Why Ethereum and Solana can both win with institutions

Transcript

I think we can comfortably see ETH approach new all-time highs within the next couple years. I think that Solana has the capacity to go through the roof if it gets the right density of transaction volume and the right institutional partners. >> Institutions have never been more bullish on crypto, but price and sentiment haven't been this bad since FTX. What are the institutions building? Why is it so bullish? And what do investors need to know to make it through this bear market? Hello and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that when sailors start crashing out during interviews, we might finally be near the bottom. I'm your host John Gillan, and today we are joined by Nick Roberts Huntley. Nick is the founder and CEO of Blueprint Finance, a DeFi infrastructure company behind protocols like Concrete on

Ethereum and Glow on Solana. Dr. Nick is going to share a ton of institutional alpha with us today. So, if that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe. Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it. Before we jump in, if you want to see exactly what our analysts here at Milk Road are buying, selling, and researching in real time, Milk Road Pro is 33% off this week only. Check out the link in the show notes to come join our community. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitget Stocks 2.0 with real liquidity, real dividends, and securitize the regulated rails for tokenization. And without further ado, welcome back to the Milk Road Show. Nick, how are you, sir?

>> Well, thank you. How are you? >> I'm doing really well. And Nick, I I think it's really interesting your your business you're building on both Solana and Ethereum. And so, I thought a good place to start this conversation would be a discussion with Solana and Ethereum. Uh what's your current outlook on ETH and SOL here? What is the state of the crypto market for these crypto majors that they're facing some headwinds, but still have some legs? Like, what's your outlook on ETH and SOL here? >> Yeah, I mean, I think as far as Ethereum and Solana are considered, you've got two foundations which are kind of like a tale of two cities, where Ethereum has largely been, you know, a very technical, almost academically driven, and kind of build best-in-class products which have, you know, a huge amount of the core blockchain principles in situ,

and hope that people will build great businesses on top of that kind of rail and infrastructure that they provide in a very, you know, kind of tier one A network. The other side, you have Solana, who I think are probably the, as a foundation and from a leadership perspective, I think probably the strongest business operators as far as a network is considered. And so, I think we've had a tale of Solana understanding how to run a fantastic network as a business, where the technology works, and it has as such caught the momentum of different phases in the crypto cycle, like meme coins when they were so prolific on Solana. And Ethereum, which has captured a lot of the traditional, almost kind of dogmatic belief in blockchain, in crypto as a financial system, or as an application, like as a

layer for applications to be built upon and businesses. I think that's not going to change anytime soon. I know there's a lot of chatter about change at the Ethereum Foundation coming up. I'm still bullish both of them. I think when you look at the absolute value of those networks, there's still a huge amount of room to grow. Um, if we believe in digital assets and blockchain over the next decade or so, I think probably given my current job and and title, I'm fairly fairly long horizon on, and I assume you are, too. >> [snorts] >> Yeah, I think that's a helpful perspective, and like, you know, we're still early days in this industry. The industry's going to grow, the the pie to to fight over the market share, the digital market's going to grow, and different different blockchain ecosystems can can thrive in those environments. Do you think that there is

room for both of these organizations and these ecosystems to succeed and thrive long term, and do you think they're going to get more and more siloed into sort of these different niches that they've established over time, or do you think that's going to evolve, too? >> I think we're yet to see what widespread adoption and success looks like as far as networks are concerned. The question that I could pose it back is like, well, shouldn't Microsoft and Oracle exist at the same time? Should HP and Dell exist at the same time. Um if the market is large enough to support those types of outcomes, the players will exist.

The question we're really asking is how big can this market be? And I think this shift into looking at bigger pools of capital, more sophisticated actors with a longer duration horizon is exactly what we need. I think historically we've been in a world of relatively short duration views in crypto, you know, kind of the slightly more casino-esque risk-on gambling type of behavior. And the question is can we re-steer the ship into something that is more durable, more reliable, and gets big pockets of capital with sophistication requirements around accounting and reporting, as well as regulatory clarity, to start investing on a multi-year horizon, not a multi-month horizon, which is kind of the more typical turn of trend. If that

