From Assets to Markets: How Value Moves on Open Rails

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1. 0:00

   All right, it's a good first fireside there. Good first panel. Give it up for uh our next guests. We've got Hunter and Matt. There we go. Oh, yeah. We're in Miami. Haven't had coffee all year, but I had a Cuban coffee this morning because we're in Miami. Hunter's got his coffee right here with us. Um guys, I'm excited for this one. We've had both of you guys on the rollup show talking about things from all spectrums, assets, agents, and the like.

2. 0:38

   Why don't we start by talking about how agents and assets are coming together? You know, near obviously representing the agent side of things, bit wise representing the assets. Um, why don't we start broad? How do you foresee the most critical infrastructure becoming agent agentic? How how do you foresee uh the billions of dollars at Bitwise becoming agentic? And then we'll approach it from the from the agent side as well.

3. 1:10

   It's awesome to be with all of you and uh and thank you thank you to uh to Near for such a such a fantastic event in space. Um maybe I'll share an anecdote that's not my anecdote, but uh I heard um at a at a dinner last night uh from somebody I was with. Um he's been tinkering with um with Open Claw, which he's running on his mobile device. Um and um he was curious to see what it could do. Uh so he asked it to create a

4. 1:35

   wallet, created a wallet. Uh he asked to share the address, he sent it some stable coins, and then he asked it a pretty open-ended thing. Um he said, "How can you make me money?" and it came back with a list of something like 18 dexes and a certain number of vaults and the prediction markets could trade and he said go find a way to make me money on prediction markets and it uh it made him a few hundred.

5. 2:04

   Um I think that that might be the type of anecdote that is how um agents start to creep into the stories and experiences of investors which is um if public blockchains like Near if applications being built on top wallets um are programmatically interface or usable by other software um and then if that intersects with people being curious about deploying their agents um against opportunities. I think it can

6. 2:36

   happen very fast and I would say that in general I think much of of DeFi and layer 1's and near are already uh interoperable with software and um if the if the sort of idea occurs to more and more people um I think you know when you hear a story like the one I just shared or when you try it yourself um it it doesn't have to be a six-month journey. you just kind of have to have the thought and you kind of have to be in a position of of comfort with um with an agent already to to go get it to do

7. 3:09

   things for you. But it it it can do the many of the things that that an individual can do um in DeFi. So uh so I I think that that may end up being the the inroad versus um more sort of enterprise scale integrations or things things of that sort. and and Matt uh do you see it similarly in the sense that as we move capital onchain agentic not just onchain but we move it uh into an agentic form of onchain commerce. Do

8. 3:41

   you see this happening more kind of grassroots? People taking it into their own hands. They deploy an agent, they say, "Hey, go make me some money." Or do you do you see this more maybe at the enterprise level? I I think Hunter's story the the lesson to take out of that.

9. 3:57

   Blockchains are awful from a UI UX point of view. They are terrible to work with. And you know, we've been in this world for a long time. We've been comfortable with it. I keep having a, you know, desire to go and like weigh the crypto steels that I have, you know, in the safe in the basement just to see like how much like weight is there because it's like that's that's kind of the the the anchor that you're dragging around

10. 4:18

    using these things. So, so to Hunter's story, like that's fantastic. I don't have to touch the blockchain. I don't have to like get my hands on it and the agent can do that. Like that to me is the beautiful exciting thing is that the agent becomes the UI. That's what I interact with.

11. 4:33

    And from a blockchain point of view, I don't have to make it pretty. I have to make it usable, accessible, machine readable, machine accessible. That's much easier to do from the blockchain point of view. And so we we start to take that kind of middleware thing, that problem and challenge that we've had for years now that that is, you know, retarding our our development and our and our adoption. Like that's a fantastic way of of solving that. On the enterprise side, um

12. 4:59

    I don't know. I g into like assets on chain and stuff. I don't know like where the institutions are there. I think if we look at what's really happening, the people that are adopting uh like tokenized equities, it's not the institutions, it's people that don't have access to those assets, right?

