Live from The Bridge w/ The Rollup: A 6-Hour NYC Special

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   extreme to provide the best scoops, the best intel, and outperform the market one day at a time. Let's keep it up, roll up army, and we'll see you soon. Developed and taken to the next stage. Yeah. And the realization I've had through conversations at this conference has been these companies have corporate transactional activities that take place, which means they actually need a breather.

2. 0:26

   Imagine if we just take that. The whole point I had a launch video that was Welcome to I just feel like the market is shifting into where you want to be allocating capital is the best assets not chasing beta you can't think like previous cycles ision putting it on chain I respect that but Show the camera, Kevin. Show the camera.

3. 1:32

   Otani around his neck. Why? Because this asset class should be on chain. But today they're more so than financial advisors. I think cuz I feel like that's maybe I mean guys we're in the midst of a tokenization super cycle that

4. 2:39

   want to sign a transaction on a ledger at all. You're not a suit. You wear a suit. You're a suit. This is a Sometimes I feel like this suit is a little bit of a disguise. Got to

5. 3:42

   really high and that's just the team has done. You might not believe it, but we're still in the pre-bull market, which should make you very excited for what's about to happen. Be more bullish. And who we got right here? I mean, look, man. I mean, we started this when we were 19 years old, 20 years old. I mean, we literally have I mean, yeah, look at this photo. Like, this was this is the rollup. It's probably like one of the first rollup episodes.

6. 5:13

   Sometimes I feel like this suit is a little bit of a disguise. Got really high. And that's just cuz the team is done. You might not believe it, but we're still in the pre-bull market, which should make you very excited for what's about to happen. Be more bullish.

7. 5:45

   And who we got right here? I mean, look, man. I mean, we started this when we were 19 years old, 20 years old. I mean, we literally have I mean, yeah, look at this photo. Like, this was this is the rollup. It's probably like one of the first rollup episodes.

8. 6:36

   Yeah, we need Randy. Come on. Really high. And that's just because the team has done You might not believe it, but we're still in the pre-bull market, which should make you very excited for what's about to happen. Be more bullish.

9. 6:54

   And who we got right here. I mean, look, man. And I mean, we started this when we were 19 years old, 20 years old. I mean, we literally have I mean, yeah, look at this photo. Like, this was this is the roll up. It's probably like one of the first rollup episodes.

10. 7:44

    say, "Yeah, we need Randy. Come on." Exponential era and we cannot wait to continue to provide the best scoops, the best intel, and outperform the market one day at a time. Let's keep it up, [singing] roll up army, and we'll see you soon.

11. 7:58

    Just develop and and take it to the next stage. And the realization I've had through conversations at this conference has been these companies have corporate transactional [singing] activities that take place, which means they actually need a breather.

12. 8:13

    Imagine if you just take that. That's the whole point. I had a launch video that was Welcome to I just feel like the market is shifting into where you want to be allocating capital is the best assets not chasing beta you can't think like previous cycles ision putting it on I respect that but Show the camera, Kevin. Show the camera.

13. 9:22

    One Otani around his neck. Why? Because this asset class should be on chain. Today we're more so than financial advisors. they think cuz I feel like that's maybe I mean guys we're in the midst of a tokenization super cycle back

14. 10:28

    I want to sign a transaction on a ledger at all. You're not a suit. You wear a suit. You're a suit. This is a head and Sometimes I feel like this suit is a little bit of a disguise. Got to is

15. 11:31

    really high. And that's just the scheme of sun. You might not believe it, but we're still in the pre-bull market, which should make you very excited for what's about to happen. Be more bullish. And then what we got right here? I mean, look, man. I mean, we started this when we were 19 years old, 20 years old. I mean, we literally have I mean, yeah. Look at this photo. Like this was this is the roll up. It's probably one of the first rollup episodes.

16. 12:32

    They say, "Yeah, we need Randy. Come on. break it down. So cheesy guys who make this show possible, who've helped us grow. We are in [singing] our exponential era and we cannot wait to continue to provide the best scoops, the best intel, and outperform the market one day at a time.

17. 13:01

    Let's keep it up, roll up army, and we'll see you soon. Develop and take to the next stages. And the realization I've had through conversations at this conference has been these companies have corporate transactional activities that take place which means they actually need a breather like Imagine if we just take that the whole point. I had a launch video that I just feel like the market is shifting into where you want to be allocating capital is the best assets not chasing beta you can't think like

18. 14:06

    previous cyclesion bring it on I respect that but Show the camera, Kevin. Pull it way up. Pull it way up. Show the camera. Want Otani around his neck. Why? Because this asset class should be on chain. Thank you. They're more so than financial adviserss. I think

19. 15:12

    cuz I feel like that's maybe I mean guys, we're in the midst of a tokenization super cycle that want to sign a transaction on ledger at all. You're not a suit. You wear a suit. You're a suit. Now ahead

20. 16:15

    Sometimes I feel like this suit is a little bit of a disguise. Got to really high. And that's just because the team is starting. You might not believe it, but we're still in the pre-bull market, which should make you very excited for what's about to happen. Be more bullish.

21. 16:48

    And then who we got right here? I mean, look, man. I mean, we started this when we were 19 years old, 20 years old. I mean, we literally have I mean, yeah, look at this photo. Like, this was this is the rollup. It's probably like one of the first rollup episodes.

22. 17:38

    Yeah, we need Randy. Come on. All right. So cheesy so cheesy. Welcome back. Welcome to the roll up. Today's Tuesday, October 27th. We are in New York City at the bridge by the tie. It has been a long time. Can we get some love? Can we get some love? There we go. We have blue today. We've got a full slate. I think we've got 16 interviews today. So, we're going to be uh we're going to be rocking

23. 18:16

    and rolling these entire day. Might might be the most amount that we've done in one day ever throughout the entire history of the rollup. So, we're going to have some fun. Um we also feel like we're on the precipice of just an absolute just explosion in the markets, which is also very, very exciting. But, we're going to be talking about all of that and more here at the bridge by the tie. It's very buttoned up event. We've got the suits on. Blue, you're buttoned up as well.

24. 18:42

    Welcome to the show. I'm Rob. This is Andy. Good to see you. It's uh it's a pleasure to have you. It's your first time on the show. And so you're kicking off today the event here at the bridge. Would love a better understanding to who is and and what brought you here to the bridge event.

25. 18:59

    Yeah. So, uh my name is Blue Mash Lari. I'm head of digital assets at Chiro Price and I'm a lead portfolio manager um of our actively managed crypto ETF. Uh and I spent many many many years in Chadfy and then about 10 years ago I left private equity to go launch a market neutral crypto fund and four years ago joined Euro Price to build out the [clears throat] digital assets business.