happens, we're in a great spot, but we do need to start nailing those things in, and there are some great companies starting to push towards that. >> One thing we've all learned over the years is that investing is easier when you're not doing it alone. Our analysts have called AI stock winners like Micron, Nevius, and Bloom Energy early, as well as crypto winners like Hyperliquid and Lighter. But honestly, that's only half the value. The real benefit is seeing every investment as it happens, understanding the thesis and research behind it, and having a team of five analysts researching the markets every single day. Milk Road Pro is 33% off this week only. Check it out at the link below. Well, I want to talk about your company and how you guys are pushing towards that, but first I'd like to hear your thoughts on the strategy

that these two ecosystems have taken to get towards that end, right? Like institutional adoption is something I've heard being prioritized from both Ethereum and Solana, but I think they're both taking different tracks to get there. And I want to hear your thoughts on what those different paths are, and and what you're seeing in terms of success on on on achieving that goal. >> Yeah, I mean I think it's interesting to see the sheer end of large businesses that exist on Ethereum is greater than on Solana. I think we would largely agree with that. I think from that perspective, you then look at the capabilities to have, you know, ancillary or complementary networks in the form of layer twos, whether that be base or then you hood chain or even Arbitrum, which, you know, had a huge prolific run and is finding its feet.

We are starting to see an ecosystem of specific function chains or specific partner chains sit around ETH, which I think adds a lot of weight to how you can weirdly step over the risk curve for institutions. There's a mental hurdle for institutions who want to use blockchain and embed it within their systems to have more control and dominion and ownership over those layer twos and those specific networks for their specific business use case. The argument can be that with gas prices coming down so dramatically in either one, do you need an L2? That's a whole another debate to go through on another day.

Um but I think that actually being able to almost containerize the L2 for a specific institutional use case creates a sense of safety and trust in blockchain that I don't necessarily think is as easily replicable over on Solana, which is why you see that strategy of Ethereum trying to build a fantastic foundation and the right tools and systems and standards so that people can build a top it really readily. And then on the other side with Solana, you actually see the foundation really pushing forward the right initiatives to attract institutions and provide those partnerships. So, it's a slightly more distributed, as you would imagine with Ethereum, uh kind of approach to giving the right tools and standards for institutions to come on board. And then with Solana, it's a little bit more

uh thematic, um narrative-driven, pursuing particular targets and activities, which both can succeed and good that they're actually going after different ways into the market. They could both equally win. >> Do you think we will see new all-time highs in ETH and Solana, and which one do you think is going to outperform in the next bull run? >> Yeah, I mean, for both of our bags, I hope so. Um >> [laughter] >> so, that's that's the first thing. Yeah, I I I think the prices at the moment I don't think are anywhere near indicative of what the terminal value of these ecosystems are going to be. Um is the next bull run kind of the final up, you know, violent upward thrash and then we kind of grind and we look a little bit more like equities. Uh maybe.

Standard rhetoric is that we all want one more time. We all want 2021 to come back and we'll all sell at the right time now. I I think we can comfortably see ETH approach new all-time highs within the next couple years. Very comfortably. I think that Solana has the capacity to go through the roof if it gets the right density of transaction volume and the right institutional partners. Again, it's this different approach. Will people condense and coalesce on building applications that have complementary activities and build depth and flow within ETH 1 and it's subject networks and can Solana just drive massive throughput through a

single network. Both can be true. Um and I think both would lead to significant all-time highs for both assets. Obviously not financial advice, but that would be my gut take. >> I really appreciate your thoughts on this, Nick. As somebody who's actively building in both of these ecosystems, I think it's really interesting to hear the perspective. Uh so, thank you for sharing that. Uh I want to pivot a little bit towards this institutional momentum, which I've heard you talking about a lot and we've covered a lot on this show as well. Um but institutions have never been more bullish on crypto and and coming into digital assets with real commitments, real capital, real resources, and yet price hasn't responded to this yet really in a meaningful way. Um what are you seeing happen here and when are we going to start seeing some of this institutional

adoption begin to impact these prices? >> Yeah, look, the way in which digital assets are getting valued and priced now is more efficient than it used to be. So, if you even look at kind of crypto Twitter or social feeds and and and posts. People are really looking at how much revenue is a network making on a daily basis. And then so if we abstract ourselves away from it a little bit and say, "Well, what does it really meant so far for institutional adoption?" BlackRock's buying a bunch of Bitcoin. People are now able to hold stable coins and use stable coins. There is institutional thoroughfare created. So, there are paths for institutions to use crypto actively in their business. There are capabilities to hold Bitcoin, ETH, other kind of blue chip assets on their

