcome to the show, Arthur. >> I'm all right. >> Hi. Thanks. First time on the show. How How are you? >> Good, man. >> I'm all right. >> Maybe we could just get a little bit of background, uh, a little bit of the lore behind Tezos. How did you first get involved in the industry? How did you h how how did you get into the place of finding Tezos? >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh I mean I I I got exposed to Bitcoin super early on. Uh like I think I I uh I had some some friends tell me about it even when the paper came out but I didn't pay attention to it until like 2011 which is still very early.

That's when I started paying attention and what really drove my attention were like uh uh the whole agorist aspect of it. People like doing online marketplaces using um using Bitcoin. I I thought it was super exciting. I got interested in the idea of prediction markets in Bitcoin. It was like around 2012 and uh but then I got deeper into the technology uh uh in particular the different methods of consensus um smart contracts privacy all that and that led me to to think about how do you you know how do you evolve a system like Bitcoin you when there's just so much happening in the space from an R&D perspective how do you keep a system decentralized and evolving and that's

the idea behind Tzos it's it's says decentralized Well, at the same time being um where's that uh where's that blazer from, Arthur? >> Uh I think it's called we're in the uh we're in the blazer wearing era of this industry. I mean you've been in this industry for what 10 plus years now. I'm not sure that we always had to wear blazers. Did we? >> Uh I don't I don't have to. I like wearing a sports jacket. That's the thing is like people say, "Oh, you know, it's like you look look formal with a you know, if you have a suit or or a jacket, you just wear a t-shirt and a hoodie." But like I you know, [laughter] if you have a if you're in great shape,

fantastic shape, like t-shirt will look good, but like you have to pull it off. That's the thing. Like jackets and all that, they make you look good. >> I think we need to I like, you know, with a with a sports jacket, it's not as formal as a suit, but you still get fly, man. And and I think you know it is indicative of how the industry has evolved over the last few years. You know we we are now seeing these mega financial institutions come in. We're seeing banks adopt crypto as pieces of collateral for loans. We're seeing all of this early tooling be integrated into the banking infrastructure uh the legacy banking infrastructure. Now they're accepting uh this greater technology and it really feels like we've evolved from a technology space into a finance space.

Have you seen this the evolution at Tezos? How how have you been tracking the progression of this space? You know, h and generally how has the vibe shifted, the sentiment? Have you seen this from your from your day-to-day operations or what what's your perspective on how you think the space has shifted over the last few years? >> Uh well, first to answer the question very trivially, how do I keep track? I reading the press, talking to people, going to conferences like uh like everyone else. Uh but it's true there's definitely been an opening and um partly I think it has to be with the US um no longer trying to kill the industry. Uh it was very difficult even internationally while you had many

different government agencies in the US actively trying to shut down industry that made it difficult for people to participate. Now that that's over uh that that creates a lot more um interest and we've seen this in a few areas. I think no area has been more successful from the perspective of traditional finance as stable coins. Um they have you know really been a bit of a killer application which is you know it's it's it's it's both a victory and a defeat in some sense you know it's a victory because the technology is being used to move uh billions. It's working really well. People are adopting the technology. It's uh reducing intermediaries, reducing cost, but at the same time, it's not replacing money, right? It's it's taking another form of

uh of money and putting it on on rails. In in some sense, I would say cryptocurrencies and and and blockchains were designed with the idea that u stable coins would be shut anything like a stable coin would be shut down by your government. People have tried to do mints, you know, centralized mints and the the problem is not so much you need to trust the mint. problem is like anyone that's like big enough to be trusted is big enough to be regulated out of existence by a government. But that government has said, you know what, we're fine with stable coins, which you know, in a way is not technologically ne neutral. Uh they're not fine with operations like a stable coin. If it's not on the blockchain, but if it's on the blockchain, it's okay now. So that changes a little bit the landscape of

the industry. It it's gone beyond that. It's gone into investments as well. um to a lesser extent but nonetheless we see tokenized commodities like gold uranium is also available on Tzos that's one of the project I'm super proud of on uranium.io But but yeah, it's uh it's it's starting to uh it's starting to converge a little bit between traditional financial industry and uh and what you see on >> Yeah, man. Would you say that TZOs I mean from my perspective right TZOs was uh one of the earliest uh companies to really exist around like 2017 and like the smart contract era. Some could call it ETH killer. Some could call it, you know, alternative L1. Different priorities, different types of L1 uh kind of uh functionalities and goals over time. It's it's shifted, you know, through all the different iterations of

the space. So you guys had, you know, you built out your DeFi layer, built out your kind of NFT and collectibles layer, kind of built out a big team around institutional, um, you know, side of things. Now it's very clearly the stable coin era, this RWA era, this institutional adoption era. Um, do you feel like you're pretty well positioned for that? I mean, uh, I'm I'm curious like what makes you guys particularly suited for RWA Rails compared to other L1s or other chains with more like speed first or tech first road maps? >> Yeah. So, first I want to address something. Tzos is not a company. Uh, it's a blockchain. It's literally like a piece of code. It's a product that you can run.

>> Uh, in fact, there's no company named Tzos itself. So, there's a there's a foundation in Switzerland. So I like to describe it as a wealthy patron to the network. Um essentially what it does is like it helps uh with the growth of the network. It does a few initiatives but it's not Tzos. Tzos is Tzos. TZOs foundation is something separate. It's also not even a company because it's foundation. But nonetheless, Tzos is a network. That's a product. That's one thing I always insist on. Uh because if it's a company then it does you know if it were a company you wouldn't have a then it wouldn't have a point like why are you building a decentralized blockchain if it's a company?

>> Well there's a lab company like >> run your ledger. You know >> what's the point that you're trying to make here? Like there's a lab company, there's like a, you know, there's an operation company around it. >> Sure, but there's a bunch of companies around a bunch of things. There's a bunch of companies around the Bitcoin ecosystem, but no one would call Bitcoin a company. >> Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. >> And in fact, if you call Bitcoin a company, that would be disparaging. >> Okay. I didn't mean to offend you, Arthur. I'm sorry. >> No, no, it's okay. It's it's it's a very common it's a very very very very common misconception. Uh so that's the second thing is you mentioned that um it was uh you know ETH killer the only people who have ever used the expression eastkiller are Ethereum fanatics [laughter]

they're like east maximalist like oh you're an east killer like I don't care I don't want to kill Ethereum I don't I don't care you know what right now is way way >> what do you think about eaxis >> do do you not like them >> so first of all I have nothing against maximalism. Um, you know, in some sense I I I don't like the Kumbaya aspect. There's two things. I don't like the Kumbaya aspect of saying everything is complimentary. We're in a multi-chain world. No, everyone's a competitor to everyone.

>> Okay. And that's fine, but like you know, my point is you don't have to you don't have to be an [ __ ] about it. And that's the thing is like the problem is that the word maxi often comes off with like and I'm gonna be an [ __ ] about it. Sure. >> It's one thing to say like like you look I like Tzos. I want every use case to be on Tzos. I I would like all blockchain traffic to just happen on Tzos and I would rather it's on Tzos than on any other chain. >> Okay. >> Uh and I think it could. I don't think there's any, you know, I I think if everything could be on Tzos and there's no reason for any other chain to exist.

I believe that that makes me maximiz. But at the same time, I'm not going to be rude to people because they use another blockchain or because they like another project. And that's >> you're describing Bitcoin maxis in my opinion. >> Yeah, but it's maxis can can be like that as there's a bunch of when Tesla Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, when T had more hype, they they they they really hated on >> I I think you you bring up a good point when it comes to the labs companies and and how people are viewing maximalism and and the decentralization theater, which was really like a a pretty popular idea and concept and strategy in the 2017, 2018, and like even back to 2020, 2021. And so we've recently seen a lot of companies shift and pivot into a more

pragmatic strategy. You know, looking at institutions and saying, "Look, decentralization maximalism isn't necessarily the answer either. We actually need to centralize a little bit in order to move faster and have a more concise and succinct strategy. Have you considered that or is decentralization always been the north star?" >> For me, decentralization, first of all, is is it's never a goal. It's it's it's a means to an end. And the end remains censorship resistance, uh, Caesar resistance, uh, trust minimization. That's what matters. Um, and from that perspective, you can look at centralization in two very different lenses. One is this lens of like do do I do I achieve these properties? Do I have

a system where anyone can participate, anyone can validate, anyone can verify. Do I have these properties? Do I have what I would call durate decentralization? There's no party with special set of keys. You know, you go on Bass, for example, there's a few people who have the keys to like take all of the assets away from Bass. Like that's that's a property. You go on Solana, you have an NFT on Solana's a small multi multi-IG that can repossess every every NFT that's ever been like minted on Solana. That is dur centralization. And then but then people focus on de facto centralization, which is silly. They'll say like, "Oh, but look, you know, there's so much activity coming from this one company or like this person has so many tokens, all of that." um those are not things that directly affect viability of the systems and so they're

far less important you know the defects in the jury it's funny because it mirrors a classical debate uh you know like it's a bit of a right-wing leftwing debate where some people would focus on negative freedom and say you know what really matters is like you know you need to keep your freedom to do what you want and to you have your own assets and then the leftwing critic of that is like no no no but like look what does it mean to be free in practice if you have to like you know work for a wage for someone who owns capital all of that and you know in practice it it it seems that from a pragmatic perspective you should care about those positive rights but in practice what has always been true is that it's places and system that focus on negative rights that actually achieve

good outcomes so I would say during this whole decentralization theater period like people would so focused on this kind of like de facto decentralization as opposed to what really matters which is just the jury decentralization >> okay do you think there are teams that are still falling prey to those today like what what teams are are still using de facto decentralization not the the jour decentralization that you mentioned >> it's mostly the you know it's it's really like the critics is like in you know who who are doing at the end of the day you know a company is a centralized entity so yeah it's more of like who feels that they need to have a dow they need to do all of this like all of this activity around it to satisfy people

looking for this deacto uh decentralization >> and yes definitely the emphasis on that the emphasis on that has has fallen and you know as a response to the fact that there's you know no longer this legal persecution of the industry in the US. >> Yeah. Which has changed everything. Um you know you guys are working on some pretty interesting uh new kind of developments. You guys have an interesting uh self- amending governance process that you've been doing for a while. Obviously, you've got shielded transactions uh in Yummi wallet. There's a bit of privacy element being implemented into this. Uh you guys are you're you're also kind of trying to solve some of the AI uh you know alignment issues as well as just general existential challenges there. Um let's

start with some of the privacy stuff. um how does uh Tezos as a blockchain approach privacy and and what is your personal viewpoint on privacy in terms of public blockchains versus private blockchains? How do you uh look to build a network that can support privacy with user protection and regulatory compliance that's just general compliance uh in mind? Uh just give us your 30,000 foot view on privacy. >> Sure. Ju just one just one quick reaction to what you said. You mentioned something about AI alignment. That's a personal interest of mine. So I I talk about AI alignment a lot on my Twitter feed, but there's nothing in the ecosystem that's partly related to talk about it.

>> That is a personal interest on a privacy front. Uh so this has supported sha >> uh for a few years now. >> Uh but really the UX to use it wasn't uh uh wasn't in place. >> Yeah. Um there was a regain of interest uh in privacy in the in the past few months. Uh you know you saw that um well it's a couple things. One is that >> so the price of the price of of the Zcash token went up a lot. Yes. And people got excited and momentum and I don't think you know this did not happen because people woke up and suddenly said oh my god privacy is so important and we hadn't thought about it.

>> No. Yeah. It's I build up and marketing and so forth. That being said, you know, I'm super happy for the Zcash team. I'm happy for Ziko. You know, they're really good people who worked on Zcash and and you know, if they're getting a windfall out of it, more power to them and als but but you know, it did trigger conversations and those conversations people did realize that like you know what it is true it is true privacy matters. Privacy is normal. So it was a good indicator that perhaps it was time to build a UX around uh this functionality which has existed now in those for a while. My view on privacy is like privacy is normal, you know, and people sometimes say like, "Oh, it lets you hide the transaction on the blockchain." And I say, "No, no, no.