13. 5:17

    Institutions already have access to those assets. It's really easy for many of the people in this room. Like we have access to those things in brokerage accounts. So, it's really for the non US market that doesn't have access to that world. that's where we're getting traction and and capability. Um, and in that case, like you're willing to go through the pain because you want access to the markets, you want access to the US markets, and so you're willing to to

14. 5:41

    push through that pain and figure out how to do that, you know, in the world of a blockchain. Maybe the agent when they have the agent there for those folks, it'll become even easier, and you'll see adoption accelerate. Yeah. And and so we're seeing the tokenization super cycle. We're seeing this agentic super cycle. Value is moving onchain. We're it's moving into an agentic world. And so, you know, that is at every single level of the stack.

15. 6:04

    UI, UX, deeper. We've been taking more of an asset ccentric view from some of the people that we've spoken to at the rollup. Uh, you know, let's just start with the UI layer. You know, when it comes to equities, people go to their broker. You know, they execute trades there. Traditionally on chain, it's been a wallet. If everything becomes, hey, call up my agent or, you know, text my agent, like the compression of that entire UI layer feels like it goes away.

16. 6:33

    You know, it's kind of a miracle, right? I mean, for how many how many years people in this room have been in crypto have people said the UI needs to get better or we need to think about uh making it easier for people to interact with the space? Well, then you know the miracle is that um uh LLMs and and uh and agents show up and they say actually you know you can go ahead and skip the the guey and uh and go straight to a um a verbal interface. Um and uh and I

17. 7:00

    think that may you know as I say sort of be a miracle for for crypto which is really f focused on infrastructure capabilities programmability um and uh maybe able to just jump over having to sort of rebuild interfaces like Robin Hood and other fantastic but difficult um consumer interfaces and just plug right into the sort of the the next generation Google search. And and so a conversation that we've had for a long time in in digital assets has been uh fat application thesis or uh fat

18. 7:31

    protocol thesis. There's a whole long winded story that goes into you know this this approach. You know we've we've sort of debunked both of those and we've called if you get close to the customers you have distribution then the moat goes to you and we've called that the fat wallet thesis because typically they've been the closest to the customer but now they're collapsing too. fat wallet thesis also and we all love fat wallets.

19. 7:53

    Nobody's going to be fat. Everyone's thin. So where does where does value acrew? Where's the moat when all of this compresses? It does it all just acrew to these these model companies that have you know the agentic interface or where does value acrue in this open agentic stack? [snorts] It feels like it could be the asset centric layer. But I'm curious to hear your your take on this Robbie. think it I think it you're right

20. 8:18

    with the fat wallet thesis like that if you abstract that out it's whoever's closest to the end user that's where that's where it happens and we saw that with intense if you look at the framework for near intense um it was it was kind of a funny thing to start you know peeling back as I as I joined near and realize okay we have a first party app near.com you can go and uh you can connect almost any wallet in there you can move assets everyone in this room should go should go play with it um

21. 8:44

    it's fantastic we don't have a you know the majority of the usage is not happening through that. So the next thing is we have connection to wallet. So now we're we've gone from direct to consumer to B2B to C, right? We're the first B, the second B is the wallet and then then you hit the consumer and that's another small fraction. The biggest chunk of what we're actually doing there is B2B to B to C. Um and so

22. 9:05

    every time so it's us, we're the first B. Second B is a um you know a a partner that is doing aggregation um and bringing flows together and they have the relationship with the wallet and the wallet has the relationship with the consumer and so what you see is that like the further you are away from that endpoint the further you're away from having that relationship with the end user um the more intermediated you are the less of the the sort of economic rents that you take out of that

23. 9:30

    right so for follow up there is you know for so long we've had this barbell thesis people really like this idea you know it kind of flows to the extremes and then you have the messy middle, but it sounds like everyone in that value pipeline is able to, you know, provide a valuable service. Do you think that there's a messy middle in the the B2B to B to B2B TOC pipeline? I mean, I I don't know that they're necessarily adding value. I I um they just happen to have