balance sheet without too much friction. There are good institutional infrastructure players who are starting to provide the rails for those. And of course, now we're starting to see this massive proliferation of tokenized equities, real world assets, private credit, everything coming on chain. We're in this phase of building up to the base so that you can start to create the flow. And just having those assets exist doesn't actually [clears throat] drive any meaningful price action in my opinion. So, what I'm seeing is what I kind of expect. The real question and the real inflection point on price action is going to come when people start putting that asset to work in whatever capacity, but we're not seeing the flow, we're not seeing the revenues generated by the networks, and then you have that trickle down effect where if a network's busy,

you know, slippage, settlement, you know, flows just go through the roof and everybody starts to eat a little bit more, there's more fat in the system, inefficiency breeds opportunity, you get more speculative behavior, create more volatility, and you start to move up. Of course, a little bit of a sawtooth because it's a thinner asset class, but you know, it will start to move when people start to get busy. >> Okay. So, that economic activity starts to creates this sort of like virtuous cycle and that just drives the whole ecosystem. That makes sense there. I I I want to get your thoughts on something. I've heard you commenting on You've said that a lot of what the institutions are building now is going to end up being long-term structurally bullish and give crypto like a bullish momentum beyond just the cycle to cycle speculation.

Could you talk a little bit about what that means in practice and what you're seeing there that that gives you that longer-term bullish structural outlook? >> I think there are the history of it is that 4-5 years ago a lot of institutions were publicly net negative on the utility of digital assets in their current form. Whether they're right or wrong is semantics. What's happened in the last 3 to 4 years is a bit of a turnstile where they've come back and said actually the fundamental software makes sense. And rather than having to reinvent our back office, our settlement procedures, our liquidity access, our ability to transfer, you know, out of hours, even look at the fantastic announcement, I think last night from Swift about a pilot blockchain coming through for global payments.

That's an like an extraordinary shift in how we think about global payments using blockchain. Because of that there has been this hardening phase where groups have understood the underlying technology. And when you compare, you know, apples to oranges in terms of what blockchain can do versus traditional traditional traditional financial rails, there is a very, very clear amount of daylight between the benefits from a cost and operational dependency perspective from a distributed ledger versus some of the more opaque, manual, and very constrained functions of traditional finance back office.

We do need regulatory clarity. Um that seems like it might be coming. Fingers crossed, we'll see. Obviously a big month ahead for us. But that underlying principle adoption of the technology is what starts to filter up to what we would call native activity on chain. >> All right. I really appreciate your thoughts on this and I think a lot of people have been watching this institutional adoption happen. Um I'm curious your your company's role in this. Blueprint Finance is a DeFi infrastructure company at at a high level, but what does that mean? Walk us through how how you think about your business, your role in this transition and adoption of digital assets, and what that looks like.

>> I think, you know, DeFi infrastructure company, what does it mean? Sounds cool, what does it actually do? The way we think about ourselves is fully vertically integrated tools and services for what we would call sophisticated long-term capital who is either already a participant in crypto or is looking to kind of dip their foot in the ocean in a meaningful way without any of the headaches. So, what we provide on the Ethereum side, as well as pretty mimicked on Solana side, vaults, which everybody talks about, but we think of a relatively simple product, effectively a vessel to receive particular assets that then can be distributed, but it serves as a wonderful accounting platform, so you

can attest to both the activity of the deposits, but also the performance of those over time, and we pride ourselves on pretty much being best in class as far as accounting goes within our kind of competitive landscape. The second piece then is that we provide a series of debt management tools. So, how do you take those assets, generate working capital um from the deposits into the vault, and then finally we provide an execution framework. So, how do you put those assets to work, whether that be in RWA opportunities, whether that be fixed-term credit facilities, on-chain protocols, yield bearing opportunities from, you know, what we would traditionally call farming activity back in 2020 and 2021, but how do you make those assets productive, and then we handle all of that roll up back to the depositor. Um we have a series of

integrations with some slightly more large store, but you know, established institutions coming online at the moment, which is exciting for us, but realistically, if you have idle assets in the form of digital assets wanting to get to work and wanting to be productive, Blueprint provides you everything from top to bottom. >> Okay, so Blueprint Finance is helping institutions put their digital assets to work in a way that has institutional grade security and compliance, and then allows them to kind of participate in this ecosystem. I want to ask you about the specifics of this.