You're not hiding anything." It's just that the blockchain is weird. It's like it's a very weird way of transacting where the only way you can make a transaction is by telling everyone in the world and by having like this untemperable proof that you've made a transaction. Not a proof, but like a uh a disclosure. You you disclose it to the entire world and that's how you make a transaction. That's weird, right? um those chill transaction there's a normal ones they are you know you're making a transaction you're proving to the system that it's valid but you're not going out and telling everyone on earth about your transaction like you know you can you can tell other people you should you should probably tell other people you know like when when you file a tax return you may have to tell you know the the the tax pe the tax man about the

transaction uh it would be very bad idea not to do that but you don't have to broadcast it to the entire world and and this you know it's been flipped on its head by the critics saying like, "Oh, privacy is bad. You're hiding it." No, no, no. You're not hiding anything. You're just dis you're just choosing who you're disclosing it to. And that's that that makes a whole difference. >> Yeah. So, I think the big problem with with the privacy side was that people were um not really comfortable doing anything because of incidents like Roman storm.

>> Yeah, that was very scary. And I think the you know it's the resolution right now is not perfect and it against the guidance that has been given for the for the uh uh through the uh uh by Finen I think in the past. >> Yeah. >> Nonetheless nonetheless the fact that he was removed from OFAC I think is a big uh it's a huge relief. >> Yeah. For them it's a big win for sure. >> Abs. Absolutely. >> Um I kind of just have a a random question. I think people would would appreciate understanding what you feel like is the core the core through line for TESOS right now. Kind of coming back to that RWA question that I asked earlier with regards to how you guys think about stacking up against other chains or just generally what the strategy is there. In a similar uh train

of thought, >> what is like [clears throat] the core objective of TASOS right now? Like what are you guys trying to dominate in? What market niche are you excelling at? Like where are you guys really excelling? >> Sure. So uh I can't speak for Tesos as a chain because again it's a it's a technology but I'm a director here at TR in in knowledge. Treat is an adoption hub for uh for Tesos and you know some initiatives from TR have been around the uh uh the real world asset uh aspect and so I mentioned uranium which you can find on uranium.io. So we've tokenized uh uranium. I think uh spot commodity tokenization is really interesting and it's something that hasn't been done. A lot of tokenization projects have been

focused either on like really longtail stuff like you know here's one coconut farm somewhere and someone wants to tokenize it and they tokenize it and there's just like no liquidity it's just primary issuance or really really like assets which are very very accessible already like you know oh we we'll tokenize the money market fund which you can get anywhere we'll tokenize Nvidia stocks we'll tokenize gold like so many ways to get those products and I was interested in like neither I was interested in like in products which have a massive impact can you know are extremely are globally important yeah but lack trading values and amazing this is a great website too

>> oh thank you so I read this book um >> oh man do I have it right here oh yeah I do so uh one of my old mentors gave me this book here called Rise of America and and in this book he effectively talks about kind of what's happening today. I read it like five years ago and he talked about how um there's going to just you know different fiscal uh policies getting towards modern monetary theory. He was just essentially kind of really firmed up the debasement theory or the debasement trade if you will um as an investment concept but actually like thinking about what is going to be applied. Precious metals was one, crypto was another asset class. Um semiconductors was one. rare earths,

which we've now seen all this problems with China about uh uranium was one. And so I think I I gotta go buy some tokenized uranium and listen to my boy Marin Katusa because you got me you got me bowled up and I can just use my stable coins and do it. I was always one I mean I guess you can just buy futures in the market right now and stock like Schwab or whatever but >> no liquid there's there's no liquid future. Like if if you want to buy uranium, spot uranium, your options are urium.io. That's what I that's [laughter] uh and there's some like there's closen funds. So there's a closen fund by sprat. Okay, >> that's probably the most popular one today that exists for uranium, but it doesn't track very well. It's a closen fund. So like you know it can be off by

15%. So the tracking error on it is pretty big. Uh and there's another one in London called Y and you know that that's it. >> So uranium three times off the since 2020. January 1st, 2020 was $25 per pound if I'm not mistaken. Um, and then now it's $76 per pound. >> No, it's it's it's it's grown quite a bit. >> And it it alltime high at about 120 or 102 in January of 23. >> 102. That's possible.

>> 102. >> I don't know. You guys don't have it all the way back on this site to uh >> I see. Uh but I was gonna at the futures markets but either way so I can buy and sell uranium in size on this website. >> Uh the liquidity is big enough. So if if you if you have you know if your size is multi-million dollars you can do I I would do OTC trades uh which you can do um right now I think if you are buying you know in tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands and you break up your order a bit. Got it. >> Then you'll have more than enough.

>> Okay. So maybe can you help me understand how how this works? I mean, >> yeah, exactly. How have you been able to arrive at a more liquid market for uranium than futures? >> Well, the futures don't trade just period. >> So, one of my theories is like >> you often in order to have a liquid futures markets, you need a you need a spot markets, right? >> And especially for uranium, it's a bit less true. But the problem is that for most things, most people are going to want to be long, right? So if let's say take a real estate future the CME also has real estate futures they don't trade and the problem is like a lot of people might want to be long uh but who's going to be short on the other side you know

it's like if you're excited about uranium like most of the interest would be long interest and then who's going to take the other side like someone who wants to make a bet so you have to push the you know the price above the spot or you have to have this we refunding rates mechanism whereas if you hold a spot at least someone has the opportunity of doing a spot futures arbitrage basis arbitrage just holding the spot shorting the future and then letting someone else buy the future. So it really helps you to have the spot market. >> I love it. >> And how have you been able to arrive at a very liquid spot market? >> Uh I think the liquidity is still beating up. I would you know I wouldn't be comfortable saying providing liquidity who's providing the liquidity >> there's some market makers who are

involved in uh in the market. Uh it's it's on um it's both on a smart contract. So there's a order book based smart contract provided by Heni which is a D5 protocol on uh on theus uh and uh it's also available on on some [snorts] exchanges like Gates. >> I'm making an account right now. >> Arthur, I also want to [laughter] ask >> Sorry, I'm just fired up man. >> I also want to ask you about the tokconomics more so yeah before we move off uranium. >> Are you moving off of uranium? All right so real quick Arthur could you give us the what is the uranium thesis? Like I'm a crypto investor. I bought a bunch of gold in the last bull run at like after I sold a lot of crypto. I bought some property. I like I'm bullish on this debasement trade idea. I'm just very

very set on like dollar devaluation, fiat devaluation. That's like the like the crypto in me. Why is uranium something that is worth invest like what is the what is the uranium thesis not financial advice? Why what is this thesis? So the first thing is that um attitudes around nuclear power has changed and there's been a generational change around it. Uh the main opposition to nuclear power was environmental and because global warming has become the bigger issues than other environmental issue. The fact that it provides uh low carbon low emissions uh very or almost no emissions uh uh source of energy means that it's more popular now. And

you know once you have an issue, you know, once you have a source of energy that's popular with more than 50% of the voters, you see that it changes. So the economics are good and because the economics are good, all it takes is for popular opinion to change before government starts uh allowing the construction of more uh nuclear power plants. So that's number one. It's just this kind of like judal trend in allowing the source of energy which has been you know kind of like artificially limited in the past. The second thing is there's a projected demand in the increase for energy which is huge from uh AI data centers and you're seeing hyperscalers like Microsoft, Amazon actively like building or restarting nuclear power plants like everyone on earth now

they're rebuilding they're restarting nuclear power >> doing space >> policies uh I'm not I'm not sure it will work well in space but but >> the Google CEO keeps talking about it but Please, >> I don't get it. >> So, nuclear has gone from not so taboo or sorry, very taboo to like not so taboo, a bit more open legislatively. And then the economics of the actual uh uh element here or of the of this uh rock, let's just say, is good that there's good e economics. So, keep building here.

>> There's a caveat. The caveat is like in any commodity investment timing is super important because there's two you know there's there's this concept of elasticity which is like if you increase demand for it how much does the price move shortterm elasticity of uranium is very low right if you if shortterm you say like I need all this uranium and I need it right now price going to raise but as you do that more people start looking for mines most people will start digging uranium out of the ground and the price goes down and so Right now we know we need uranium but it takes a while to build the reactors and it takes a while to build the mines and so the question is like what is going to be slower building the reactors or getting more mines out and if you get [clears throat] a bunch of

reactor and the mines are still lagging right then you get then you see a spike price spike in the price of because reactors will buy it >> the fuel is such a tiny component of like a reactor reactor like you know once you spend billions building your nuclear reactors you don't care how expensive the uranium is you know like your main expense is your amortization of your capex you're just going to buy it any price >> uh but which one is going to happen first because if people are saying like oh wow we forecast lots of demand for uranium when all those nuclear power plants are ready in 2028 yeah >> therefore let's start digging now I still think it it takes a long time to get those m you know those those mining projects going so we can still see

appreciation in the area >> okay so your perspective is that the mines will will be slower than anticipated so let's just say going into 2030, 5 years, right? Four years. >> Yeah. H >> how do you anticipate that elasticity equation playing out? Like what would your like forecast or thought be like with with regards to the speed? >> Um I'm not going to ask you if it if it's a good time to buy or anything, but like >> No, that that's so certain. I I I I I don't know. I think you know >> in in in trading if you uh >> you know, if you're making a coin flip and you have a 51% probability of like getting the coin flip right, that's already pretty good.

>> Yeah. Uh so I think um is uh is quite interesting. I can't know for a fact you know like what's going to happen with the like even more with oil like that's super well studied. Yeah people have had surprises with how much oil is found like >> tomorrow it's possible that we hear that they found this giant amount of uranium in Canada somewhere that's super cheap to get and I can't predict that. >> Yeah. Yeah. They're certainly pouring research and development into finding those mines, but it seems like they're pouring a lot more into the data centers and and a lot more into the reactors and even geopolitically it's becoming a lot uh it's taking up a lot of the priorities when it comes.

>> Do you mind if I just read you a quick passage, Rob, and and Arthur? So, just real quick, uh in the recent years, there's been a a renewed interest in nuclear power plants. Some call it a renaissance. Uh, as of May 2020, there were 54 facilities under construction with China having 11, India having seven leading the way. It's [snorts] a boom everywhere but in the US, which only has two units under construction with another six permitted as opposed to 37 facilities permanently shut down as of February 2020.

>> So that was five five years ago. >> Five years ago. And with Trump's, you know, bring onshore a lot more uh of rare earths and a lot more production and reduced dependencies on China, we've ramped up the plans for a lot of those reactors, but to Arthur's point, it takes time. After we've started planning, now we're going to start digging. It still takes time to go and find the uranium. >> I wish we had some numbers on the state of the amount of growth since that passage because that sounds unreasonably small for for for the US. Guys, we're coming up on time here. Anything kind of just to close out or um Yeah, this has been great. Um this X308 thing is is very interesting.

>> Um anything for me to close out or do you want to uh do you have >> Yeah, I don't know if you have anything else. I mean, >> I'm just generally just curious as I guess I could ask a bit more specifics like how do we get started here? But >> my last question was um you know, we we talked about the uranium uh thesis. Um I I was curious a little bit more on the on the Tezos thesis uh specifically with regards to the TZOs asset. You know, we've seen tokconomics and you guys are still doing quite well and have, you know, been able to sustain a high market cap as a project that has survived longer than most projects. And so I was just curious, you know, as you're thinking about inflation, we've seen a lot of L1s, we've seen a lot of projects

reduce their proof ofstake inflation schedules. was curious if you had any takes on this or generally how you see the tokconomics of TZOs playing out over the coming months and years. >> Yes, it changed massively in June of 2024. Um so the Toss model used to be essentially like there's some fixed amount of inflation 5% but most of it end up being redistributed to uh people who delegate and in fact because not everyone bothered to delegate in practice uh you would get more by delegating than uh the amount of infection. So like historically if you're delegating on Tzos you've always beaten inflation. Um now it's al now you have to stake to beat inflation. Um but it's a lock up of only a couple days. Um

and the way it works now is like the amount of issuance that happens on the chain automatically is a function of how much it takes. So the more stake the less issuance that there is. So you have an automatic balancing mechanism that happens which you see in other proof ofstake blockchain but this one can um it doesn't try to have a floor or the floor is very low. So right now I uh the sticking uh yields about 10% a year whereas inflation is around 4%. Uh but the goal is to drive it down under 1%. By having more people stick >> and so recently we saw like for example Near did a 50% inflation cut. Uh so Sana's talking about it. Uh even Celestia had been talking about doing a proof of governance going down all the

way down to 0.25%. From your perspective, um maybe a difficult question. Did Tasos spend too much expenditure on inflation compared to the actual necessary amount of network security that proof ofstake consensus provides? >> 100%. >> Yeah, [snorts] >> 100%. There's way uh way way too much is being like paid to secure networks. So you guys are aggressively working to kind of change that then. >> Yeah. But you know all all all that work was uh was recently done in June and since then we've seen the the amount of uh of staking steadily increase on the network. It's currently around 27%. I think right now it's mostly an awareness issue. So you know I I I think what it

needs is a bit more hype building up on Tzos, a bit more uh people taking a fresher look at it uh getting back into the ecosystem. And even and when they do uh I think they'll stake uh which will drive down the uh the rate of the rate of issuance. Now it's not enough you even if you have a rate of issuance of zero uh you do need also to have uh syncs and so a sync can be transaction fees >> but this is scaling uh every blockchain is scaling but I think this has been leading the way in terms of uh the R&D there and the transaction fees I think it's going to be very hard for any blockchain uh to burn a lot in transaction fees and so probably what you'll see is I think uh Is there like partnerships in some form uh whatever

form that might take we would call it a partnership between apps and chains is that more of app revenues actually flow to the chains. >> Okay. >> Interesting because if apps are going to have to sustain the chain token value acrruel then it's like well what's the what's the reason or the rationale behind an app token? Well, that and also stable coin proliferation has changed the entire dynamics of how uh L1 tokens and L2 tokens as well operate. It's because they're not necessarily the trading pair for all the DEXes anymore.