26. 19:23

    Very cool. I mean I I'm personally very excited. We have a few different thesis that all seem to be converging. On one hand you've got the tokenization super cycle. There's been a little bit of push back on that in recent times, but this is a train that doesn't feel like it's stopping. And so, we've also got this this this feeling that as these assets get tokenized, they will propagate

27. 19:46

    throughout the network, throughout the onchain economy, flow into a lot of the DeFi protocols that we know and love. And so as you've been sort of, you know, working through this journey in digital assets, managing this portfolio, how have you seen the evolution at Tro you guys have this ETF product? How are you personally seeing the evolution of more and more assets getting tokenized, more of those assets flowing throughout the onchain economy? How do you personally react to this this evolution of the market?

28. 20:16

    Yeah, it's been really interesting, I have to say. Um there were there were a few years where I was like you know trying to have meetings about tokenization and people weren't you know um showing up. They weren't that interested. Um in the past 12 months I I can't tell you the number of large like giant established institutional clients who have asked me to come in and do like a teaching for them like what is tokenization? What are stable coins?

29. 20:41

    What is all of this? How is it going to affect our business? Um it is the just the sort of learning curve in across child but even across fully tokenized suites of like highly customizable client solutions. And we have massive trading floors, right, where they will ultimately be trading tokenized stocks, bonds, etc.

30. 21:21

    Um, and we can also invest in blockchains and tokens because they're the beneficiaries of people buying lots of blocks. stocks. It's kind of wild. Yeah. And and so rather than doing this at the fund level, we're doing this at the underlying level. Is is the idea that gives us a little bit more flexibility to then build more primitives and more, you know, kind of customized funds on top of that.

31. 22:04

    I think so. And this is actually a way in which hero and primitives have something in common. Bear with me, okay? Hear me out. Um, we're traditional asset managers. We're active asset managers. All of the things that we do involve picking names for discretionary portfolios, right?

32. 22:22

    So, um, if you run, you know, an index fund, a vanilla index fund, uh, in equities, it's really easy to tokenize that fund because you don't really have to con be concerned that the underlying settles at a different pace than the than the tokenized fund. If you run an active fund, which can really diverge from like it doesn't have to be wetted to an index, um you do you're running an intertemporal compounding asset

33. 22:48

    liability mismatch between the tokenized fund and the underlying like token, you know, stocks if they're still in old timey format. When you tokenize the trading floor, when we tokenize those ingredients, those Legos, we can then build an incredible amount of things um that won't be slowed down by that slowest leg.

34. 23:10

    Like Henry Ford said, if I'd asked the people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. Y and like this is we need the underlying tokenized. Yeah. So for for a company like Tro Price as you mentioned very kind of uh returns driven company for your customers and for your clients when they see Bitcoin at new all-time highs in the I think near future could be in the far future sometime in the future they're

35. 23:36

    going to wonder why they were either positioned or not positioned. They're either going to be grateful that their asset manager positioned them or they're going to wonder why they're still kind of on the sidelines. What do you think about the current kind of market positioning of the customers of asset managers? So what you know whether that's your customers and clients or you know the broad set of mom and pops or

36. 23:59

    401ks or our IRAs that are out there with asset managers are they exposed to crypto assets are is it 1% 2% what is your customer profile look like and what is your thought process and philosophy to kind of get them exposed to this industry? Yeah, I think um there's going to be I I agree with you that we're like I feel like we're solidly into crypto spring. We're coming out a really nasty winter. Not the nastiest, but a tough one. Um and I think we're

37. 24:26

    in, you know, in the spring and that's often when you see the best opportunities, right? Um and you always look back and say, "Oh, I I wish I bought that there. I should have bought more." Yeah. Um and I think that I think that what we have seen across the board with crypto like ETF products has been driven by individual investor demand. People are not getting they're getting some access through RAAS and advisers but they're not getting sort of nearly enough. It's

38. 24:53

    very much been individual driven which shows an incredible amount of demand. Um, and in our case in particular, because we run like an active discretionary fund, I think people are going to look back and say, "Oh, wow. Why did I only buy Bitcoin when I could have gotten exposure to everything else?" I mean, in in the portfolio I run, Bitcoin is like the fifth or sixth performing top performing asset. It's not in the top five. Um, and I think that we have a lot of other really

39. 25:20

    interesting names in this space this year, um, and this cycle that are that have like fantastic value props that are much easier to explain to people and worth investing in. Um, and I think people want exposure to crypto and how can you deny them the sort of range of returns beyond just Bitcoin?

40. 25:40

    Yeah. And Hyperlid is one that I think is in your thesis as well as in ours. We talk a lot about it. I I want to dig a little bit deeper into the underlying rails though because I think Tro is in a unique position given that you launched on the New York Stock Exchange ARCA, right? And this is still somewhat experimental, right? It's still new. You guys launched this in July. Just curious, given New York Stock Exchange

41. 26:03

    is obviously massive Goliath in the finance space. Now they're breaching into the tokenized finance space. what was it like working with them to deploy on this Arca exchange? How was it maybe a little bit different than a traditional listing process?

42. 26:19

    So, um having come from privates and then crypto, this is my first experience with a retail publicly traded um vehicle. I I think we have a great relationship with um with NY going back quite some time. I think one of the things that I absolutely love is in the past call it 12 months we've seen the major exchanges step up and recognize that they have to start engaging and that if they don't want to be disrupted that they need to like sort of participate and engage and

43. 26:53

    they are you know also moving ahead building um in the space to support tokenization uh I think it'll be really interesting to see how that transition evolves, right? Because we've seen it fastest sort of outside the trad more on the edges and like intersections. Yeah.

44. 27:14

    So, and and for anyone unfamiliar, just give us a sense of what New York Stock Exca is relative to traditional NY that someone might access through their brokerage. I think our audience is very familiar with the way that the onchain landscape looks and like permissionless infrastructure, but when it come and and and then there's obviously a cohort that's very familiar with brokerages and accessing the New York Stock Exchange

45. 27:38

    typically, but when it comes to this this Arca instance, it's like permissionless infrastructure but in a permissioned environment. So maybe you can just explain how this differs from the traditional NY. So how they're they are it's not tokenized, right? So there's no tokenization and there's no blockchain involved. It all happens inside the fund. So it looks um and trades very much like a typical

46. 28:03

    electronic trading of shares. So with um what really is interesting is that as we all know crypto trades 168 hours a week. Uh the equities guys they think it's like 35 hours or something a week. Um which sometimes seems really tempting.