One of the companies you're building on or protocols you're working with on Ethereum, Concrete, announced a partnership with BitGo on June 2nd, which I think is just a little over a month ago, and this is BitGo is a publicly traded infrastructure company. They do a lot of custody work with with clients there, and this is a yield program that you guys have done with them. Can you just tell us a little bit about the product that you've actually launched here, what this partnership with BitGo looks like, and what you're excited about about this? >> Yeah. Of course. I mean, one of the things we're most excited about that we've managed to get going since we launched the company and we're very grateful for BitGo and their partnership and advocacy for what we're doing there.

Yeah, quick kind of flash of the details. BitGo, obviously, as you mentioned, kind of one of the bellwether companies of crypto, publicly traded, chartered banking license, over a hundred billion dollars of assets in their custody. The question is, though, like how many of those assets are necessarily productive? And per my comment about what we do, as we take these somewhat idle capacity assets and make them productive, make them yield generating in a way that meets accounting standards, reporting standards, operational security standards. That's really where we pride ourselves as being differentiated from the rest of the market.

And so, what we provide BitGo customers now is the capabilities to commit their assets within the qualified custodian to a Concrete yield product. They stay within the qualified custodian, which is really important because some DAOs, foundations, investment professionals, investment firms, the whole slew of customers that BitGo services may not either want or be able to, from a regulatory perspective, allocate those assets traditionally on chain. They may not be allowed to, quote unquote, put them to work in the way in which we would typically do to maximize rate of return.

They also may just have a general security risk concern. They may just worry about what does it look like to put assets on chain? And finally, it may just not be a core competency of theirs to put those assets to work. So, with us, what you could do is let's say you have a million dollars of Bitcoin within BitGo, you could commit it to Concrete and BitGo's partnership. From there, that asset is, you know, in kind of not perfect nomenclature, but um escrowed in a shared environment where we then mint a token on chain, an ERC-20 token on ETH 1, for example, which represents your Bitcoin. So, we would mint what we call BTCCX, which is custodied Bitcoin, on ETH 1, and then take it to a money

market that we work with. You can think of examples of those would be a Morpho or a Cap or a Dollar Might or an Euler. Um we would take those assets there, borrow stables against that effective representation of the assets within qualified custo- custody, and run those stables on yield bearing opportunities. We would outwork the cost of capital from the money market and return the yield back to the customer within BitGo. Meaning that for a BitGo customer, your funds stay within the qualified custodian environment.

For a money market, they receive deposits representative of the value of all of the Bitcoin that is in the qualified custodian. So, the money market receives a million dollars of TVL, and we generate, let's say, half a million dollars of borrow against that. So, revenue for the money market, TVL for the money market, security and principal protection for the QC customer, and then we go and put that money to work in our kind of traditional safe and standard way. >> Okay, so I I hear you describing how this works, and what I'm hearing is that there are many billions of dollars that are held at this qualified custodian BitGo that you're trying to unlock and, you know, let loose on DeFi in a compliant and secure way without moving those assets out of that custody

partner. Um who Who clients that you have in mind for this? Uh and and what's the need in the market you're trying to meet? Are you seeing a lot of demand from people who want to unlock these idle assets and get them more involved in DeFi and and what does that look like? >> Yeah, we've been very surprised pleasantly by the amount of appetite for this product. Um there's more than 10 10 figures of capital that we're quoting right now in terms of commitment to this. So that comes with its own problems in a in a market which is a little thin and the chain isn't that busy.

So creating places for that to to go is a challenge, but and it takes time. You know, institutional deals involve a hell of a lot of legal work, paperwork, aligning all the right parties. It just moves a little bit more slowly, which is why it I think there is this cognitive dissonance between the amount of noise and chatter about institutional adoption in crypto and the actual activation or activity that's happening. We're so used to the speed and kind of feedback loops that we get in crypto and digital assets as participants within the market. We forget there's a world outside of it and it doesn't move as quickly as we do and it's not on 24/7.