Back in the day, you used to always trade to ETH. Every unis swap v2 pool in 2020. You had to you couldn't go from USDC or asset to USDC. You literally had to route through ETH first and then go to USDC. I know it changed and evolved and they do like multi- swap routing across all dexes now more or less but the stable coin proliferation I think also changed the dynamic of token understanding for L1's and L2s but especially proof ofstake networks do you agree Arthur or no? >> Yeah.

>> Um I'm not an expert in the stable coins uh uh area. I think it's uh what where I was going to with is is more on the idea of um so a long time ago people had this fat protocol the saying like oh most of the value acral from the applications on the chain are going to zone one um I don't think it's panned out uh but you can make it pan out essentially by nationalizing applications so like there are some really commodity applications I don't mean commodities I mean like there's some basic features like having a deck, having per all of that. And you want to have a vibrant ecosystem, but not now, not in a year, but in a future at some point, a chains can, you know,

like the governance of a chain can say, look, there's a lot of revenues in this app. We can build them at a protocol level and capture that revenue uh and, you know, become fat in this uh in this aspect. And that that's always been the idea I think in in in Tesos to capture the sources of revenue in in the long run. >> Yeah, makes sense. Awesome. Uh Arthur, I think we're out of time, but this has been tremendous. Just to wrap up the U the uranium conversation. Uh we did get a fact check and it says that nuclear reactors powering data centers are growing much faster in the US than uranium mining. They're actually still just opening reopening uranium mines following a COVID slowdown. So, uh very interesting conversation on uranium and

uranium.io is where everyone can find access to uranium. >> I'm buying a bag. I'm buying a good solidiz bag of uranium. I'm listening to my boy Marin Katusa and I'm going to we're going to do the little uranium endeavor here as my diversification plan continues to evolve. Arthur, thank you so much for coming on and bull bullpilling us and giving us the uh giving us some of of your time. I know you've been in this space for a long long time, seen a lot unfold. So, we appreciate it. >> Cheers, man. Bye.

>> We'll see you next time, Mark. All right. Uh we are going to roll straight into Jason from daylight. It's going to be another conversation about energy. Um so it should be a good one. >> Yeah. Oh yeah. I like the through line here. Uh we're going to go straight from uranium nuclear energy and I believe Daylight is working on solar, right? So uh we're going to talk about the financial layer for decentralized energy. Daylight, helping households generate, store, and share power. Jason's ready in the back.

Let's bring him up. Without further ado, we're gonna go from uranium tokenized uranium products. Maybe uh Jason will give us a little bit of the juxiposition between new. >> That's right. That's what I think. So, man, I mean, I'm bowled up, man. I'm about to I'm I'm thinking a little 50 bagger of uh X308 is on my uh is on my Christmas shopping list here at $4.77 an ounce. Alltime highs of 663. If we think Bitcoin's going to a quarter mil because they're going to devalue the share of the dollar, then we can assume that other commodities that are scarce will also do pretty well. I think I'm >> energy.

>> Jason, are you a Welcome to the show. Are you a uh uranium bull or are you an uranium bear? >> I'm an energy bull. And so I think I think we are in a world where we need to build more of everything and all inputs into that are critically important. So, okay, uranium to solar panels were bullish. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was showing um so I was showing uh our last guest, Arthur, the co-founder of Tezos, this book here. Uh it's Marin Katusa's The Rise of America. And he talks a lot about the different American uh basically like he predicted the the reonshoring of a lot of the the things that now like this new administration has has done or has at least started in some way, which I think will probably accelerate. Um, and and

I'll find it during the show, but he talked a lot about other forms of energy. Um, so I guess like let's just start off here with uh giving us your like the decentralized energy kind of thesis. Like give us the bullcase. Why should people care? Why is this something worth investing in? Uh how do we how do we really wrap our head around like okay with these amount of inputs this this is the predicted output? Kind of give us the thesis here. >> And and let's not bury the lead here. you guys announced DayFi, which I believe is going to be your answer to this question. So, let's talk about Defi and let's talk about how you guys are turning the electricity uh industry into an investable asset class.

>> Amazing. Yeah. Well, it's great to be here, guys. I appreciate appreciate the time. If we take a step back, you know, energy is the constraining factor to the next, you know, decade plus of progress. Everything from AI and compute, but Andy, you hit it right. Reshoring of industrialization deglobalization like the fragmenting of supply chains leads to an incredible increase electricity demand. Autonomous vehicles, electric vehicle fleets, if we want to see Whimo grow, we want to see better products than what exists on the market grow. That depends on more electricity delivered when the market needs it. Robotics, all of this demands massive increases in electricity. And so we're in this world where for the last 20 years, electricity demand growth in the US was basically flat. And over the next 10 years, peak demand is set to almost

double. And we need to find a way to solve this problem. The problem is centralized generation really isn't the solution. It's simply too slow. It takes too long and it's too expensive to build all the new transmission infrastructure, all the interconnection process, all of the surrounding infrastructure in order to build a massive power plant in the middle of the desert, connect it into the grid and pipe that electricity in. Simply too slow and expensive. Quick data point I'll give on this. Traditionally, you know, every power plant goes through something called the interconnection queue. 10 years ago, that queue took two years to re review and approve. Today, it takes longer than five. So, before you can even start construction on a new power plant, we're talking about a 5-year wait time.

Distributed energy is the cheapest and fastest path to scaling new energy capacity on power grids. Without a doubt, you totally circumvent this process. You circumvent the need to connect it in with new transmission and distribution infrastructure. You can deploy it in a matter of weeks on power grids and you can use it to scale energy. >> Did we lose Jason? >> I don't have him. Um, we're just going to flip back for a sec. >> Yeah, let's get Jason uh reloaded because he uh he was going on a rant. I think energy is the way to go. >> Dude, I'm just I've got this I've got the part of the passage of the book up.

>> Oh, yeah. >> Um >> why don't why don't you read the uh the passage here? >> Yeah, it's it's short. I'll give us like the like the TLDDR here. So, um, basically we've >> we just >> Yeah, you're back now. We'll get you up in just a sec. Uh, Leo, just bring them up. Uh, we've long known that sunlight can be turned into electricity, but the challenge has been a way to capture that energy, somehow convert it into a usable electricity, a cost effective manner. Obviously, we're in the sunshine state. We don't really have that problem. Um, yeah, and Jason, we'll we'll we'll bring you up ASAP. We're just going to make sure that you're all set. I think we just dropped you for a sec. Um, basically, um, we had all these advancements in technology for solar. Um, as recently as

2010, if I had told you that solar would emerge as a major factor in global energy production, you'd have laughed and said something as like as if, dude. Um, everyone knows that solar panels are too expensive, too inefficient, and useless on cloudy days. But, uh, one modern advancement in technology leads to the next. And here we've got Jason back up on the screen. And basically uh by the end of 20 2019 uh the to the total um gigawatt power increase from 2000 to 2019 was an 81x enough to power 15 million homes in that 20-year period. That was six years ago.

That number is posed to store soar another I don't know a couple hundred or or a couple tens of exes probably by the end of 2030. Um, and yeah, we'll get into some more of it, but Jason, you were going on a huge rant, so please uh continue. >> Yeah. Where where did where'd you lose me Andy? >> Uh, man, I just went on a rant, too. So, I'm kind of lost. >> Yeah, that's great. Let me let me summarize it, right? Centralized development of energy is simply too slow. Distributed energy is a huge time and uh cost arbitrage on building new energy capacity for power grids. It can deploy in weeks rather than years.

Doesn't go through the interconnection process. You don't have to build all the transmission infrastructure around it and it can provide immediate savings and reliability to whoever hosts it at the same time as creating new energy capacity for power grids. And so that's why we think distributed energy is the answer to how do you scale energy production double tfold over the next you know 100 years. It's all about distributing decentralizing and scaling energy energy everywhere we can. And so Daylight is focused on building capital markets for distributed energy to make this as robust of an asset class as possible because it is the most critical uh new energy source we have to scale on power grids today. Um, and so DayFi to your point, Robbie, is kind of the introduction of the DeFi side of Daylight where we're building this, you

know, globally available Yieldcoin product tied to revenues from distributed energy projects that makes electricity yields um available onchain, liquid composable, and is a totally uncorrelated new asset class. Uh, for >> Jason, I keep I keep hearing you say uh decentralized energy, right? Uh and so >> is daylight inherently a is it only for solar or is the core product here the financial layer on top of decentralized energy and this is applicable across liquid natural gas across nuclear across uh all sorts of other renewables beyond solar.

>> We're focused on distributed solar and storage today. So batteries and solar, fuel and storage is the kind of critical layer that we're looking to incentivize and build at daylight because again what we're looking to solve is bottlenecks on power grids by distributing energy across the power grid. Daylight uniquely is not just a financing layer, right? One of the right ways to think about daylight is as a decentralized electric utility. So we have the incentive layer that will incentivize hosts and users to come to the platform and deploy energy capacity on the network. There's the network layer that aggregates all the data and forecasts and verifies and measures everything that's being provided into the network from this kind of decentralized group of hosts and then you have the capital markets layer that is financing the infrastructure and making it available and easily deployed

in a way that removes a lot of financial barriers to entry and all of these pieces come together in one verticalized network that allows the uh protocol to scale effectively as quickly as possible. Um, one thing about solar is so I bought a house like a couple years back and we ripped the solar panels off. It was a piece of crap roof. I had to get rid of them. Um, and what was really annoying was actually uh like you know you had to have this company come out and take the panels off and they would have to store them and then they'd have to resell the panels to somebody else and like there's this whole like freaking physical problem with with panels. It's like why Bitcoin is great because you just throw it on a ledger, you, you know, bury it and you're good. With with solar panels,

there's like this storage issue that I think is being solved. But I think that would would cause some obstacles and some issues for you guys. How do you guys think about this like storage issue with solar? And am I, you know, overexaggerating this? H, you know, how do you think about this? >> Are you talking about like physical storage of the panels themselves? >> I think both, actually. I I think it's it's but I'm not that educated here. So, I'm just trying to sound like I know what I'm talking about based on my boy uh Marin here that that you know I can read you the the passage but I was trying to you know you know let you rip it here.