47. 28:19

    Uh but but one of the things that is really important for us and with our fund is that we the underlying is bifurcated from the ETF shares themselves. ETF shares trade during like extended hours and sort of night hours. The underlying our crypto holdings can be traded 24/7 365 like we can trade on the weekend um because we can settle in stable coins. We can just stay totally on chain. Um, and that I think is a really important tool both for managing money

48. 28:52

    in terms of crypto allocations and I think it's something that is a good precedent that people are going to have to get used to for how equities probably look 5 years from now, right? It feels like that's kind of the growing pains in the adoption curve we're at right now. I just have one more question for you, Blue, which is that, you know, this actively managed fund, whether it be in a tokenized format or not, it feels like very, it's very similar to

49. 29:17

    the vault complex that we see kind of happening on chain. Is that I mean, you mentioned, you know, this is the way that equities are going 5 years from now. This is what it's going to look like. Is it similar with the actively managed fund space or is this pretty much a vault or is it just going to be a vault in the near future? I think if if we had if we had the ability and a forum um and distribution that could have

50. 29:40

    supported it. Yes, we absolutely could have done it in a vault and that would be a great way to do it. I think the un like so the broader infrastructure of traditional distribution and you know all those pieces isn't there yet to allow that but that would be like a natural way to do it. I think one of the questions is how granular can we get with the pieces of literally everything

51. 30:03

    and then how can you represent them on chain so that you could have a portfolio that's a cross-section of you know uh infrastructure and covers a bunch of different companies but just accesses the infrastructure component within those companies right right it's wait till we introduce Trafi to composability and I think it's going to be really mind-blowing yeah we're we're extremely excited about this as well to be able to express very

52. 30:28

    specific insights and thesis in the markets something we're very excited about and and that blockchain tokenization and vaults in particular enable us to do um I think that's it blue quick segment today but thank you so much for the time and would love to have you uh on again very soon for a deeper dive into the space my pleasure and good luck get those clients in crypto get those clients in crypto good luck with a 16 interview

53. 30:50

    thank you so much have a good one righty guys uh that was our first first guest of the day. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back with the next one, Stephen McClur on the ETF side of the space and the active ETFs. Thank you so much

54. 32:14

    Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.

55. 34:27

    Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget?

56. 34:42

    We're going to have people from all over all different investment classes. People All righty, guys. We are here back at the bridge event by the tie. Uh we're just getting started here. Um, you know, typical first hour of the show is left, right, and center, but now we're good.

57. 34:59

    Now we're flowing. Everything's going well. Stephen, good to have you back, man. I think we've done a couple virtual conversations um as you guys were launching different ETFs in the past, but now we're very firmly uh in person and, you know, kind of in a different world of public listings for crypto assets. Um, what's new, man? How's how's business going? How how you feeling about the market? Just kind of catch us up a bit.

58. 35:23

    Yeah. Yeah, no, business is going great. We're u we've now launched six ETFs in uh various crypto assets. We hopefully have about six more to go and um but look, the markets are actually doing quite well. Uh we've come to a bottom of the market now. In the short run though, um AI is going to be an issue and I do feel like AI and tech stocks will have a drag on crypto, but we'll pop right back up in 2027. Well, let's talk more about that. So, you know, what what what is

59. 35:55

    the is it the cyber security um power that these AI models have? They're solving like generational math problems. You know, we're seeing vulnerabilities across the entire internet. The NSA is putting out, you know, uh uh notices around PHP and and you're saying that you think crypto is particularly susceptible to these cyber security hacks. No, I don't I don't think it's because they're susceptible to the cyber security hacks. I I it has more to do with uh valuation. Yeah.

60. 36:26

    Right. So, Anthropic put out their uh their their S1 yesterday. uh they're frantically trying to get an IPO done while there's still money in the market. But really what's happened is uh a lot of uh data centers have been built and there's actually been an overbuilding of data centers and over buying of GPUs and a lot of the large companies are just buying GPUs and they haven't even set them up yet. U they're they're buying them because they're afraid of potential scarcity.

61. 37:00

    But as far as um compute, we have too much compute right now and all these new data centers coming online is going to have a lot of strain of compute. So uh I believe there's going to be some consolidation. Uh a lot of the uh the the smaller hyperscalers are going to have issues y and we're already seeing strains in the debt market which should have an effect on price. I mean, Elon just, you know,

62. 37:24

    tweeted a couple days ago. He thinks that um entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn't have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers. Um, and he said SpaceX closed $40 billion of debt for GPUs, but they're in investment grade, have Starlink and launch revenue. And so, you're saying that all these neoclouds, like the hundreds of neoclouds, pretty you pretty much agree with Elon here that these neoclouds are going to go guppy level death and consolidation.

63. 37:52

    and they're going to get bought up by maybe the hyperscalers or some of these more investment grade companies. And then all of this happening too while we get the anthropic IPO announced. All that we have left is the open AI IPO. And then from my perspective, everything that's happened in AI is going to take a multi-year reconsolidation, reformatting, restructuring. They're kind of going to go through their own, you know, uh,

64. 38:18

    trail of kind of disillusionment into this political productivity, you know, kind of. And what is this going to lead to, Stephen? We've been saying this for a while. It was hard to, it was hard to believe in June, and May and July that Q4, we were going to finally see this AI to crypto rotation, this kind of stocks to crypto rotation. I don't know if it's going to happen that fast, but I

65. 38:39

    generally agreed. I think Q1 next year we'll really start to see that and investors are going to go to where returns are are and where there's most liquid activity happening. And so how do you actually see this playing out? Like is this just a narrative? Is it just oh you know we made a bunch of money on anthropic from our early kind of like VC round or we got you know 10% out 20% out and and and that just goes into Bitcoin.

66. 39:05

    like how do you see capital reshuffleling from the AI tech stock kind of uh crowd into crypto? Yeah. Well, to back up just a little bit, when when the debt market shut off, Yeah. the only way that a lot of a lot of the publicly traded companies are able to raise capital to pay for uh a lot of the GPUs they've already they've already bought or committed to, but they're they bought it on loan and to continue to build, which they're going to have

67. 39:32

    they're forced to continue to build out their infrastructure. They're going to have to issue debt. Uh they're going to have to issue equity. This is like what Meta is doing. Yeah, exactly. And then the equity is going to be dilutive and then when NASDAQ stocks drop, tech stocks drop, anything techreated will come down with it. Right. So that's that's the short term in crypto. However, just like you

68. 39:55

    said, once that trade is realized, you're going to see a rotation back out of AI into crypto. particularly into areas where there's um interesting activity like tokenization for instance. So protocols that are heavily involved in tokenization that are doing that are making real money that are that that have real transactions. I believe that those coins those tokens are going to do well. Bitcoin will will get a good lift off of this and I do believe that that will happen sometime around Q1.

69. 40:26

    Yeah. I mean I think it's already happening. I mean, yeah, I think Zcash is actually I mean, I'm just, you know, I hold Zcash as you guys know. We told you guys about it like, you know, 3xes ago. Um, it is actually getting that bid first because you've got this AI kind of surveillancing.