And so that does mean that these things take a little longer than you anticipate, but yeah, as you mentioned, we announced the partnership about a month ago and we're kind of quoting 10 figures of capital to commit before the end of the year for this. >> Real world assets like funds, treasuries, and private credit are still running on rails built decades ago. Gated, paperwork heavy, slow to settle. Everyone's talking about tokenizing them, but far fewer can actually do it and do it without cutting regulatory corners. Securitize can. It's the SEC regulated infrastructure bringing real world assets on chain. Nine years in, native tokenization not wrapped, backed by BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, and Cathie Wood's Ark Invest and chosen by the New York Stock Exchange, VanEck, BNY, and Apollo to do it at scale. It's the

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>> Yeah, there's that It's been a lot of demand. That's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. Nick, there are a lot of different ways to get yield in digital assets. It's like one of the biggest products that that digital assets has brought to the market is some form of DeFi. How do you think about the differentiating value proposition of what you guys are offering here versus other opportunities and other other competitors who like, you know, legacy finance, TradFi, that are that are trying to bring different kinds of products like this to market. How How do you think about that and what what's the story you tell to differentiate this offering? >> I think a lot of traditional finance partners are doing a wonderful job in bring bringing exposure to traditional participants to a particular fund instrument, a private credit vehicle, a

loan book, whatever that might be and tokenizing that and and putting it on chain. I think we're seeing a lot of real estate activity, which we're really excited to be a participant in as well. Now, the difference here is that that is an opportunity to effectively purchase that rate of return and but we actually provide the liquidity to purchase that opportunity. And so, it's kind of two seas coming together where I think a lot of traditional finance groups are finding operational efficiency and improvement in performance by tokenizing and or pushing these assets and these opportunities on chain, who's buying them? And your you know, historical role bit participant from maybe 2023 is not necessarily that excited about buying a

9% 12-month hold private credit facility. But, the people that are are often the types of customers we're talking to, which are the ones who hold their assets naturally within a qualified custodian and think about that longer-term longer-duration expectation. And, as I always say, if it was so easy to make 25% on my money year-over-year, I would be retired many times over. And, so I think we are starting to see like what that compression is to what is a meaningful um rate of return, but also taking on a reasonable amount of risk. >> Nick, I've heard a lot of people talking about vaults in some form or another.

And, I think that a lot of people in retail are still not quite familiar with what this is. We know what a liquidity pool is, we know what an ETP is, but what is a vault? What is this product a vault? Do you consider it that? And, why are institutions so excited about vaults as a way to get exposure to digital assets? >> Yeah. Uh vaults have been all the rage and a hot topic of discussion for, you know, the better part of probably 18 months now. If I say something very plainly, I actually think vaults themselves should remain pretty boring and very simple. What we really care about is the topography above it and below it, where kind of the elegance and the magic happens. And, a lot of that is relatively proprietary. Some of it is actually off-chain code, which is not necess- you know, is a slightly

antithetical piece to how most people in DeFi will want to build, but it is just not reasonable or feasible sometimes to be able to provide what you would consider hedge fund and or investment banking reporting standards with it all being on chain, while maintaining an effective cost. And so it's what goes on and around the vault that matters um to us more so than the vault itself. And, we use an ERC-4626 standard, which is kind of the ubiquitously accepted um blue chip for for for most vaults that are being distributed across DeFi and digital assets.

A vault is a very, very simple thing. It is a vessel, a deposit if you will. Operates somewhat like a savings account that you would get within a bank. Deposit your assets in. Some can take just one asset, some can take multiple assets. There's a whole slew of accounting complications that happen if you take in multiple assets. Some vault providers, not us, will take in multiple assets and then swap them to one on the back, which means there's something called impermanent loss that is now available to those who have been swapped into an asset they didn't necessarily own before. The other component then is what happens next? Well, the vault really doesn't do an awful lot other than effectively receive and attest to the performance of the assets that have

been passing through it. But the really, really important piece and where we spend a lot of time designing that new features and functions is the vault share, which is effectively your receipt. So, if you put one ETH into our concrete vault, you will get a concrete ETH token back. That token isn't Ethereum itself, it isn't necessarily something that is a net new asset, it is something that simply represents the right to redeem that one Ethereum that you deposited, plus any yield that has accrued during the time with which you've been a depositor.