>> Yeah. I look I you know anything you do in the physical world is clunkier in the world of bits and that's like the nature of yeah phys building physical products but also physical products and physical networks are the most important ones and critical ones to build today and so managing that complexity is something that we have teams that do that there are other companies you know distributors logistics companies that focus on uh removing as much complexity to the physical layer of this as possible when it comes to interacting with the network right there's not a bunch of panels the protocol owns in some warehouse somewhere there are completed commission cash flowing projects objects on roofs that are tokenized and deployed into you know our capital vault uh that are used to kind of support the the revenues of the network itself. So the re the network

isn't even touching kind of the the layer up until project commissioning. I think to your the more interesting point on storage is you know solar is great. It produces electricity when when the sun's shining but often in the majority of the time solar production does not coincide with peak demand on energy grids. And so while you might be removing demand from grids by generating electricity behind the meter in the middle of the day, that's not actually when the grid needs that. And so what we do at daylight is the majority of our installations actually come with oversized batteries as well. Number one, it's a better product for the host. They get access to backup power when the grid goes down and there's a power outage, there's a storm, that's built into their subscription. And so that's just a better product because not only are they

saving energy or saving money on their energy bills, but they're also uh increasing their reliability and increasing their independence. But number two, the battery enables the network to aggregate its capacity through that storage layer and make it available to utilities, to power traders, to entities on the electric grid that can utilize that stored energy when the grid actually is strained. And the proto protocol can then monetize its power at a higher rate because prices increase when the grid is strained. And so that storage layer is like very fundamentally important to what we're doing at daylight. It's not just about producing energy. It's about ensuring that we have the infrastructure to deliver it to the grid when the grid actually >> got you. Okay. So, so that issue um that you've you know that you've like laid

out here does defi then kind of provide a like financialization or like an economic layer to create a market for to like enable different participants to kind of uh I guess like not like bet but like side and like provide the the liquidity or the capital needed to spin up new talk to us about this um USDS uh deposit vault that you guys have Plasma Defi just kind of like how the vault interacts and helps you with this kind of situation that you're facing here.

>> So, uh, what Defi is bringing to market is what I would call, you know, a yield coin, a liquid composable asset that generates yields from an underlying yield source. And traditionally in crypto, those yield sources have been treasuries or they've been some type of onchain money market fund. And what we're bringing is yield that is attractive and backed by something uncorrelated to crypto markets which is the revenues produced by all of these energy systems distributed on the network. Right? So it is the subscription payment from the the hosts. It is the uh grid services revenues we're getting from using the batteries to support the energy grids. It's the tax credits and government incentives that come from deploying new assets onto power grids. And all of that flows back as a new novel type of yield asset that we are building in a decentralized way

for DeFi markets to utilize to collateralize um and to build like totally composable new yield products on top of this asset. Um and so that's kind of the vision of what what DFI is doing. To your point, I actually do think there are interesting ways to leverage prediction markets, knowledge markets, like trading markets as you start to scale physical infrastructure. But for now, our focus is on yield. uh down the road there may be opportunities for hey perhaps there's a way to bring some measure of electricity trading around this network on chain as well. >> Yeah. So let let's sort of trace through because there's a lot of aspects to this stack right and we we've talked about a lot so far and so just to summarize we've got uh the foundational business model of daylight which is selling solar power and storage of solar power to the

everyday human right anyone who needs electricity. And you guys have power purchase agreements you're doing residential neighborhoods. You've got a thriving solar power business comprised of multiple aspects that is generating revenue. Then you've gone and you've built this liquidity layer on top of this power business, right? And so you've got grid. This is the liquidity layer. Shout out to our friends over at MZ. You guys are using their stable coin infrastructure. This is the stable coin of grid and it's fully back composable redeemable. It's used to mint the yield coin, right? Which is the second part of the liquidity layer. The yield coin is where someone can get access to the revenues that you're generating from the solar power company of Daylight. Right.

>> That's exactly right. And then I think, you know, the the interesting way to top all this off is, you know, to your point, Daylight is not just a, you know, a RWA or lending platform. It's not just a decentralized physical infrastructure network like Helium. It is kind of the culmination of all these different pieces of the crypto stack that give us a competitive advantage over traditional models. And the entire system is decentralized end to end in like a totally unique way that brings something novel to DeFi markets which is energy back yield brings something novel to the deployment of the physical infrastructure which is you know token incentives and the ability to you know build community bottomup growth models for the deployment of infrastructure and then having a totally you know permissionless network that people can

deploy capital into can deploy um infrastructure into and can query in real time to see how the network's performing. >> Perfect. And and one more question about this uh about day right the liquidity layer on top of the solar power company you know I framework invested in you guys we talk we talked to Michael and Vance quite a bit I think they'll be on the show tomorrow and and so they've kind of brought up this idea of yield coins and how that can differ from stable coins right I think what I notice is missing from the mechanics of day is a utility coin or a governance coin or just a generic equity token of daylight Right. And so I'm curious, do you think this flywheel is sufficient with a stable coin and a yield coin or do you

think that it's missing a token of sorts and would that add anything to the overall value acral mechanism here? >> It's a great question and I alluded to it just in that in that last statement, Robbie, which is I actually do think the culmination is the launch of a, you know, a network token that brings all the stakeholders together, the hosts, the originators, the capital providers. If you take a step back, right, there's two things that need to be done in order to scale energy network. You need to drive the behavioral incentives in order for people to adopt daylight and distributed energy, which is a better product, right? It's cheaper, more reliable power, but it's still a complicated product. It's an education driven sale. How do you get them to pay attention? How do you build a community cult army to go out and scale this in

the real world in a really high high leverage and efficient way? And then how do you catalyze a huge amount of capital in the back end in order to finance this? We think crypto is powerful and very good at doing both of those. And so when Daylight started, it was much more focused on kind of the pure Helium deepen style uh you know token incentiv uh uh marketplace for driving new deployments of physical infrastructure. And what became very evident to us is that that doesn't make sense without the capital layer. And so as we're starting to scale the capital layer, I think the right way to think about it is how does daylight create a advantage in the market not only on the capital side but also on the origination side. and deepens give us a really unique playbook to go uh model ourselves off of, improve

off of, frankly, and deliver kind of a net new product that closes the entire value loop for the for the network. >> And Jason, I would say that the Helium style um tokconomics of traditional deepen, for lack of better term, are cooked. Um they're cooked. There is zero. Um >> you will not hear me argue with that. Oh, look at the H&T chart and like honestly they are doing incredible work but that is a terrible looking chart and look I mean so are all >> that's exactly the point right is that they're discon they're their their primary business is disconnected from their capital layer >> correct and Jason just explain kind of like you know how you think about this but could you maybe just go a little bit deeper like if you if there is a daylight token how will you make sure

that it's not cooked [laughter] >> it's a great question uh I think if we take a step back and look at deepens to your point Helium really is cooked now and I think start starting to like the flywheel's now closed and and I you know not financial advice but I think what they're doing is incredibly exciting today >> but it's taken years and years and years to get to this point similarly we're starting to see other you know interesting deepens start to hit some level of trajectory and escape velocity but I think one of the early flaws of many deepens and this is actually just endemic to the model itself is that the idea was we can print money to build a network that then can go do something functionally useful and valuable. The cool thing about daylight is that we have both individual value to the host

which is cheaper, more reliable energy. We also have network value which is aggregating all these assets and making them available to power grids to support power grids. And so there's value in the product in and of itself before someone even thinks about a token. So you're no longer required to just give this perpetual inflation stream for someone to keep a box online. The the reason for someone to keep the box online is because the box gives you more more reliable and more affordable energy. And the tokens are the the customer acquisition wedge, the thoughtful way that we can give people number one ownership of the network they're building and upside in the network they're building, but number two get them in a process that is a again complicated and educationdriven sales process deeper into the model. You can build unaffiliated community armies

going into their local markets to help deploy and scale this. You can take the best part of deepen and apply it to a network that generates more and more revenue with every single node that that comes on online into its platform. Um and so I think that is the fundamental difference is you can design a token model that can be more calculated in how it distributes itself. You can also um build a network that generates revenue much earlier in its life cycle than what you know maybe a traditional deep end deep end does. >> Revenue meta strikes again Rob. Um Jason, I would say that that's spot on because it's like when I heard about Helium, when I heard about these, you know, deepen, you know, uh projects, it was like, "All right, we're going to evade the traditional issues that Comcast has or that other physical

infrastructure networks have because we can just launch a token and then we can just print, you know, $500 million FTV out of thin air and then we can just use this to like basically incentivize, you know, cheaper usage or uh, you know, whatever it It was like, okay, well, yeah, great, but like, you know, how long is this going to be able to last or what is the actual value of this token? And so, you know, sometimes being an entrepreneur and being a founder, it it's it's actually nice to be in the sec, let's call it the second cohort of of uh idea uh establishment here because I think it's very clear that for from your strategic perspective, obviously, you thought this through very very deeply and are quite bright, but you have to do it in this, you know, more

sophisticated, smarter way. And um, you know, I think that's bullish. Well, if you aren't, you know, paying attention to the market and taking market feedback, then like you aren't you aren't building correctly as an entrepreneur. Like you should be always reevaluating your prior strong opinions, loosely held all of that. And I do think from the deep end kind of 1.0, there will still be massive businesses built. I think Helium is going to be a massive business. It already is a large business. I think Hivemappers seems like it's building a massive business. Um, and so, you know, you what you want to do is just study what worked, what didn't work. How can we take what worked and apply it to our model? I do think there's a bit of like a pendulum on on crypto Twitter that's swung maybe even too far to the like tokens are

interesting where it's like tokens should 100% be unlocked the entire token supply. It should never be used for incentives. It should literally just be equity on chain that we have% >> and I think that that loses that loses a lot of the interesting elements of what tokens can be used for if they're used thoughtfully and programmatically and built into the the value of the network itself. And so there's a sweet spot that someone's going to hit. I would say that I think we're you know thinking very critically about it is like how do you use a token and its superpowers in a way that also ensures that like the value is captured within the network and is very like value aligned with all the work that all the stakeholders are doing.

>> Coming back to day um you know you guys are building now with Sky in the Sky ecosystem um what what can people expect following the launch on December 16th? What can people expect uh materialistically to change? um how how should people think about interacting with daylight? Um yeah, just give us a a kind of sense of the tangibles here following this launch. >> Yeah, the the 16th is really quite simple, right? So, we're launching a pre-eposit vault curated by our friends at K3 Capital built on upshifts infrastructure. It will accept USDS and USDT stable coins into the vault and it will earn you know yield on plasma where

that capital will be deposited through kind of defy uh yield products that K3 is curating a boiler uh it will earn incentives from the plasma team in the form of XPL and will earn enhanced points in our incentive uh campaign called the grid games um uh for as being like the earliest capital into the protocol. So for a few weeks that capital will just be there effectively earning yield and earning incentives before becoming the first capital into the day protocol when it launches. And that allows us to utilize that vault as a way to bootstrap ecosystem liquidity with K3 across you know dexes lending markets pendal markets. How can you come out the gate and build really robust uh integrations with the best DeFi protocol so that people have something to do with

the protocol when it launches. Um so the pre-eposit is really the initial entry point for um people that are able to participate to to come to the protocol and start start to benefit from it. >> Many people are requesting per user deposit uh limits. The uh they want to they want the chat is saying uh chat is wondering if there's minimum max if there's a minimum or maximum deposit criteria. >> We do not have a minimum criteria set. We also do not have a maximum criteria set. So, um I think we will kind of assess as we get closer if that feels if feels necessary. I do think like anything in crypto, right? There's uh it's pretty easy to sibble things like max max uh allocations. You can easily spread your liquidity across multiple

wallets and and deposit it. Um and so, you know, we're going to do our best, I think, to make this as fair of an opening as possible. Um we, you know, don't have any kind of side agreements. It's just open to everyone at the exact same time. And um participants that that are able to participate in that first cap will be uh will be our earliest participants. H have you had and I think you probably have what what are the perspectives or is the sentiment from outside of the crypto industry about this particular model like you know when when you go into the typical like more traditional energy space and you know you're talking with other solar companies or nuclear companies and you're explaining what you're doing with this capital liquidity layer on top of the the the electricity company. What's

their are they interested in it? Do they think it's going to work or do they take some convincing? >> I think, you know, it depends on the audience. Certainly, everybody that's not paying attention to the space, you know, takes some convincing, but I also think they're like very pragmatic. And the story is if they have capital to finance projects, then we want to be integrated with the capital layer. And that's kind of how they think about it to I think you brought this up earlier, Robbie. You know, we discussed this earlier last time I was on the show. We raised this initial capital offchain where it's kind of our own vehicle to bootstrap origination channel that allows us to build out uh our origination pipeline about enables to build out our fintech platform for local solar companies to integrate with without having to worry about managing

the complexities of DeFi. And then as we start to scale into the DeFi markets again that's all abstracted to them and just daylight exists as a financial services company that is financing distributed energy projects that they're bringing to the network. Um, so I I think it's it's it's largely pragmatic. >> Um, another question here. We got a deposits on ETH mainet confirmed question mark. >> Yes, the deposits will be on on mainet accepting USDS and USDT. >> That one was from Majesty Vance. Sounds like Vance's alt account or something. >> Dude, these guys are running a full cabal here. It's like sky, plasma, daylight. This is This is gnarly, man.