70. 40:42

    You've got this quantum thing. You've got this kind of like uh all these kind of like weird little things happening that are kind of pushing, you know, assets uh like Zcash forward. Bitcoin is going to be the recipient of a the monetary kind of debasement happenings and also this kind of AI rotation. How much capital do you think is going to kind of flow into digital assets? Like

71. 41:06

    are we talking tens of billions, hundreds of billions? Like how much money do you think is that mobile and wanting to kind of change course if they see some weakness? Oh, easily in the billions actually. uh over 2027. And by the way, I I agree I agree with your assessment on Zcash. Um you know, I I mentioned tokenization, but the biggest thing that I'm interested in the market's not quite there yet, but it's probably the second biggest thing for the market is privacy tokens. Y

72. 41:38

    I think Monero has issues in the US, uh which makes it not quite investable, but the the two cryptocurrencies I like the best are Zcash and Litecoin. Litecoin, a lot of people don't realize about two years ago they switched over to a you know privacy feature very similar to Zcash. Yep.

73. 41:58

    Where you can be public or private uh utilizing Nimblewimble and that's happened. And so Litecoin, Zcash, those are probably my two favorite tokens at the moment. And then after that, it's going to be the protocols, right? But but I do believe the market's going to wake up and realize that oh privacy coins is where it's at and uh it's it's it's going to be a preferred currency.

74. 42:23

    I I tend to agree. I don't I don't see that going away. That focus on privacy. What what I want to I want to pressure test the premise cuz I agree that if the neo clouds implode and the AI trade the AI bubble pops, that's going to bring a lot of the returns to to fruition and then we will see that rotation. And so if we get that AI bubble pop, we will see that rotation in crypto. I agree with that assessment. But my question is, will the AI bubble pop? We saw

75. 42:52

    Elon's tweet talking about how the credit markets are strained. But then the anthropic S1 came out. Yeah, they're raising 100 billion, maybe $200 billion at a $2 trillion valuation. It's insane. But their revenue and and margins seem to beat expectations. And so on one hand you've got what seems like a pretty bullish anthropic S1, but then on the other hand you've got a pretty bearish Elon. So two pretty powerful competing forces. Do you think the AI bubble is

76. 43:20

    going to capital's poured in and there's not a whole lot of more capital that wants to pour in from public markets. But what we're discounting right now is the government, right? So the US government, the Chinese government, uh other governments around the world that have capital to deploy in AI because they want to win the race and that's what's going to sustain it from not being a complete bust. So a backs stop by means of purchasing equity in these companies being a key

77. 44:14

    shareholder positioning it as a national defense priority and thus printing more money. That's exactly right. Which causes Bitcoin to go up or any store of value asset effectively. Yeah. The Chinese stock market imploded. I don't have a ton on this, but I don't know if you saw, I think this was just today. like the the the index that tracks the Chinese AI market or tech market is down like 40% today.

78. 44:58

    Um we yeah we'll see what happens. I think there's going to be a lot of cheap cheap chips on the market. And then how about in Brazil, you've got the election of of the socialist Luma or Lulu Lula again, whether he's a socialist or a communist or just a leftwing, you know, you let them you let them kind of name the name. Their main index is down 30% in in a day. And so you've got this crazy dynamic as well on the political spectrum that the US is going to face as well in 2028. Y

79. 45:28

    um just kind of close this loop here, Stephen. Um how do we how should an investor think about allocating capital into digital assets as a result of all this kind of macro environment? Obviously, like you know, Robbie and I are very young and very risk. I don't even pay attention to that anymore because I'm just so I'm already up a significant amount on my core positions.

80. 45:49

    Bitcoin, Zcash, Hype, and a couple others from the lows. These are just secular trends. privacy online perpetuals and 247 trading and and tokenization and then just store value. Like it's just it's just very clear to me. But how should broad global investors think about their allocations to store value assets like Bitcoin, like Zcash, like even on the Litecoin side in this new era?

81. 46:13

    Yeah. Look, I think I think broadly speaking, most investors should think in in terms of long-term horizons. You know, if you're trying to day trade, you're going to you're going to eventually lose. Yeah. But, you know, the scalpers are going to win. So, but and that's sort of like what our hedge fund does. We do a lot of scalping. So, we're we're we're we're we're you know, we're winning on on basis points at a time. And in the in a short run, we're

82. 46:36

    not heavily invested in crypto. But if you're a long-term investor, we're we're so close to the bottom right now that if you're thinking 6 months, one year, 5 years out, it's a great time to invest. But you think in the near term down before we go up?

83. 46:52

    Oh yeah. Yeah. You know, the next the next three months are going to be uh a little painful. Um I'm not talking 20%. We're talking 5 10% moves. Yeah. I don't know. I think Zcash is about to just go to three $3,3500 boys before the end of the year. I I think it's going to explode.

84. 47:08

    Do you think it's like all the capital's waiting for it? Litecoin, hyper like some of the like the altcoins can do well even if Bitcoin does plunge another 5 10% from here. Oh yeah. No, I think I think I think they can. Yeah, obviously they all follow each other for for for no reason other than they just follow each other because people are making broad allocations. But we do have we we do have some headwinds right in the next 3 months. We still have a an ongoing war

85. 47:35

    in Iran that's causing some issues. Uh, and we also have um midterms coming out. Yeah. And until we have um until the midterms are over, I don't see any upside. And then typically after midterms, um, you know, we do get a rally in crypto and then it sort of boring through the end of the year and then picks back up again in January, February. Yeah. Okay.

86. 48:00

    Last thing for you, Stephen. We're obviously here with Near. They are basically making Zcash programmable as well as bringing privacy on chain. You know I you know you were bullish on Litecoin Zcash but kind of what what Near and and also Zama is doing is basically bringing programmable privacy to DeFi.

87. 48:17

    So kind of a near.com you can basically you know trade all sorts of assets onchain without really needing to change chain change wallets etc. And it's all kind of in a confidential black box that's self-custodial via Pasis. my favorite onchain experience. I'm not sure if you've tried it, but I I I think it's kind of a one-two punch with Zcash and Near. So, Rob and I hold a good bit of Near and continue to hold to to kind of see this as the big trend as well.

88. 48:45

    No, I love that, you know. Yeah. No, I've been following Near for for for a while now. I love what they're doing on privacy. Yeah, man. Well, Stephen, thanks for your time. Absolutely. Thank you, sir. See you next time. See you next time.

89. 48:56

    Bullish fan. All righty. All righty, guys. That's Stephen McClur uh from Canary Capital. One of our favorite shows each time. Brings the energy, brings the bullishness, and uh yeah, Rob going. I think um you know, it's an interesting thesis. I I agree that we have some headwinds.