So, you can think about it as a little bit of a coupon that you can redeem at some future date. Why is that really interesting? Well, there are some interesting tax implications which we're exploring and working with some institutions on and the fact that that asset doesn't necessarily have any underlying value, but has a right to redeem later on. The other component is it itself, kind of think about it like a paper mortgage, is backed by an underlying asset which is being productive. So, I could sell you that share. I could also borrow against it again. So, we're starting to find some really interesting areas on that top surface level that we're investing heavily in to design ways in which people can borrow against their vault shares, can trade those

vault shares, and and optimize tax. So, to ask your question, vault is simple, it's what they allow you to do either side of it that really matters. >> Okay, well, let's talk about what you do once you're allowed to do it. So, to to kind of follow the line on this, I have an asset with the qualified custodian partner that I want to leave in cold storage, but that I want to unlock and and get some power out of on in in lending. So, I can deposit it in your vault, I get a receipt, then you take my asset, you go turn it into stable coins. At that point, I'm curious what happens because as you said, you've got a lot of demand for this, you've got a lot of capital. Finding places in DeFi to deploy stable coins is you know, a risk management game. How do you go about

finding opportunities that meet your compliance standards, that you think are where the risk is worth the reward, and you're just like yeah, where where are you looking right now? Are you just like dropping all this onto Aave? Like, what what what happens at that point? >> No, I think what we really care about is if you're going to trust us with your capital, you better be doing something that's worthwhile. Because I wouldn't want to just be a pass-through for you to get exposure to Aave. Aave is incredible protocol, fantastic people there. You know, has for a long time been considered {quote} {unquote} the the risk-free rate in DeFi, right? But, there are similar opportunities like that, you know, whether it be Morpho or Euler or Dolomite. Insert great money markets, the guys at Fluid are doing great work as well.

I think the question here is like what do we do that is extra or provides you more capability without more headaches. Two questions you asked there kind of well, there's two questions in what you asked. One is how do you put a few hundred million dollars to work effectively in DeFi right now, and the other one is like how do you basically out-earn what could be considered the risk-free rate on Aave without taking on too much risk. It's well-known the further you go up the risk curve, typically the higher the potential rate of return. Our customers and our strategies, very simply, focus on principal protection. So, how do I not lose your Ethereum for you based on taking too much risk? And how do I move you up the rate of return curve away

from something like a risk-free rate, quote-unquote, or let's just use money markets as an example. So, we think 4 to 5 and 1/2% is kind of something that you can do without taking too much headache on. So, our goal is how do we get stablecoins up towards that 8, 9, 10% consistently without earning or taking on too much risk. Not an easy job to do. A lot of that comes from security analysis with the products that we work with, engagement, due diligence on smart contracts, um understanding um typically like how the rate is generated from their side, uh whether it's all incentives uh or whether it's real cash

flows is obviously very important to us. Um airdrops are obviously not the great way to promise consistent rates of return, so we try and stay clear of a lot of that activity. The other side of it is because we do have we're very fortunate to have sticky capital within our platform um we can typically work to do some slightly longer duration um deals, which effectively starts to put us on a bit of a preference stack. And I think preferred tranches and preferred stacks uh are soon to start blossoming across DeFi more broadly when you see groups like us start to say, "Hey, we have a potential to allocate a hundred million dollars here into this opportunity. Can you explain to us what's going on? And if we do fix that

for a certain duration, which may align with that group's business uh interests that they need milestones, they want to generate cash flow, whatever it might be, or they have an opportunity to fill, we'd like to earn a little bit more." So, our ability to condense all of that capital into our vault layer makes us more powerful in finding those yield opportunities for our depositors. So, it's kind of coalescing all that capital into a small group of buckets, converting it into stable coins, makes us a very, very powerful firehose for liquidity across DeFi, and then all of our depositors are able to benefit from that.