Jason. Um, I'd like to just end this off for the last couple minutes just more holistically thinking about this decentralized energy thesis. Um, so I I'd say a lot of people in blockchain in crypto investing, you know, if you've been around for a while, you you kind of naturally adapt this, you know, the the basement trade thesis, the the denominator is worthless, the, you know, dollar fiat devaluation thesis, the scarce asset thesis, however you want to say. And like obviously Bitcoin's programmatically scarce. You've got other crypto assets that have similar properties. You can expand that outside.

Then you've got gold and silver. They're on an insane run right now. Um also, you know, not as programmatically scarce, but scarce by physical nature. Then you've got real estate, land, energy, oil, etc. Commodities. So, it's kind of like this basket of um investable assets that are just uh scarce by design. And then because of the inflationary regime that we've been in for such a long time and that we will likely continue to be in, this makes it this makes it appealing for an investor who can just understand basic supply and demand. Um, what do you ex like when you're looking at mapping this over five to 10 years? Crypto people like myself, we expect a 5x in five years. Now, I know that's not exactly what's going to

happen, right? But like if your portfolio didn't like 10x for the last eight years in crypto, I'm sorry. Um, and so when we're looking at the actual investable energy market here, let's say to 2030 to 2035, what are the key factors that investors should look for and pay attention to? And then if you could just like give us a rough like forecast or just a what your vision is for how this market evolves and then how you kind of want to uh, you know, entrench yourself in that, I'd appreciate kind of like this broader view. >> Yeah, maybe I'll just say that this and everything else I've said is certainly not financial advice. Um, but I do think to your point, right, baskets of things that can't you can't print more of are always attractive in, you know, fiat

denominated markets. Energy is no different than gold in that standpoint. But there's something else going on here, which is like the structural shortage of electricity that is able to be delivered to markets to supply compute growth, to supply electric vehicle growth, supply uh electrified heating growth, restoring of industrial capacity, all these things we've talked about. And so the the trade for daylight really is is a network that goes long power, right? We're going long power and we're developing distributed power plants that aggregate themselves into larger power plants through software that can deliver electricity to grids at scale and it can do it in the fastest and cheapest way possible. We're seeing really interesting things happen in the world of like private equity and

infrastructure funds, right? Blackstone, KKR, they're all buying large-scale power plants because they are trying to express this view of how do we go long electricity the last year. I actually just saw this yesterday which is super interesting but the EIA just published data on residential retail electricity rates. Retail electricity rates for the US across the US average this is not the top this is not the top quartile is the average increase 7 and a half% from 2024 to 2025 significantly above inflation and that again is this constraint that we have as a society of we need to go long power we need to do it in a way that is fast and efficient and can get more kilowatt hours onto the grid in a way that uh uh uh you know doesn't require all this necessary transmission

and distribution infrastructure upgrades which make things even more expensive. And so what is my prediction? I think that um being in the business of building power plants is going to be a great business for us. I think that building and scaling energy capacity faster and cheaper than other you know centralized developers can do it is a competitive advantage. And I think that the world in 10 years will look from an energy production standpoint much more decentralized by requirement um physically decentralized than it does today. and daylight hopefully will be one of the major players if not the major player that's driving that kind of fundamental shift in in how power grids function.

>> And so if we think about like Uber right or like um some of these other kind of P uh P2P applications that have really grown in size over the last 10 20 years is it a similar thesis as to why like ride sharing has done well as to why decentralized energy is going to do well or is it different? >> Like is it like is it a fair analogy? >> I would argue it's different. I would argue it's different and and you know the reason Uber and and decentralized ride sharing took off is because it's simply a better product for the end user. Decentralized energy is um two it offers things twofold. It's a better product for the end user. You know the person who's deploying it. They get cheaper, more reliable power. So that's valuable, but it's also again this structural advantage compared to other

deployment models for the grid. If you don't deploy distributed energy, prices will continue to spiral out of control. they'll continue to print at 7 and a half% 10% annual inflation. Uh and that would be I think pretty problematic for power grids. So there wasn't like this like external like taxis disappeared overnight and Uber had to come fill the gap which is what daylight found finds itself in the position of we literally can't build enough power and all the companies that are out there attempting to scale energy capacity in new ways are going to benefit from this structural trend. I think the analogy would be like if taxi companies were made illegal overnight and went away and all of a sudden there was nobody to drive anybody around and then Uber came into the market.

>> Got it. Holy crap, man. I need a bag of daylight. Jason, thanks for your time, man. I appreciate it. >> It's been awesome. >> Thanks, Jason. We'll see you next time, man. Congrats on all the success. >> All right, buddy. >> Thank you. Thank you. Bye. >> See you soon. Bye, >> man. Give me a bag of daylight, please. The the world has turned into the decentralized energy podcast. >> Dude, this book I'm telling you, you tell me I sold the bottom, but I'm going to keep diversifying. Robert, >> you devis diversified into cash at the bottom of the bottom of the debasement trade. Don't tell me. Talk to me about diversification. You thought you went directly from >> I'm going to I'm looking I'm uranium.

>> I'm assessing I'm obsessing my options. 25% later. [laughter] >> You're a clown, bro. Oh my gosh. All right, let's rip the timeline. There's a bunch of stuff that's been going on. We got to talk about it. We got our next guest in like 20 minutes. So, we'll pull up um >> Yeah, let's go screen share >> whatever we want first. >> But yeah, man. I mean, this book changed my I mean, so uh good old Mr. G gave this to me. Yeah. >> And read it. And uh it basically was the reason that I bought a lot of gold and silver which is now up like over two times from when I bought it which is crazy back in like I don't know 20 it was like 20 21 20. So I sold the bottom again there

you know at 65k Bitcoin and got myself some gold and silver. Then that has now doubled or tripled over the last four years while the Bitcoin that I sold at 65 is sitting at 90 for only a 50% increase. So man, maybe you should uh do some alternative asset class investing yourself, Robert, and then try to assess the, you know, choices of your fellow friend here. All right. >> I think you make great choices and uh I think you are unfamiliar with my diversification. Yeah, you want some cows. All right. Dead bags don't pump. Um, this tweet is just so tell us about this one. Tell tell us about this

one. Feels like it's maybe a little stale at this point. >> Hey, Shiv, man. I was trying to hang out in Art Basle. I didn't get to see you. I'm sure you were having a hell of a time. But man, you marked the bottom with this one, buddy. [laughter] You marked the bottom. All [snorts] right. So, >> aren't going to bounce just because we're emotionally attached. >> Why did they bounce? I let go of many tokens that were sitting dead in my wallet. Doesn't matter what I bought them and how long I've held for waiting to break even until it goes lower and it's not even worth a dime. It's crazy work. Start asking yourself whether it has potential to go up and they are still delivering. The mindset has helped me to buy into conviction only plays instead of holding on to dead bags. Do

the same. You won't regret it in the long run. Look. >> Okay. So, I can actually take quite a bit of valuable points from this other than just like memeing that that it was the bottom. Um, as a fellow Pangu, you know, you got to understand that the Pangus are smart. Like the Pangus are not like out here shooting dumb stuff in the world. Like, he's got a point here. The point is like uh concentration in investing, especially in crypto, in an asset class that is so so heavily correlated. Now, it's been slightly less correlated this year than it has in the past where like when Bitcoin would go up, everything would go up. When Bitcoin would go down, everything would go down.

We saw different types of runners this year and different types of things happening that wasn't kind of familiar or that didn't happen in the last couple years. Like from from 2017 when we first got in till 2024, Bitcoin went up, everything went up, and then we we had this weird sailor bull style run that wasn't normal, right? But uh he's got a point which is that concentration is how you win. Like you're going to win in this market by holding heavy size in long-term investments that you're really really certain on because you'll be able to weather the draw downs. You'll be able to hold through bare markets and hold through bad times. I think what he's trying to say here is like if you got a bunch of random dust, it's okay to

sell the dust, man. Like it's okay. And I'm I'm with it. And uh a fellow friend of mine also told me the same thing several months ago. He's like, man, like I'd be dumping everything that you're not like super super certain on for the long term. Um and you can always reby. And so I think it's like bad timing for a good tweet. Um okay, that sounds about right. Uh sell the dust. Uh, I also think, >> you know, the >> the point that you're getting at timing uh isn't terrible because selling dust is tax loss harvesting before the end of the year.

>> Yeah. You you remember that vapor coin that's in Hyperlid, >> dude. Yeah, we're going to tax loss harvest the hell out of that thing. Any whatever you're ready to press the red button on that one, we get a nice little >> The market pressed the red button on that one for us, buddy. >> Nice little tax harvest on that one. >> Let's move on. >> All right, move on. Um I think generally we're talking about uh okay well here we got infra and I think this is something that you got to consider like okay well what infra do you have in front of you that you're reliably sustainably bullish on for the next decade.

>> Hold on though tempo testn net live we should have done stable mainet major major issues uh segment. So plasma launched, right? Stable coin chains. It was like the the hypest thing since it was the most hyped up launch of the year. It went to 15, no plasma went to 15 to 18 billion FTV. It is down 92% now to like 1.8 bill FTV. >> Stable launched with all sorts of problems and all sorts of issues and the sentiment around it is terrible. Uh DeFi Ignis put out a whole tweet about it. I I I don't really like to so

>> we've got both. Hold on. It's important to call out like when we saw the predepos, there was seven people >> literally seven wallets that bought the uh that stable predeposit. Also guys disclaimer as you know we we do we invested in plasma. We don't have any investment in tempo or stable but but so I think plasma was like like the golden child and now is kind of like the hate child of CT. Stable is not even going to have its time in the light. It's just going to be Ignos is going to go down. Tempo is like the new like wow like the savior of crypto. Like wow look at these partners. Look at Dankrad.

>> Who's calling it the the savior? >> I am I'm telling you that's what that's what >> Tempo is a web two company. >> St. Tempo is a is a crypto web two company. >> Okay. I think I think you're right. >> I mean, they're they're stable coins and they're good infra, I'm sure, but calling them the savior of crypto, I think, is a little bit misleading because they don't really >> That's what the sentiment in this category the sentiment in this category is kind of like that right now. Like plasma and stable are cooked right now.

They're cooked >> and and look, I you got to look at the lineup here. uh a lot of these companies are working with Tempo and have not really came out and said that they've got much of a crypto strategy. So the partner list is is is extremely impressive. Look, we're going to celebrate a test net. There's been a lot of test nets. A lot of test nets have come out as the greatest thing since sliced bread and then the mainetss fall short and vice versa. Sometimes test net is a nothing burger and mainet comes out and busts the doors wide open. So I'm gonna Okay, but so there's a couple cool things here measure when we when we talk about testing.

>> They made some interesting decisions from a first principles perspective. Um as far as like actual blockchain design, >> the dedicated payment lane, stable coin gas, >> I asked Zaki what his favorite was. Um he was like >> builtin stable asset decks is a pretty unique design choice. They have subblocks um and fee sponsorship mechanism that is super unique. >> Subblocks sounds like uh like embedded rollups.

>> Yeah, we have beyond >> you kind of have like a finality mechanism that's baked into a intra block window and it's effectively a rollup and then you roll up those transactions and put them into a single block for uh for settlement. >> Yeah. So, I'd imagine that >> we have to get Zucky on. I just told him to we'll have to get him on. >> Stable coin gas is table stakes of all these stable coin chains. >> Yeah, >> I I tend to agree that partners are going to be where these uh stable chains are are made into winners and losers.

>> Partners. >> Yeah, you got to look at the ecosystem. How much flow? It's all going to come down to the flow, the infrastructure. Like, look, we could talk about design choices, but I don't think that's going to be the moat. I don't I don't think that's really going to create that much of a better product in which they're going to start to win some of these deals. Tempo already has a moat with Stripe. They've already got the the distribution, whereas I don't think they're really going to uh get beat too much on product by some other company that doesn't have the distribution. And so I I would agree that Tempo is currently leading the stable chain.

Tempo's brand is giving me like it's giving me like Art Basle vibes. >> That sounds like some recency bias. >> Yeah. I mean, it's giving me like um I don't know. Like they just did a a partnership with Clara and Clara just quote tweeted it. Like it's giving [snorts] me like they're sort of like Neo finance and then crypto in a different world. >> Yeah. It's giving me like some fintech vibes for like CLA, Stripe, even like Revolute Cash App, New Bank, Shopify, like Visa, Mastercard are part of the old crowd and like >> Pimple invested 25 mill in Commonwe.