90. 49:14

    I um I think we've got midterm elections, the Iran war. I mean, there's speculation geopolitically. We always know that the Trump taco could could happen, but uh that after the midterms uh that there we could see a greater uh strike against Iran. That would be unfortunate, but uh that would escalate things further. Obviously, you know, diesel, oil, gas, all of that. And especially with Russia giving the US some more diesel that could lead, you know, Trump to kind of give him a window to to go and do a bigger strike. And so

91. 49:46

    you got some geopolitical pressure in Iran. At the same time, you've got the midterm elections. We kind of know how those are going to go. Maybe the Republicans crisis is going to unfold in China and in the US. And the reaction that's bullish for crypto is going to be money printer go burr from the Chinese and from the Americans. However, the Chinese AI index fell 40% today and we haven't really heard any great stimulus package.

92. 50:37

    At the same time, you've got a Fed meeting coming up tomorrow. They're not going to do anything. That's most likely I think 90% prediction markets have it. Hold rates 90%. Right. You've got uncertainty on the horizon. You got uncertainty in the in the central bankers and the in the in the in the political climate geopolitical climate.

93. 51:00

    I kind of think like like what Stephen said is about, you know, the AI bubble isn't going to go curpl, but you might get this like slow deflation of the AI bubble, especially if the Democrats force data centers to slow down. Yeah.

94. 51:16

    Right. you get some consolidation, lenders are going to be less uh uh willing to lend money and credit to extend credit, right? And and let let's be, you know, very clear with what leads to digital asset prices to increase. Yes, central banks printing money to backs stop the AI, you know, bubble that is added stimulus, added liquidity in the market. It's also uh banks and lenders that are extending credit. that is what adds money to the money supply is when lenders provide

95. 51:50

    loans and extend credit. I do think on some uh level, you know, you've got the AI credit crisis and then you've got the bullish anthropic S1. The anthropic S1, look, you know, a lot you've got two parts to this. On one hand, you've got a very bullish S1. I think it beat expectations.

96. 52:09

    They're raising capital. I think they're going to raise somewhere between 100 and $200 billion. Yeah, that necessar and and so you hear about, you know, anthropic going public and how the market has to absorb this. There's two parts to this. The lenders are going to just create money out of thin air. It's what they do. They lend money. They extend credit. That's what they're going to do to Anthropic because they've got a very successful business model. They're actually profitable and and we know this now because of their

97. 52:37

    S1. That does not cause the depreciation of any assets. What causes is the second part when Anthropic goes public and you have retail investors and people that didn't get exposure in the in the in the private fundraising round, they're going to have to go and sell their assets on the public markets to go buy and get exposure to Anthropic. So, there's two parts. I think one of them actually does create credit and add money to the money

98. 53:02

    supply and there's plenty of money for profitable businesses. I don't think that's a liquidity crunch at all. I think you will see stocks broadly depreciate as people rotate to anthropic and then I think the same thing is going to happen to OpenAI maybe before the end of the year. I think OpenAI is in trouble.

99. 53:20

    I think they're in trouble though. I think I think they're they've waited too long. They've waited far though. I think I think it makes sense that Elon went first with SpaceX. I think Anthropic going second makes sense. And I think ChachuT Open AI actually has a stronger right now. They haven't been fear-mongering as much as anthropic and so I think they there's actually less uncertainty around

100. 53:44

     yeah but they yeah I don't know the whole fearongering into the IPO is just insane like it's just like everyone's going to die and then what we're going to go live on our IPO guys um good to see everybody in here it's been so long for me I mean little miss gun royal all uh football Greek wizard I mean guys like I I mean, Stephanie, uh, Greg, Reversal Toad, Monolithic, Spyros, Enrigo, um, guys, it's been far too long.

101. 54:16

     Michelle, uh, Rahul Aob, man. Gosh, she's Vic. Uh, Goken Espresso, guys. I mean, I miss I miss the live. I mean, it's been so long for me. Um, and man, we're just so bowled up right now. We're we're very bowled up right now. Uh, it's been a fun stream so far. A lot more to come. We're looking for Matt of Van, but if he doesn't come, we're going to keep moving.

102. 54:42

     Andy, tell me your thesis, man. We uh we we don't get a chance to chop it up too often these days, right? We were in Asia. We had some flight complications. We were going live for you guys every single day, telling you guys to buy the lows. And then we literally had to leave for like 3 weeks and just like take a break. And we haven't been able to refill our thesis. My current thesis is

103. 55:05

     that the end of the we're at the end of this mini bare market that we just had like I you know if you had been at the bottom with us right you're up a lot like you're up you're looking good you're looking strong and you're feeling pretty good about it my current thesis is that we are at the end of the mini bear 3-we pullback after an 8-week push so look all of August all of September into the first week of October was golden. Zcash hyperl grid led the

104. 55:38

     market and you know near pop towards the end really hard and now we had this kind of pullback consolidation but what comes next in my opinion is that we start to see the leaders lead. So Zcash I think is bottomed. I think we're going up on that run now to the end of the year looking for that two 2.5K 3K level. I think Hyperlid's bottomed. I think Near actually takes a step here and leads Athena. Bitcoin also up in the 90s here sometime before Thanksgiving probably um

105. 56:12

     but before Christmas for sure. So I just think that like 3we pullback it was great. It was fun. Congrats. Everyone got scared. We're doomed out. Leverage is way down. Um we haven't touched any of our spot positions and I mean to me it's like what are we doing here? We're ready to go. So I think we're at the end of our little pullback and I think from here we we go up um into the end of the year.

106. 56:37

     Give us a portfol give us a portfolio update, right? Cuz we evolved from I mean like we can go way back. Uranium which we were just talking about the other day with someone. It's still very much bullish as people getting exposure to electricity and then hyperlid per Zcash. Hyperlid you guys know it. All I did was I added more to Zcash at 1,100. I got multiple entries uh in spot at $1,100 under $1,100 uh was my best entry about 1,96.

107. 57:07

     Um I re I reallocated some of my purr uh quite a bit higher into more near and more Athena. Um I actually bought a good bit of Tia. So I am now back on the Tia train. Um of course we're in lighter. Um, of course we're in Athena and then you know a bunch of kind of like the smaller DeFi names but a much smaller allocation. You got the a of the world and you got the arrows of the world and even like the Zamas of the world. So primarily I think Zcash hype near

108. 57:40

     lighter Athena lead us to Valhalla and I think I've got a basket of names under that that I think are going to reflexively move higher. So we'll get more into the portfolio. Rob, of course I have some Bitcoin. We have our next guest. So, we're going to have to take a super quick standby and we'll be right back with you guys with our next guest.