>> Yeah, Nick, I did an interview on Monday with Joe Shalom and Joe Lubin, who's a co-founder of Ethereum, and Joe Shalom is the CEO of Sharplink, and they said something similar, which is that because they have not permanent capital, but closer, longer duration capital, they can get favorable opportunities in DeFi. That it's very rare that anybody can offer that kind of stability in DeFi. So, it makes a lot of sense what you're describing there, and it's helpful to understand sort of like where that yield and that alpha comes from because, you know, historically people in crypto, we've been a little nervous when people are outperforming on yield. So, I I appreciate the transparency on that.

That's really helpful. I want to get your thoughts on who are the winners and the losers as vaults and as institutions start to come into DeFi, because I think that a lot of people are wondering where does the value accrue, you know, what falls by the wayside, what, you know, goes, you know, 10 100x here. Just in your mind right now, who are the winners and losers? Is it the L1s? Is it the DeFi protocols? Is it the institutions themselves? How do you think about all that? >> Yeah, I mean, sadly I will tell you that the 100x's [clears throat] will be fewer and further between as the market gets larger and more efficient. There won't be that many more cash cats that will happen over the the next couple of years, I I don't think. Um >> It's disturbing to me that both of us

know what that is. I hope our audience doesn't. So, >> [laughter] >> I know. I know. But that's why that's why you trust us to look after your money so that we we we do make sure that we know those things are going on and why they have. Look, I I think that the biggest question right now, and you you see a lot of chatter about it, is, you know, Vanguard's hiring a new head of digital assets and personal wealth. BlackRock's hiring this. Blackstone's hiring this. Millennium, you know, all of these desks are investing in talent, which groups don't typically do unless they have a long view on this.

And a lot of those, you know, trillion-dollar, multi-hundred-billion-dollar asset groups are figuring out what their long-term horizon is within digital assets. And I don't think we yet know how much of the stack they want to own. My guess and our bet is that it would be unreasonable for them to take on too much risk day one, and they should divest that onto groups like us to handle a lot of the piping, a lot of the flow management, and a lot of the reporting because we are effectively more native to the ecosystem.

The question is after, you know, hopefully we've scaled many, many folds over from where we are right now, do they come and try and take our breakfast as well? I think I'm a big believer and I got into this market based on the doctrine of being able to have open and free financial markets, but I came from a very institutional financial background, obviously previously being at Point 72. My gut take is that for the time being, DeFi and crypto will see its most significant uptick based on its ability to augment traditional finance practices and reduced costs for back office.

And whether that be to do with private credit, whether that be to do with overnight liquidity facilities, weekend trading markets, how does DeFi and digital assets become a release valve or a new market window for traditional behaviors? And for a long time, we've lacked the capability to draw those institutional professionals into the space because they don't want to trade cash cat. They would love to trade a credit facility or speculate on, you know, interest rate derivatives. But we don't provide them that facility, and I think that's why something like hyperliquid has really excelled. It's provided people a familiar experience across a single plane.

>> Nick, I think it's helpful and I I do think it's going to be interesting to see how it all how all of this plays out and I like that you frame it like this is my gut feeling because we're all still figuring this out and it looks different day-to-day, week-to-week. Nick Roberts Huntley, thank you so much for coming on the Milk Road Show and telling us about Blueprint Finance, what you're building in vaults, and just sharing your thoughts on the ecosystem. You're you're in the trenches every day, in the real trenches, um building and and building cool things in this ecosystem. So, thanks for coming on the Milk Road Show. Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online? >> Please feel free to connect with us on X. You can follow me as well. My DMs are always open. Um please like we have an

open connection forum, Discord, usual channels. We have a fantastic team happy to answer any questions. And if you're an institution who's interested in working with us, we have a full enterprise flow, um you know, through our website, register, we'll get back to you within 48 hours to engage and give you a scope of our services. >> Thanks so much for being here, Nick. I hope we can have you back to talk again soon. >> Thanks so much, man. Thanks for having me again. >> And thank you all for joining us. I hope you all learned something today. So, until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all in the next episode of the Milk Road Show. Thanks for being here, everyone. Bye. Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're [music] trading each event? Subscribe to our channel and join the Milk Road daily

and pro newsletters and start investing like the top [music] 1%. This show is for educational purposes only. Nothing we say is financial advice. Investing is risky. Never invest more than you can afford to lose.