24. 9:55

    those relationships and so I think that collapses. Um I think whether just through you know economic pressures or if it's some sort of technological innovation I think we will see that that collapse. Um it's very interesting to me to watch the where the economics start to collect as you look through and watch the transactions. The issuer ono makes money on the way in and the way out. The person that's making the most money in this world is the person that's there facilitating the trades and taking a vig

25. 10:26

    on every trade. like that's where the accumulation is happening. It's very strange to watch the numbers. I was at the Onondo summit in January and uh the president Ian Dabode stood up there and he was talking about some of the metrics. These were shocking to me at that point. So they had launched global markets in September. It was now January, so five monthsish. They had $550 million of uh of tokenized equities. I was like, okay, no big deal.

26. 10:49

    You know, who who really cares? The trading, they traded $9 billion. So that $550 million should turn over 18 times in five months. That's and so there's a there's a vig there's a rent that's happening every time that asset is turning. Compare that to what happens in the US markets. We have about hundred trillion dollars of US equities. They trade about hundred trillion dollars a year. So the US equity market turns over once. Um and this sort of online world

27. 11:14

    where we're not really investing, we're speculating, we're gambling um and we're moving in and out of assets a lot. like there's the those like spots where you can find that you know the economics accumulate in the in the kind of trading part of that world today and and Hunter from your side you know given the ETF landscape and kind of the traditional investor mindset maybe doesn't turn over as much how are you

28. 11:37

    approaching what this you know more online native onchain native you know investor trader is doing with these these funds and these assets um so so Bitwise does a number of things today. Generally, we we serve investors and try to help them do what they want to do. We have ETFs. Um we have um an alpha part of the business. We have uh we provide validation services including validators for near. We do vault curation and we just announced our first tokenized fund today. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you.

29. 12:10

    Very very excited about that. Um so, uh it it sort of depends. uh we have clients who um want to get exposure to near because they think that value will acrue at the the settlement uh and L1 layer. Um uh and then uh we have clients who uh just want to to run strategies through through vaults for instance. Um so those are some of the ways and then of course with tokenization you can you can play a role in some of that. Um so th those are the ways that we we interact with with clients today.

30. 12:42

    Yeah. Hang on. Just like the beauty of what you did is is an analogy of what we're seeing on that agent side, right? You abstracted away all the complexity of the crypto markets and brought that exposure to people. So I could have it in the same pane of glass where I'm trading my Echodos or I'm trading my bonds. Like that was a you know that is a huge piece of value that you provided to folks because you were never going to get the trader to open up a second

31. 13:02

    screen to go into Coinbase and buy those assets themselves. It's so much easier just to have the ITW in there and um and be able to to see that in my portfolio and and move through that. Yeah. Yeah. I I I think I think one just one other thing on the economic models is you know I I I think that a good base case in thinking about anything in crypto is uh to think about the context of tech in general or financial services in general and you know the the the

32. 13:29

    likely probability is that um is that there won't be a fat part there will be thin parts and that things will need scale which is the case of most financial services and I think that that's sort of a transition the industry is going through at the moment where when things were very knew competition was very thin. People could have, you know, very large take rates and very large monetization engines, but I think it's getting thinner and and so people need more scale and that's a little bit of the tension of the moment, but I

33. 13:56

    think it probably settles in a place where um you know, it's not it's not just one one one pocket of the value chain that's that's really uh soaking up all of the the the monetization. that that feels unique to what we hear when we think about the power law and and some of these you know as these companies scales uh typically I I've heard it's you know four to two to one when you have kind of these early markets that end up reaching some uh

34. 14:21

    critical mass usually a market leader 40 you know uh you know maybe 60% of the market second 25% but it sounds like uh you're you're thinking that this will over time get more distributed uh I think I think it depends on what part of the what part of the the industry or value chain or supply chain we're we're talking about. I I think over time fees will just become lower across everything in crypto. And that's one of the beautiful things about financial services that's different than some other businesses. There are other businesses that really can capture um