109. 57:57

     Stay tuned. Don't go anywhere, guys. We're having fun. We're bullish and this is marking the bottom of the bull market. Let's get it, boys. Heat.

110. 59:05

     Heat.

111. 1:00:53

     Heat. Heat. Yo yo yo. So, what's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City, getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget? We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't

112. 1:01:50

     be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212. Dr. Heat. Heat.

113. 1:04:12

     And we're back the bridge by the tie. We're here with Chris and Anestis. Uh we're going to be talking about the near bull thesis. Near is behind us here putting on the show and uh is one of our uh most uh honorable supporters. Very very proud to work with you guys. Uh and absolutely crushing. I mean there's no doubt about it. Leading on the AI front and the privacy front. to multiple thesis converging. So, we're going to be talking about the near bowl thesis.

114. 1:04:38

     There's a lot to be excited about. Uh Chris and Anessa's first time on the show. So, let's get into it. Chris, why don't you start give us a little bit of an intro into yourself, what you do at Near, why you're sitting here with us today.

115. 1:04:49

     Thanks, Robbie. So, yeah, I'm the CMO at Near. Really, really excited to be here. Used to be the CMO at the TAI, so actually this was my old event. Uh, so thanks for having me. Yeah, like I love to talk about like privacy and what we're doing with AI. We also have some other cool things that are coming up that I'd love to talk to you about as well. So yeah, it'd be great. Let's do it, dude.

116. 1:05:06

     We'll get into it. I'm excited. And Anes, nice to meet you both. Uh my name is Anestis. I'm running Center Markets is the structure product desk of DV Trading. Uh we've been making markets for the past 20 years or so and we've been in the digital asset space for the past four or five years. Been making markets in options, structure products, you name it. We've been working closely with the foundation for quite some time

117. 1:05:29

     now. And uh yeah digital asses are so sensitar markets I mean you guys obviously have a very you know high level view of a lot of things that are going on you know broad strokes in the market generally but you're here with near right there's a reason why you're here why why are you excited what what is your thesis on look we have a lot of respect for the team we work very closely with them and I dare say they are some of the most serious people uh in the business right

118. 1:05:54

     now and they are actually representing all three hot topics of digital assets right now AI, privacy, centralization. So, we love being part of the effort. We love helping them the way we can and yeah, happy to be here. Very cool. Very cool. And so, Chris, I mean, there's a lot of things going on.

119. 1:06:11

     You guys have been working like uh Anessa said, across the map, right? Privacy, AI. Uh there's a lot of uh excitement, attention, but also drama around AI right now. Anthropic S1, Elon's chiming in, but at least onchain, Mir's leading the way. And so from your perspective, especially from a marketing and storytelling perspective, I'm curious how you've been able to weave together so many of these ideas that Near is now leading the market on.

120. 1:06:40

     Well, first off, just one thing to drop, right? So remember, Near's quantum safe, right? So again, we're already trying to stay ahead of that. And if you talk with Ilia, the way we think about technology and cuz again, I know like I was listening to Thre guy this morning. He was talking about the whole open AI cracking other, you know, mathematical, you know, equation. Like Ilia's whole thesis is we're going to move so fast and adapt so fast that we're going to

121. 1:07:02

     stay ahead of anything that happens, right? Uh, you know, instead of having kind of like, you know, the bunker mentality that we were talking about actually just, you know, back in at token in Singapore, right? It's like instead we're going to just continue to adapt and evolve and stay ahead of it.

122. 1:07:14

     Um, but again with with the priv and we have a lot of more stuff coming on the privacy side. I think that's really one of the key pieces. Um and maybe something to kind of drop. We have you know as you remember at token we launched uh Quantis that was our first token launch on intense uh we actually have a lot more stuff coming actually to uh near.com. Uh so actually if you want to do it right now we're actually geo which is going to be the largest IPO in

123. 1:07:38

     Asia. It's happening on the Indian stock exchange tomorrow. It's going to be like 3.8 billion. You can actually you can basically do the per right now on near.com. It's actually available right now if you want to do it before it goes before it actually goes IPO live, right?

124. 1:07:53

     And that's just like a sample of all the stuff that we have. We're working up, right? We have a lot more stuff coming. Uh there's actually a token that I know everyone's very excited about. It was the talk of the town at token. Uh that's going to be coming soon to near.com as well. I'm not going to drop the name, but keep an eye out for something later this week or early next week.

125. 1:08:14

     Okay. And so Anessus as you're kind of like evaluating the thesis here like from a investment underwriting point of view you know it's kind of it's like which where do you evaluate where do you look at right on one hand you've got revenue so so Near Intense is almost able to like kind of like continuously build this revenue story you you look at the AI side Elon just put out a tweet

126. 1:08:38

     right you know basically there's this huge credit crunch coming to AI companies and you're not able to get a credit if you don't have revenue outside of the data center story. You look at Near, they've got revenue outside of the data center story, they've got uh revenue from Near intents. And so when you think about like the addressable market, the TAM, right, kind of the ceiling or how high Near as a market can

127. 1:09:03

     go, when you start to see, you know, the preipo perpetuals, you see the AI component, you see the revenue component to kind of build a very solid floor, how do you evaluate? How do you underwrite and and generally how how much value do you think can be absorbed into this?

128. 1:09:19

     Amazing. First I would like to say to start with a disclaimer that all views are my own represent my firm naturally. And the one thing I want to say is that right now we are in the beginning of an avalanche of a switch in the global financial system. We are seeing the tokenization of finance and we are seeing the move of everything trade find of the blockchain and the war in Iran

129. 1:09:40

     kind of helps speed things up because you see oil now trading 24/7 gold and near is actually in the front of these things and why what are some of the reasons that I like it is you have a big AI market cap momentum that needs to switch out of stocks as those IPO into new products and I believe that crypto is the great fit. This money won't go into the bond market, right? You have privacy and then you have decentralization. Being able to trade oil across different currencies 24/7,

130. 1:10:13

     being able to run arbitrage on stocks that are listed in the US versus global exchanges or being able to touch every product in the world in one store. I think that's worth quite a bit of money. I don't want to put the valuation out there, but I believe that this is just the beginning. Okay, it's very exciting especially as we think through the rotation and we we've had a couple of

131. 1:10:31

     guests today already just you know early morning talk about the rotation from the AI equities market into the crypto market. They kind of describe you know this AI bubble starting to slowly deflate and rotating into these onchain assets especially as we start to see the returns in crypto go up maybe the returns in and we've already seen what happened to the Chinese AI index is down

132. 1:10:54

     like 40%. And I think Near provides a very compelling story as a digital asset, but also sort of a bridge as we're at the bridge from the AI equities market. Anessus, do you see it this way? Like how do you see the AI equities market broadly across China and the US and how you might see the rotation into onchain digital assets? I believe the rotation will take place and is slowly taking place, but to be honest, not on the way that many people in the space