Wow. >> Like the BVNKs of the world, the neo banks of >> Yeah, that's the vibe that I'm getting. >> The Claras, like the neo finance like world, these are the guys that like are even like you could even put like Coinbase and centralized exchanges in that. Like that is the vibe that I'm picking up from like Tempo >> and they've got distribution. They've got the partnerships for them to work. They these are the guys that don't really care. They don't have research fetish. They're building something for the real world. >> Yeah. And >> that's what Khi is also part of this crowd. Whereas in the other world is where you kind of get into like you know truth seeeking philosophically aligned with Ethereum and this like

>> no they don't care about that. They just want to make money. Tempo just wants to make money and build a build a business on chain. So >> I tend to think like there is a world in which I do think that maybe like the latter is more sustainable, but in the near term you're going to see a lot more business cases. One >> I don't know. Tempo's giving me very mercenary vibes. I think that they're g they're coming for people's heads. I'm bullish, but I'm scared. Let's move on. [laughter] Congrats on the test net, guys. Um, okay. So, this is cool.

>> Oh, new uh just quick Yeah, this is similar to the last thing, but but I just quick thing is uh new Bitcoin treasury company just dropped. It's actually been around for a long time, but I believe 20 21 Capital went public today. >> Um >> like an IPO. >> Yeah, I'm going to send this to our technical producer behind the scenes. Let's see if we can download this video and watch it on the stream. >> Wait, what happened? 21 >> 21 Capital is uh it's the it's the conglomerate Jack Mers uh it's the it's Howard Lutnik's son forget his name but it's Howard Lutnik's son obviously Howard Lutnik commerce secretary in in >> Jack Mers is Howard Lutnik's son >> no no no no they partnered up also an uh

Pompiano I believe is is affiliated with this it's like pretty heavy hitters that have talked about this treasury company they they've also done like mega deals with Tether Cool. >> Um, >> okay. Well, that's cool. Um, but yeah, so this Neo Bank thing is is interesting. Um, you can kind of see the modes uh a bit, but but basically like um they've mapped out the players here of of the Neo Banks. And yeah, I don't know. I think it's just like very interesting how there's a lot of competition right now for getting users to use your physical card. Um, so yeah, I mean I I think this is a super

cutthroat category and a win winners take most or all. I also think it's a very big category and very profitable category and something that people will underestimate how quickly we get new adoption through this type of of kind of like sector. So I think it's just something definitely to pay attention to and like I think it's going to be an investable an investable category from the public liquid side going forward. >> I think we're going to get that video ready before the next guest comes on. Uh so let's go to that one next. In the meantime um >> crypto cards, neo banks, >> look, this is where we're headed. Um, and I think this is the this is the

current thing, right? Where you have this startup category. You have neo banks and phones. Um, and then, you know, we're going to see if these neo banks and crypto cards can get distribution faster than American Express and Bank of America and Wells Fargo can integrate the technology. I think those banks have enough capital where they're going to uh probably look to acquire some of the uh some of those uh more tech advanced startups. >> Yeah, cool. >> We're going to acquire as much Bitcoin. >> I mean I I can't really see the chart that well, so we'll just move on through this. Let's go ahead and bring up Jack Mer. See what he's got to say.

>> Yeah, let's see if we can get some audio here as well. >> [snorts] >> Man, that is uh tempo test had me had me dying. Yeah, I mean, look, I've used Crypto.com. I use EtherFi. Um I think Plasma has Plasmo one coming out. So, um yeah, it's should be really really interesting to see kind of how they how they work it out. >> It's all going to come down to the yield, right? I mean, we're going to use the card that gives us the most >> the best benefits or whatever it is. >> So, I think this is, you know, Arthur from Teslas came on and was talking about fat protocol thesis. Look, fat user thesis is where we're at.

>> Like, >> um, >> fat fat user thesis is what happens when you get competition in the market. You get, you know, so many more cards that we can end up uh just looking and taking a choice out of like which one is going to give me the most cash back. Uh, which one is going to give us, you know, the most users, most benefits. uh when it comes to um uh you know points, airline travel, um all of these things, these are the neo banks and the and the credit cards that we plan on using, right? The ones that are going to give us the most of the value. So, uh we've got some questions from the chat. Did Ready get mentioned in the

Neoank? Um I believe it should have been. Obviously, Ready is uh the recent rebrand from Argent. Uh Argent was the first smart contract wallet from Starknet. Um did it get mentioned in the moat? Let's see from Polaris. We'll call out some notable names here. Um obviously Rain Rain card is doing quite well. Uh they also started out in this web two world. Argent I see here did get mentioned. MetaMask uh is here with their card in a couple different categories. Uh and then you've got a few like agent AI agent like cards that I

think are going to be optimized for the agentic economy. This is something that I anticipate is going to get more and more adoption. Um Revolutes in here. rain. You've got sort of the neo banks that have been around a while, already have some distribution like the Revolutes, the Cash Apps, uh even the the centralized exchanges you can put in there. Crypto.com, Gemini, they've been around for quite a while. And then you've got uh some more uh niche cards. You've got Pay, don't forget about Pay Link. Uh they're in it for like more privacy. Uh and then you've got more regional uh uh neo banks. And I could I could also see a lot of these NEO banks either launching their own stable coin or partnering with the stable coin uh to get more

verticalization in the stack. I think that is pretty inevitable. Uh let's see. Let's see. And so there's quite a bit more to come out of this market. Uh but you just you gota you got to realize that a lot of these uh historical banks are not going to go down without a fight. uh they have been around for such a long time, they're going to do everything that they can to preserve uh these businesses that make up a pretty significant part of their revenue. And so I would imagine that as like like just today, Coinbase announced that they're partnering with PNC Bank.

PNC is going to let you buy Bitcoin directly from your online banking and they're going to use Coinbase to do it, the Coinbase exchange product. Um, and so as banks are go, you know, start to incorporate custody services and open up the ability to access crypto from their online banking, we're going to start to see more and more products built on top of that basic infrastructure. So now you can buy bit you can buy Bitcoin, you know, through your banking portal. then you're going to be able to spend spend that bitcoin on your debit card or on your credit card and you're just going to see all of the products that are currently available through the banking stack become cryptoified and you're

going to have uh the augmentation of crypto stable coins uh uh you know right into that same product stack. >> Um well we got a new uh little uh Patrick Collin banger. Um, this is about a vibe shift, a foot in Silicon Valley about what one should work on and what's worthwhile. Honestly, I think this is coming from a place of like existentialism with regards to AI. Um, but like this is like really interesting. Uh, EA is no longer the automatic default for smart people. Does that mean like what does EA mean?

There's increasing skepticism of slot and slop machine dynamics. Does that mean like gambling and AI just garbage? Overall, what is worthy and valuable feels like it's becoming more central? Davos expert morality is stale and discredited. If I'm being honest with you, I don't even really know what half this means. So Patrick Collison is uh is obviously the Stripe founder and uh you know Stripe is very uh deeply entrenched with Tempo and so this is marking what and that we should probably coin a term for this category right it's like the it's like the neo finance category where it's not quite web 3 it's not quite web two it's like the coinbase stripe tempo

centralized exchange neo bank >> it's just called fintech >> yeah yeah I mean you could call it fintech tech, right? Uh so Tim Tempo is more like a fintech company than a crypto company. I guess yeah, you could see that. And so this is this is what you're seeing out of this fintech neo finance category. Uh what is worthy and valuable? Like these guys are sorting through and finding the ethical uh motivation to build this category where they don't want to build slop. They want to build something that's more efficient, but they've already done a lot of the work on the traditional legacy infrastructure that powered like legacy fintech. This is like neo fintech. Yeah. They're going into this direction and they want to make sure that they're doing it ethically, morally and aligned with the values of this

customer segment that is sort of this combination of web two tech fintech and crypto. It's somewhere in the middle and they're trying to figure out the value system and the belief system of this category. >> Okay. And more broadly Silicon Valley it seems like as as I think it's AI. It's a fintech silicon. Silicon Valley is very AI, but it's also very fintech. There is elements of like >> New York financial hub energy in this category, >> right? >> But it is very Silicon Valley when it comes to the tech. So, it's kind of this convergence of two. It's like very like it's this American dynism, right? It's like very pro- innovation on both technology and finance. And this is where they converge is this neo finance

uh fintech category. And I think, you know, you can see what it's defined by. They don't want gambling, right? They don't want necessarily financialization of everything. That's crypto casino vibes too much in that direction. But you also and and you don't want slot machine dynamics, which is where if you get too far Silicon Valley, you end up like Sora ChatgPT AI slot vibes. And so it's very intentional intentional innovation where it's not just innovation for innovation's sake, seeing like look what we can automate. Look like look what we can get robots to do.

Yeah, >> right. It's like it's very much intentional and ethical, I think, is the goal, right? But it's still very much underdevelopment. >> Well, I for one have been enjoying their uh cheeky uh podcast uh beer by the bo with the boys in a uh madeup pub uh studio. So, maybe we'll get invited on one day after the rollup does 100x from here. Um guys, we're going to take a quick pause. We have an amazing next guest, Mark Greenberg from Kraken. uh really aligned with both this tweet as well as the the the following one. So, or or sorry, the the previous one. So, we'll take a quick break and be right back guys.

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[music] Welcome back to another episode of Money Moves Fast, our premier weekly show covering all things tokenization, RWAS, [music] and payments. This show is made possible by Polygon, the leading blockchain for payments and RWAs. Money Moves Fast is the convergence of Wall Street and digital assets. Now, sit back, relax, [music] and enjoy the show. Boom. Money Moves Fast episode 13. Mark Greenberg here today from the head of cracking consumers business division.

Mark, thanks for calling in man. >> Hey guys, thanks for having me. It should be a pleasure. We are just riffing on all these different neoanking uh kind of you know applications and differences and there's just this whole sector is really is really growing. Today we are on Money Moves Fast episode number 13, which is our weekly premiere to tokenization and payments show powered by Polygon, one of the leading providers for stable coin payments. Uh, low fees, great transactions, easy experience, use the chain. Check it out, guys. We got Mark Greenberg here. Mark, quick background on you, man. Um, head of Crackers Krakens Consumer Business.

What does this mean? What is the head of Krakens? Yeah. Yeah, it's a it's a good question. It's a bunch of different stuff, Andy. Uh I lead all of our uh work on crypto trading on the retail side. Everything we do around tokenized equities and equities here. So, everything we're doing around X stocks and then uh also everything we're doing with our brand new uh neoank uh competitor money app called Crack. So, uh, really excited with, uh, we got so much on the go here and we just believe that there's so many opportunities for Kraken to, uh, make everyday payments and investing and trading just a lot easier.

>> OG Kraken users, by the way. >> Oh, yeah. I think Kraken was >> our first centralized exchange that I I opened up way back either 2016, 2018, something like that. Um, and I felt like you guys were one of the one of the the uh pioneers in the space. Like you guys got started, you always had like this really core brand ethos of uh kind of like this adventurous guys like when crypto was the wild west, right? It it feels like the the vibe has shifted a little bit and I think you caught a little bit of the the uh rant we were going on before you joined, which is that we almost have this new category, this next generation of fintech that's popping up. It's neo banks. Um it's centralized exchanges, but also going

into the decentralized world as well. It's not quite quite crypto, but it's also not quite uh uh web 2. It's sort of this this uh it's not quite like Wall Street Finance. It's not quite Silicon Valley, you know, AI slop. It's like somewhere in the middle. It's trying to take the best of both worlds out of out of all of these things. And so I'm thinking, you know, my question is what was the inspiration behind crack? When you when you're looking out at what banking and crypto and money and finance is going to look like over the coming, you know, decades, you guys saw an opening for crack. What was the inspiration? What do you think that is going to look like over the coming years?