35. 14:55

    and extract an extreme amount of value that that's great for shareholders, less great for uh customers. I think that the open source nature of crypto, the interoperability of crypto and the general nature of financial services is that there is competition. Of course, there are people who quote own the customer and have a little bit more uh pricing power. But um but I think the trajectory of the space will be lower fees and then the mission of anyone who

36. 15:19

    cares about economics is to uh is to scale up alongside that. Um and some won't and some will and agents only accelerate that, right? That's a great point, right? like it they're going to go find the cheapest, lowest cost, most efficient way to do things. So that that's going to be one of those forcing functions and and less likely to be a captured customer because they don't care about the inertia of opening a new account the same way that you would conventionally

37. 15:42

    think of some of the the frictions of just human time and effort uh allowing people to be captured and they don't like our beautiful branding and they don't give a about, you know, all the work that we put into those things. They want, you know, they're going to optimize for whatever they've been told to optimize for, which is generally going to be cost and security. Yeah. Uh couple teams, few teams that have uh it feels as if they found the efficient frontier. Uh there's

38. 16:06

    this threeheaded dragon that seems to be brewing, which is this hyperlquid Zcash near three-headed dragon. Just curious if you guys have a perspective on why we may have seen this cohort of assets really take charge of the market in the last say call it a month or so.

39. 16:24

    I mean, best description I heard of hyperlquid was it was like you took a bunch of engineers and you put them in a room and you told them to like rebuild financial markets. Ignore regulation. Ignore like all the rules, all the things that Hunter and I are, you know, the older people in the room. Like we we grew up having to deal with these things. Just forget all those things.

40. 16:42

    And I think, you know, that's a I just I love what's happening there. Um it will run into a regulatory wall. it will you know there's there's going to be some some limitations on the on the adoption there but it's exciting to see you know innovation approaching in that way um near for me like intense was the thing that that brought me in that was the capability I love Ilia's vision on on AI and agents but intense was really the thing when I saw that I said that is

41. 17:06

    something really special and and different and it um it's you know it's the the chain abstraction the the ability to sign transactions on other chains like that's such a powerful capability um to have, you know, to get rid of that boat anchor of of crypto steals that I have and to be able to do everything just in in near.com. Um and then, you know, Zcash is just that that theme of privacy. And I wrote about this

42. 17:31

    for the Near Foundation board back in December, just the lack of privacy being a constraining function on institutional adoption in our space. Anytime you're making a payment, not just investing, I'm not just worried about people frontunning me or watching what I'm doing. anytime I'm making a payment, anytime I have value moving in and out of a wallet, it's discoverable. You know, I you've traded with OTC desks.

43. 17:54

    The first time you trade with them, it's one kind of transaction. The second time, well, they know all your wallets and they know all the transactions. They could see a whole lot more about what's going on. Um, you know, so I think Zcash is a great example of of the way in which, you know, privacy as a as a concept is so is so critical.

44. 18:10

    You you you know, do you know the uh do you guys know the Midwip meme? It's a normal distribution curve and there's like a Jedi and a frustrated person and a Neanderthal. I think I think another thing that [clears throat] you said.

45. 18:22

    No, no. I No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm surrounded by two sitting in the middle two. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm like the frustrated, you know, uh overthinking it. Uh but uh the thing that I would just add, I think what you said is correct. The other thing I'd just say is um um something that those three have in common is they have uh smart capable ecosystems and teams around them and they're you know there's no force more powerful than being on the right side of

46. 18:47

    a structural trend and each of them is in a lane where they're at the forefront of uh of a wave that is forceful and cresting and um and uh and that's a very powerful force. So, um I think being in the right position to do something that the world thinks is useful um and uh is is true of all three and and is important to the success of of um of any asset or any network and and so I think that that's also a theme for those.

47. 19:16

    Yeah, they all feel very fundamentally uh part of this agentic movement of liquidity on chain liquidity, efficiency, privacy uh and agency with all these agents. Guys, thanks so much for uh for this panel. It's really really fun. Not the first time, hopefully not the last. And uh we're going to keep things rolling here at Near Miami. Give it up for our panelists.

48. 19:33

    Thanks, Robbie.