133. 1:11:22

     envision it. I don't believe the market cap of equities will just fall blindly into the digital asset space. I believe that there will be two or three uh places that most of these aum will get into and these will be sophisticated players that show up on product that show up on revenue and that show up on professional teams and you know personally my view is that NIA represents these things and I love working with them but we also see it with people that are entering slowly in the space on an institutional way. I believe the money will be significantly

134. 1:11:53

     more sophisticated, less blindly throwing darts on the wall. But yeah, I believe that MIR is a good place for some of that rotation to to take place. Yeah, I I think that you make a good point about the market sophistication, which is essentially how this market will be unbundled as more advanced players get into it. And I think we've seen that with crypto because, you know, early on near kind of had it had chain abstraction, it had a lot of these

135. 1:12:17

     things. It had blockchain, had AI, but now I think as the market becomes more educated, more sophisticated, it starts to realize the value proposition. You know, something that is obviously very core to this particular ecosystem is going to be the agentic buildout. You know, Elon obviously, you know, has gone and kind of made these comments about the credit market, but he's also gone and said that Grockbot, you know, and the agentic buildout is one of the fastest growing products he has ever seen, right, across Tesla and PayPal and

136. 1:12:43

     all these things. Chris, what is the agentic component to Near? Because I I can imagine a world where there are no apps. It's totally agentic, you know, and we're all just interacting with our agent through an actual exist. It actually already exists today. How does this work? Well, I think there's a couple key things there. One is basically you're going to really see, you know, a lot of the things that we've what we've done with the blockchain and web 3 actually

137. 1:13:06

     being adopted in AI, just like we saw the adoption of crypto with Trafy, right? I mean, you remember in the early days, Trapfi was really against crypto. They were, you know, they were they were not fans. But now you here at the bridge, literally like half this room is Trapi. Like literally every major token desk from every major bank is sitting in this building right now talking crypto.

138. 1:13:26

     And then the next thing they're talking about is AI, right? And so again, I think we're going to see that kind of emergence of the two and you're going to see that adoption happen with sort of more of these traditional AI and web 2 companies, right? And so I think we're and I really do believe Near is going to be the forefront for bringing that technology. It's really key and crucial to really make those agents successful,

139. 1:13:43

     right? Because again, those agents are going to right now if you look at the internet, right? Agents visit websites more than humans do now, right? So, if you're going to manage that, right, and let's say you want to charge a fee or have that agent interact with that web page or that website, right? How is that going to be managed? The only one who really has technology that can help do that is is Near, right? You need a you need a protocol that especially works fast enough that actually works in

140. 1:14:07

     milliseconds to actually move at the speed of agents and what are you doing this stuff and then let's not even get into agent trading. I mean as you know I just invited you guys to like basically the pre-alpha for what that agent experience is going to be like on near.com right and so again we're going to see more and more this emerging where we see really you know the crypto space and even like just the traditional uh you know finance space interacting more and more with agents and Near's going to

141. 1:14:30

     be at the forefront of that. I I I think I'm starting to see the bigger picture here for air and and you know what really put it into perspective is how you just said agents are visiting more websites than humans right now and I'm thinking to myself how can that possibly be the case with all the humans that are out there but you know we make one prompt one query to our agent it search searches 35 websites for like one query right in one shot probably more right

142. 1:14:54

     whereas I would maybe you know I might Google something I would take a look at the first two choices an agent is scanning probably an order of magnitude or multiple orders of magnitude beyond what I would be searching for a similar prompt and so that is only going to increase in disparity that that's kind of the broader internet and we'll get there but I think I think that also helps me realize I was at Cyos right a couple weeks ago just the week

143. 1:15:18

     before token the big narrative and I'd imagine that a really big conversation point with the people here at the bridge is going 24/7 it's huge and and follow me here cuz this is going to connect the 24/7 market can only be accomplished with blockchain. And now all of these digital asset teams, they have an executive team at their bank that doesn't care about blockchain, doesn't care about tokenization, but they care

144. 1:15:41

     about going 24/7 to compete with the narrative that they hear in the media. They need to go 24/7. It's a mandate from their executive team. They go tell their managing directors, "Go figure it out. We don't care how." The only possible conclusion to reach is going on blockchain and tokenizing. And once they do that, they need to connect to all the private permission permissionless ecosystems that are out there. That's near intense. You extrapolate what is happening in the banking world with 24/7

145. 1:16:11

     and how the only possible solution is blockchain. Extrapolate that not just to finance but to how they need to reach the corners of the internet. Just blockchain itself. It's blockchain with privacy. Cuz again, remember in traditional and tradi privacy is a key element if you actually want to succeed, right? not just finance, it's the internet broadly. And I think that is now what my my kind of total addressable

146. 1:16:35

     market for near is starting to tap into is like this intense product. It's not just a financial servicing layer for helping assets reach their buyers and sellers. It's helping service data across the internet with the people that are trying to get these packets or agents people and agents that are trying to get access to different pockets of the internet need to get serviced right

147. 1:17:00

     give me that data packet for that website give it to my agent right that is an intent and I do think that as we get agents that are transacting across blockchains we will get agents that are transacting across the internet with near so when you think about like traditional finance companies like all the work, all that paperwork, all the traditional stuff that was done, right? And that's why you couldn't have markets running 24/7 is because it was basically done by

148. 1:17:24

     middle and back offices, right? And so again with tokeniz I mean that's why Larry Frink got so so excited about tokenization, right? When he was remember we wouldn't stop talking about it like uh 2 years ago, right? And so it's really that piece and then you combine that with the agent with what we're doing with aentic agents. I mean you're talking about a whole new system, right? That's going to Yeah. What's pointing out here and I believe that finance is about to be snowballed into

149. 1:17:48

     progress is that the previous uh standardizations of systems did not really create need for innovation. When you have T+1 settlement, when you have the markets closed on the weekends, when you have a lot of back office layers, innovation goes and dies. People had no need to innovate. But in in cryptonative ecosystems when there is no margin calls there is no intermediaries the exchange

150. 1:18:12

     doesn't offer credit and you trade 24/7 for us to survive we were forced to actually become good we were forced to build our own systems because the trade fight systems did not exist and now what happened was you saw some tokenization taking place in gold silver some stocks and suddenly the cryptoesks of the world become relevant in the trade file And now you have to play the cat and the mouse because you actually have the cryptonative desks being significantly more sophisticated on trade fight topics that traditional finance companies are.

151. 1:18:48

     And the question here is not only technology. Technology is one thing you can pay for it. But imagine even the actual executives and the employees like we are used to working seven days a week 24/7. Can the trading desks of yesterday do that? Right.