>> Look, guys, I spent my whole life trying to make banks suck less, and banking still sucks. I I just like it is still too hard to do most of the basics. If you think about what Kraken's been really good at for more than a decade now, it's turning one thing into another thing in the Kraken platform, right? So that was fiat and stable coins and crypto. Now it's tokenized equities. It's uh lots of different pieces that we're putting under the hood. More different types of currencies, more different types of stable coins, more different types of assets. Um that's what's always to me been broken about banking to a large extent, too. Why, as a Canadian, do I have to hold mostly Canadian dollars? Why do I have to be paid in Canadian dollars? Then I can

convert it and then I can use my Canadian dollar credit card. Oh, well, shoot. I have to convert it back. I was talking to someone today. They're like like, okay, the best way to get euros is you take your Canadian dollar out of your bank account. You move it to US dollars by Wise. Then you move the US dollars by Wise to Revolute in Europe. and then you can spend on your European card. Those are the kind of things that are just completely outdated. As a Canadian, I don't necessarily want to hold Canadian dollars. Um, we've seen what's happened in Canada over the last few years. And maybe it's not the place where I want to store my wealth. Maybe I want to store it in Tesla stock. Maybe I want to store it in Bitcoin. Maybe I

want to store it in Ethereum, Salana, you name it. Stable coins in US dollars. All of those are options. now and banking still hasn't really caught up to the fact that everything can be money and uh we want to be able to spend everything that we're using as money in the moment. And so that's what we were excited about with Krak takes all the things that Kraken was really good at behind the scenes and um puts it uh front and center. >> Awesome. And so we also uh we realize that the big banks are not going to go down without a fight. Like you said, we know this that banks sort of suck. They've sucked for a long time. we're trying to make them suck less, but we're almost, you know, inventing a new form of bank, uh, rather than, you know, seeing the big banks sort of, you know,

be sort of reflective and and understand that, you know, maybe they can improve their own products. And so I I'm curious how you think the the banking the legacy banking companies are going to respond to this. How do you think legacy banks are going to approach crypto in your experience? uh will we see them you know augment their services with something like crack with neo banks in you know M&A are they going to start to acquire more of these things when when you you know are looking at the banking uh system today how do you think they're going to react to the uprising of neo bankanking and crypto >> look I'm going to say slow and late just to start right so I don't think this is

happening anytime soon typically my experience with bigger banks is they're going to talk about this for a long time before they take action on it. And we're now in this talking stage. So maybe we get to action at some point. First and foremost, um I think they're going to continue to use Kraken behind the scenes. So whether it's crack our own neo bank or whether it's Kraken in bed which empowers uh banks like bunk um crypto does need to be a part stable coins do need to be a part of banking in the future and we do expect folks to use the security and transparency and liquidity of Kraken to make that happen.

That being said, I still think banks aren't yet in a position to get to a place where they are going to see things other than their local fiat as uh as money and that's something that I think more and more users are seeing like hey why do I have to hold fiat? Is fiat really going to hold its value? Why can't I hold gold and stable coins and others? And so I do think that's going to be something that banks are slow and and later on. I don't really see them as our key competitors. I do see some of the neo banks though moving more into that same kind of narrative and I'm personally excited for it. I I look forward to having a a wealth of new

types of money apps that don't operate the way the traditional >> Yeah, most definitely. And and I think there's a global use case for that. there's a democratization thesis around that as well. Um a and so [clears throat] you know we're talking more about this uh you know about this app specifically and and we just looked at a a chart comparing different neo banks and there's all these different types of categories here. I think like maybe you could just walk us through the high level of what makes a really really good NEO bank, you know, uh debit card, vaults, salaries, uh um uh earnings, payments, um uh crypto first kind of uh user experience like what makes uh a

really solid NEO bank, you know, and kind of like how do you think about uh the idea of um building a really solid finance app for somebody to kind of have like this one-stop shop. >> Yeah. Um it starts with the ability, it's three things. So the ability to spend your money, save your money, and send your money to others, right? Those are really the three things. Maybe deposit as well. So um let's start with spend your money. So we launched uh recently the crack card in Europe and the UK. 1% CAM, up to you, or stable coins. Uh, you can spend from

any currency you like, which is pretty cool. And including uh everything as silly as maybe Fartcoin if you're into that kind of thing, all the way through to US dollars or euros or stable coins or CAD or whatever you want to actually or actually X stocks, which for me is something really exciting. Then you got, hey, money is going to sit in this account and I'm going to want to save it. How do I let it grow? Well, onchain DeFi yields are some of the best safest opportunities out there and um we're going to have in the Crack app over the next few weeks 10% plus yield opportunityities.

Those ones are the more risky ones. We'll also have you know five six% ones that are less risky, but opportunity for folks to earn more than the basically zero that most of the traditional banks pay at this point. And then you're going to want to be able to move the money in and out. uh that means payroll deposits and pieces like that. So we're working with a number of different organizations to make that uh available by default but you also have you know regular banking ibands in Europe and the UK when you use crack. Uh but then also um the ability to every market is a little bit different and what that means in Canada it's specific bill pay approaches etc.

Uh those are the three things you need to make a really great bank uh or a really great money app because we're not a bank. But banks historically have really done none of those super well. A little bit on the card. They've been pretty good at card um at the same time, but typically don't give most of the value back to the users. Uh secondly, they don't allow you to save in all sorts of different things and they certainly don't allow you to grow your money in all sorts of different types of assets. And then um uh so those are things that we're really excited about being able to use onchain defy opportunities for and um we're excited about with awesome.

>> I I'm curious how you think this uh wave of these financial super apps. How you think this is going to change consumer behavior like because for for so long you had you know uh stocks you went to your broker right you went to a brokerage account you had stocks over there. >> Now everything's kind of getting bundled up. You got X stocks >> the Robin Hoods. Yep. >> The Robin Hoods, right? Everything is becoming you know you can go there earn yield there right 7% 4% you can get access to defy yields effectively as a checking or savings account be checking because you have your card savings because you have a high yielding account and then you have your stock and your brokerage account right there in the same app. Do how do you see this playing out? How do you think consumers are

going to react to it and and you know where do you think uh where do you think the uh the the points are? Well, first I get excited about all the places something like Xtocks can be offered. Financial apps, sure, but actually you can buy XT stocks on Telegram. >> Uh any and so if you're in a country like Usbekiststan and you had no access to stocks in a prior life unless you went through an arduous complex process because you had a lot of money. Uh well, you can just do that now inside your messaging app. um more and more of finance should operate like that where you don't need to go through 10,000 different steps in order to get access

to uh the same thing as the big boys. Yeah. And um uh >> is that so yes now that's coming to certain like super apps on the financial side. Great. you know, like why did I need three different apps to do the basics of holding Bitcoin and a stable coin and fiat and a stock and a venture fund and all these other things over time. We should have one ability to do that. But actually, I hope over time that actually comes totally out of traditional bank style apps and broker dealer style apps and we get to a place where this is just uh common place for you to use the kind of apps you use every day to uh buy and sell stocks or tokenize stocks and have yield on your assets as well. So that's kind of where

I see it going uh much more and and maybe this like super app kind of thing is a step in that direction. Yeah, Mark. So, this is actually quite the episode because you guys have, you know, recently rolled out this this crack app or at least kind of announced it and you guys also just acquired backed uh last week. Um, so like a lot of things happening on this kind of tokenization kind of like bridging this gap front. Why did you guys acquire backed and maybe you could like layer that into your thesis about how you think tokenized assets will kind of reshape global capital markets? We just saw uh the um US SEC is it chairman Paul Atkins say that uh all markets will be on chain in two years. So like clearly it's

happening from the highest of powers. Talk to us about your tokenized asset thesis as it relates to backed and and that acquisition. >> Yeah. Um so we started XTOX in partnership with backed now in first week of July. So we're we're coming on six months at this moment. Um, the thesis isn't that different than banking sucks because equities suck even more. Uh, we wanted to get to a place where you could have all the advantages you get at crypto trading on equities. I can store them in my own self-custodial wallet. I can trade them 247. I can move them to anyone I want. I can buy them anywhere in the world. And uh, I can use them as collateral to get loans. Why couldn't stocks look like that? And I

often use my own personal examples where like in Canada it's almost impossible to buy a European stock or when you're trying to move from one broker to another. I don't know if you guys have ever done that, but like trying to move an equity from broker X to broker Y can take weeks sometimes where you can't even touch your assets. When I did this in Canada, there was an actual fax sent a few months ago. I didn't even know faxes existed anymore. >> So >> way the Canadian way man. >> Well, exactly. and I like to take on Canada but >> my parents are from it just hits different. My parents are from Toronto, basically, so it's pretty funny.

>> So, um, uh, why can't tokenized equity solve all of that? And now they can. So, Xtocks are regulated, uh, in Europe through a retail perspectus, all sorts of, and then there there are actual stocks held behind the scenes to make sure that you can use your tokenized equities in a very similar way to the way stable coins work. So there are real equities there. Uh we store them in a special purpose vehicle and then you can buy and sell tokenized equities 247 on Salana on Ethereum. You can buy them on Telegram, you can sell them on Telegram, you can do all sorts of different things with them that just you can't do with traditional equities and uh backed well we we looked far and wide to find

someone who could help us do this because as I said we have this Kraken platform. We're really uh good at liquidity and good at moving thing A to thing B. How do we do that same kind of thing on the equity side? We talked to a billion folks. There's a lot of companies out there doing permission. You got to be KYC. You can only do it on a Tuesday, you know, like all sorts of very complex rules around this. Backed had a specific approach that was really unique and allowed us to create X stocks in a truly permissionless way. Um, >> awesome.

>> A few months of working together, we decided it was too cool to pass up and that's the end of the story. And now we just continue to work together on making it huge and uh and growing XT stocks together. I'm super bullish. >> So, how big is XOXOs now? Users, volume, integrations, like how has has the growth been what you expected? More or less kind of how's it looking? >> Yeah, it went really it's going really well. So, we're at about 80,000 users of XStocks, about $200 million or so of value locked up in XOXOs so far. Um, just getting started to be honest. Uh, lots lots more growth to come. Uh, but we're starting to see that that hockey stick as people are using it. And, uh, you know, we're at 12 billion dollars of

uh of volume. So, those are 12 billion dollars of trades that have happened across centralized platforms and on chain. So, um, and I think that number was 10 billion even a few weeks ago. So, growing really fast, seeing a lot of success and, uh, look forward to just finding more and more places to, um, for Xbox to be offered among many different apps. I'd say the most fun part for me is the very first XStocks billboard, not related to Kraken in any way. It showed up in South Africa. a company in South Africa saw it as an opportunity for them to sell stocks directly to folks in that market without having to go through the hoops that you would normally would have to do. And uh so they put up a billboard about it uh in Johannesburg. So that's

the kind of thing I get excited about with X stocks. Yes, you can buy and sell them on Kraken. Yes, you can buy and sell them on on Telegram. But the more people around the world we can give access to uh Xtocks through as many different apps and experience as possible, the the more excited I get. >> Very I love it, man. I think >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Go ahead. >> No, I just think that that democratization of access was a big thing that a lot of us were interested in when we first got into the space, uh which for us was like in in the 2017 era. And it feels like we're just now really starting to get that level of adoption with stable coins and this neo bankanking primitive that is enabling the Turkeys, the Syrias, the Latams of the world to really kind of come on

chain uh participate in global equity markets, especially US equity markets and then do it in a way that preserves their purchasing power from their local currency as well. And so there's like a lot of really cool happenings here that actually are ironically linked to like institutions and to the suits which people are like, "Oh, I don't want to be the suit." But then we're actually providing the core ethos of the space at the same time for like begging the unbanked and such. So I just want to throw that in there. >> Totally agree. I look everyone should have the same access to everything. I strongly believe in that. Uh and I think that's something that crypto enables in a totally different way. Stable coins do the same thing. act, you know, as a Canadian, I have far more access to US

dollar yield than I ever had before through something like USDG. And uh we're just going to bring that to more and more asset classes over time. That is the promise of of uh crypto. It's the promise of blockchain, and it's exactly what I think XOX and tokenized equities and the Crack app in a different way are providing for folks. So, super pumped about what we're building here. Could could you tell us more about the Crack app because I think people are somewhat familiar. They're familiar with the uh exchange offering on Kraken. They're familiar with Inc. and an onchain ecosystem. Um the Crack app, tell us more about it. What what are the distribution channels like? What what do you guys currently have on there and how does it separate from the other uh existing parts of the stack? Yeah. So,

one thing that we've been probably unique versus others on is we prefer to have a group of apps that do one or few things really, really well and that interact with one another. And so, Krak is our money app. It uh connects deeply into the Kraken ecosystem. You can use your Kraken username and password. you can move funds back and forth between them, but it is designed to be the replacement for your checking account or current account. Uh, available around the world allows you to send and receive any asset that we of the 400 plus that we support here at Kraken and more coming every single day. Uh, if you're in Europe or in the UK, you get access

to a card. We're working on getting that around the world and just continuing to build basically something that can replace your bank account. Uh will it and it just works seamlessly with all the other apps that we have at Kraken whether that's Kraken or Kraken Pro or uh the Inc. ecosystem etc. So uh get the best of Kraken for a different use case and money in saving and spending your money and uh and we look forward to bringing a whole next generation of users into the Kraken ecosystem via this different approach. I think that's spot on. The next generation of users are not going to be uh intellectually captured by the legacy banks thinking that their savings account can only earn them a quarter percent per year, which is probably pretty generous for the

existing banks. The the new generation is going to come first to something like a crack app and they're going to see seven, eight, nine% probably through some onchain yield source that you guys are passing through uh to the app. And the end consumer is going to be why am I going to use, you know, some of these existing legacy banks that give me a quarter percent. I can go get, you know, 20 times the yield on my savings account by depositing through something like crack. >> Yeah. Exa. Exactly. Look, there are going to be some users that are going to chase the yield that's available for them. There's going to be a different group of users who don't want to trust a bank to lend out their money and hopefully have it behind the scenes afterwards. So if you want to hold T- bills, you want to hold gold, uh

tokenized gold, you want to hold tokenized equities as your main mechanism of holding money, uh you can do that as well. And there'll be a whole group of users who want to do that. And then um and then it's also just faster to transact in crypto versus cash. um whether that's a stable coin or uh or crypto directly, you can while money apps while banks have done a good job of more or less making that hidden behind the scenes for you within a country, it's still really hard to get when I'm I'm in the US right now. When I when I try and like pay a friend here or give them 10 bucks, still the only way to really do that again there's like one or

two apps. can't use Venmo, can't use Zel, can't use any of the things that folks can't use Cash App. So, I still end up going for boring old fiat. I literally go to the bank, take out money, and hand it to someone. Uh, that's ridiculous. And Crack app is part of, I think, the solve because Crack app is in all these countries at the same time and allows you to move move money easily. >> Well, I've just downloaded it. It looks pretty pretty cool branding on it. So, I'll have to set up the set up the account. You're saying that we can just sign in with with our Kraken account, which is awesome. It looks like it says that here. So, that's exciting. Uh I'm curious when you're thinking about like you know Robbie's talking about right so there's banks that the s the savings

rate isn't that interesting. Now you're getting to a separate point where is like the actual fintech services right now are actually not that compelling either from a a transfer perspective. So like who are you really competing with? Is it traditional neo banks like Revolute? Is it Venmo? Or is it some of these more traditional banks like Chase or Wells Fargo that that Ros mentioned? It seems like there's like there's faults on both side that you guys, you know, for lack of a better term, will be looking to exploit from a business case. How do you kind of think about competition? >> I don't think anyone has the street cred around bringing the best of the crypto world and the old traditional banking world that Kraken has. So, I think we're actually in a really unique spot with

the Krak app. We're taking some of the things that we've done as well, if not better, than anyone on both sides of that and putting them together into something that is a little different from everything out there. Yes, on one hand, you've got the traditional banks who uh you know, we've talked a lot about the issues there. Uh on the other hand, you've also got folks who are they've got a lot of these more onchain cryptospecific offerings that also just don't always work in the easiest simplest ways for folks uh who still need to operate mostly in the traditional world. And that's what we're trying to bridge with uh with Krak at the moment. Um, we'll have offerings in all sorts of different spaces and so we

will have some more onchain specific opportunities as well here at Kraken and we're just building those. But for this specific use case, the idea is to bring in as many new users into an app that they maybe don't even care has crypto in it uh to allow them to use the benefits of crypto, of blockchain, of stable coins, of X stocks without having to actually spend a whole lot of time um figuring it out necessarily. So maybe just a bit more uh concrete than on on the question with regards uh to competition. Uh there there's this uh chart here of crypto cards and there's basically by categorization of bas categorization basis modes. We've got perks and incentive programs, speed and UX advantages, geographic or regional

lockins, infrastructure or white label, network effects, regulatory licensing, uh regulatory licensing advantage, exchange platform integration and privacy niche positioning. Um, and you've kind of got all these different cards from the cast, Crypto.com, Rain, Etherfy, Holy Held, Kaju, Metamas, Arjent, Cipher, Tuyo, there's 30 of them now. Um, I know I just laid out a lot of categories here, but like whi what is the edge and the core insight behind Crack Card that other crypto cards aren't solving? Like why do we need another crypto card right here right now? Um, you know, is it cashback? Is it multi-asset? Is it rewards? What is it

in these kind of like categorizations that you feel that you guys have a sign a significant advantage in? >> Yeah. So, first, the rewards are industryleading. So, we're it's a Europe and UK card. When we bring the US card to market, it will also have some of the highest rewards out there. That's first. Second, what makes it really unique is that you can store your value in anything and spend it uh just the same way you would local fiat. That's something that uh you you just can't can't do easily in this world today. Um, so bringing all those assets to market, uh, is something that's really important. Again, as a Canadian, I hate holding Canadian dollars. I'd much

rather hold USG and earn my 4% yield. Uh, I can do that just very, very simply with the crack card. I never have to worry about it. I still get the yield as if I had an American bank account. And I also get to spend it in the same way while being in Canada. Um, a lot of my European friends uh like to hold US dollars as well. Some of them like to hold Bitcoin and spend from Bitcoin. All of those are available with the crack card very easily and simply and you can just choose your order. You can just pick which which uh which assets you want to spend from first within your account. So for me that's the big differentiator but absolutely important that we offer yields sorry rewards that are at the uh at the same level or higher as anyone else on the market and

that that 1% we have in Europe and the UK is and we'll bring a card you know with the similar with a with the percentage that would make sense for the US when we launch that uh over the coming months >> and is 1% not low for cash back you're saying >> it's not in Europe so we're only in Europe and the UK right now one of the weird quirks about cards is that uh if you're a US card holder uh you're used to probably things like >> three to four%. Uh expect the crack card in the US to have that. The interchange fees uh which fund those things are different in the US versus Europe and the UK. We're actually capped in Europe and the UK um at a much lower level. So 1% while it sounds quite a bit lower is actually uh

uh market leading within the UK and and Europe as well. So, uh, that's the percentage we have there. We'll probably continue to find ways to grow it over time. And then when we launch in the US over the coming months, uh, expect to see something, yeah, much closer to that 4%. >> Yeah, it makes sense because there's lower fees on the card transactions. Over in Europe, uh, there's lower cash back, but, you know, over in the US, higher fees, higher cash back. It kind of balances out. I I I wanted to ask about how we might see having multiple products here all under one roof. uh tends to create some network effects and I and I can sort of picture like some different reward

mechanisms like having X stocks and uh crack card and you know this this on the crack money app you know almost imagine like you know rewarding people with X stocks right if they want to do almost like an acorns like used to do where you invest a little bit at a time uh and you kind of roll over you round up your card transactions into a stock in this case a tokenized stock. What are some of the network effects or synergies between products in the Kraken stack that you could see coming up uh as a result of integrating these?

>> Yeah. So, it all starts from that Kraken platform that I started originally. We have the safest place to store your crypto um with 400 500 600 now assets under the hood uh and more coming with X stocks growing each and every day. uh that then allows us to take the so if you can move those assets uh from anything to anything. You can move them in and out of fiat in 100 plus countries and you can access uh you can access them within an app like the Crack app or in the Kraken app. We have lots of things that we can do. First, you can spend from all of them out of the box right away. You can have the app. You don't have to go country by country to

get a banking license because we have the licenses that we can use in countries around the world. The Crack app is in 100 plus countries right at this individual moment. You can sign up for any of them. And then yeah, lots of different pieces. So, we're going to play with um those kind of rewards. We'll probably play with accounts for kids over time, the ability for them to stack sats or stack stocks uh and and learn how to save over time. We'll talk about um uh launching different kind of reward mechanisms. Right now we have crackbacks which every time you send or receive a uh once a day every time you if you send and receive uh from someone you'll get a random crypto token. So we'll offer those continue to offer

those. Just lots more coming over time. I don't have a I think we're we're listening to users. We're trying to expand thoughtfully for what they want. But just the fact that out of the box you get equities and crypto and stable coins and fiat and seven plus currencies all available to you uh in 100 plus countries I think is something that's really special. >> Yeah, I mean Mark everyone's excited for Kraken. Um you got a big year ahead. You've got uh rumors of IPOs. You've got this Inc. uh product that has came out and started to really kind of be popular. We've got a new purp there.

NATO, people are excited about that. People are rumoring Kraken tokens, Kraken uh stock. What is it like internally right now? How are you guys preparing for 2026? How's the how's the kind of energy in the culture? >> Yeah, we're um the opportunities are endless. We have so much to do and so every day uh just feels like we get we're behind at the same time. Um we're building so much. We're excited about all the areas we're investing in. We've got a brand new uh app called Inky, which is a more gamified trading experience coming out today. Uh so, lots and lots of things coming out uh every single day. We're really really excited

about everything that we can do, but also really um focused on continuing to build the best darn uh experiences we can for users. So, so pumped about everything that we've got going on. way uh uh and just like a huge responsibility on our shoulders to keep building all the things that we want to build for consumers around the world. >> Inky heard it here first. Um Mark, when when you're ready to, you know, take it easy, have some fun, and kind of zoom out from the crypto world, what what what do you do? What do you when you kind of step out of the the crypto echo chamber, what what do you like to do to to have some fun?

>> Uh who has time for fun? No. To be honest [laughter] >> no. Uh everything we're doing is fun. So um I I flip from one app to the other. Actually, what do I do in the evening? I scroll through the Kraken app or the Kraken Pro app and I try and find bugs. So that's what keeps me busy uh 247 nowadays. And um uh but that's that's totally cool. >> I love it. I love it. >> Awesome. A fellow Canadian Marcus, pleasure to have you on the show today, man. Thank you for joining us. Uh congrats on the Crack app. Congrats on the success. It's really been awesome to have a renewed regulatory presence in the states allowing for, as they would call it, innovation exemptions. Um, and I think that Kraken is a perfect example of, you know, just sticking through the

the craziness from the regimes and and being able to just be nimble enough and survive. So, uh, it's full-on cockroach mode here in, uh, survival city in crypto, while at the same time, it's a tokenization mania, Wolf of Wall Street's New York City. I'm not e selling uh vibes happening as well. So, um you're at you're you're at the forefront, Mark. Um so, man, keep it up. >> Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me, guys. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you, Mark. We'll see you next time. >> Alrighty, man. Fun segment there. Um >> I'm not I think selling, but you did sell.

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Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. Bada bing, bada boom. Um, fun stream, man. I'm uh recovered from Art Basle. Fully ready to get back to it. Two weeks to holidays. If I mean, it takes It's like two weeks to holidays, but it's like it feels like less. >> How high does the ball bounce? >> I don't know, but I'm not really even worried about it, man. That's the best thing ever. I don't even care. Like, I got I'm so long. We have so many venture bags and if it goes up I'm happy. If it goes down I'm happy. It's good man. Good

place to be. >> I think I think that is uh that's a great place to be. >> But it is looking pretty it looks good but then you look at the weeklies and you're like okay long way to go. >> Um it's pretty uncertain out there. So it's a good place to be. Uh take some long-term convicted bets. Don't don't do anything too uh >> too uh uh too much in the short term. Just stay cozy. >> Yeah, I mean I think people will appreciate a nice little balance. People have been kind of yelling back and forth at each other on the timeline for a while. Um

yeah, man. I mean Tom Lee just bought a ton more um another $400 million worth. uh people are going to start calling for alltime highs. We'll see, man. It'll be interesting. >> Hyperlid underperformance is something to keep an eye on. >> I think it's a combination of unlocks of uh new perks coming out. Um but these things tend to these things tend to work themselves out in a way. >> How do you mean >> like oh they're it's underperforming and then all of a sudden the DAT starts buying a million dollars over like a a week. So, it's like these things tend to work themselves out, but it's also underperforming because it's overperformed so or outperformed for so long right?

>> It's like kind of like they, you know. >> So, but yeah, man. Um, guys, great stream today. We'll see you guys tomorrow. We got a full slate this week. Uh, thanks for watching Rollup TV. Big vibes. >> We'll see you next time. >> I got my Emmy in me still. See you later, guys. [music]