152. 1:19:04

     Yeah. Yeah, these guys are used to going back to Connecticut on the weekends, right? That doesn't exist in our world. Exactly. Exactly. Super fun. Exciting times. Um I think Can I do give one shout out real quick? Please give a shout out.

153. 1:19:16

     So also we just launched the near hackathon. Oh yes. Yeah. So it's near hackathon.com. We have a4 million prize pool, right? It's going to be judged by Ilia Mert uh Hib just to name a few. Uh so again like if you're looking to do development on near protocol right or or work specifically on intense like go check it out near hackathon.com.

154. 1:19:39

     I can only imagine the quality of work that comes out of these hackathons now that these hackers have access to AI tools. It must be just oh it's going to be amazing. Incredible guys. Thank you so much uh Anessus. Very very uh nice meeting you Chris man. I'm glad that we can make it happen. First time on the show and uh we've got Near behind us all the way all day today. So, uh, guys, we'll be right back with our next guest from the bridge by the tie and near. Be right back.

155. 1:20:04

     Don't go anywhere. Heat. Heat.

156. 1:21:16

     Heat. Heat. Hey. Hey. Hey.

157. 1:22:55

     Heat. Heat. Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget?

158. 1:23:42

     We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212.

159. 1:24:50

     Hey. Heat. Heat.

160. 1:26:08

     Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.

161. 1:27:10

     Heat. Heat.

162. 1:28:45

     Let's go, Sasha. The tokenization bull run is on, ladies and gentlemen. It's the bridge by the tire. We are here Tuesday, October 27th with Sasha, general partner, Morgan Creek Capital, who I bet your phone has been pretty slow the last eight months, but that phone run is on. It's happening on Shay. We're here at the bridge. uh there's more institutional capital than crypto natives or digital asset natives which is definitely a tell as to where we are in the industry. Maybe just kind of give us a purview as to what

163. 1:29:30

     you're seeing um what your role is at Morgan Creek and really kind of how you're viewing this I guess convergence as as it is currently. Yeah, sure. No, happy to do that. So um at Morgan Creek I'm one of the general partners. Uh we've launched four funds and uh hopefully we're on the precipice of launching our bit fund in this kind of web 3 world. But our thesis is affectionately called ABCD and every

164. 1:29:55

     good thesis needs the acronym. Ours is ABCD which stands for AI, blockchain, chips and data. And so we invest in these four quadrants of the internet. And as the internet iterates upon itself, we believe these are the four value drivers of the internet. And so what gets us excited around those quadrants are intersections of those quadrants. So as an example, we like to invest in ships that focus on AI, right?

165. 1:30:19

     C and the A. Or we like to invest in lending companies that use AI for underwriting and blockchain for origination, the A and the B. So those are the type of intersections of the ABCDS that we like to invest in. So we've um we have somewhere between 100 150 portfolio companies. uh we've deployed um let's call it around 400 million in these in these um in these through these funds and into this thesis ABCD and so we're really excited about kind of the next chapter of both our

166. 1:30:49

     fund management and uh of our portfolio which what we're seeing emerge and going now back to your question around what we're like excited about and what themes are kind of driving value you know clearly there's a stable coin killer feature that is taking place and we're seeing it all over the world, right?

167. 1:31:08

     Stable coin remminances are are unfolding. We're seeing it from corridors from the US to Latin America, US to Asia, US to to Africa and the Middle East. And so we're investing in those companies that are which is kind of the the core of what we're here to across financial services. We're seeing this across lending products. Um, one of our portfolio companies is figure technology solutions which specialize in the tokenization of home equity lines of

168. 1:31:48

     credit or helocks. Uh, and so they were able to show both uh the market in general but also also Wall Street as now a publicly traded company that you can originate loans on chain, you can service them on chain and you can securitize them on chain.

169. 1:32:06

     Right? So when we think and they were able to show this wing-to-wing solution for tokenization at scale right they are now originating about a billion uh loans a month right through their platform and they have a tremendous amount of white label kind of connect partners as they call them uh that are utilizing this platform to help originate loans as well third party loans uh for other originators. So th this is a wonderful

170. 1:32:31

     use case to showcase how tokenization of real world assets is being perfected by one company but there's many companies that are out there doing this. Another thing I'll say is that if if you added up all the asset classes on the planet today I'm talking commodities I'm talking real estate I'm talking stocks I'm talking everything right private everything it's around 500 trillionish right of all assets. There's a belief in

171. 1:32:55

     our community that we could tokenize that entire pie. Yeah. Right now, I'm not going to go all the way there and say, "No, but even just bips, right, just like, you know, a tenth of a percent." That's exactly where I'm going with 5%.

172. 1:33:08

     Right now, we're at 2 3 trillion of that 500 trillion slice. So, what happens when we go to 4 trillion? What happens when we go to 5 trillion? Those are paradigm shifting events of value creation for our industry, right? And so if we're able to be successful in those efforts, maybe even more in the coming years, all of us are going to be better for it.

173. 1:33:29

     There's also a a nature of, you know, liquidity begets liquidity, there's network effects and ultimately as a standard, as that standard gains momentum and traction, it tends to accelerate. And so I think it is very exciting as we creep up in terms of the relative share of uh of how much of that that value is tokenized. My question is and and I I think it's increasingly the case that this is becoming untethered from Bitcoin's price as we become more of a sophisticated industry. There's

174. 1:34:01

     better education that's done. I take it that these onchain businesses can stand on their own and they no longer are require I guess what my question is when you're underwriting you know these companies how much are you taking into account you know Bitcoin's relative price movements over some time horizon I saw you know actually a a piece just today by Jason Calakanis from Allin

175. 1:34:26

     which was basically like hey you know I'm super bearish on Bitcoin but I'm super bullish on Tao and to me you know I'm still trying to reconcile these two thoughts in my head. I think part of what he's saying is that there are onchain use cases and businesses that are becoming untethered from the way that we used to think about crypto as this one big blob. Do you think that's the case? How much are you taking into account Bitcoin into your relative

176. 1:34:50

     market thesis for underwriting these companies? Yeah, so I think there's a couple ways to look at that. Number one, I would say when I'm underwriting and I'm looking at a solution, I'm not asking whether or not you, I, or anybody in this conference are going to be buying the solution or product or service. I'm asking what the average person is going to be thinking. What the average company is going to be thinking from a B2B perspective or B TOC perspective. And the answer is they don't care about the technology. They don't care about

177. 1:35:17

     blockchain. They don't care about cloud services. They don't care about AI. It is what have you done for me lately? Can you make it faster, less expensive, a better experience for me? And if the answer to those questions is yes, then you got a real product that can scale to the next 100 million people unbeknown to that person or that business that blockchain is powering the bottom line of it, right? The back end of it, that AI is on the back end. But you cannot

178. 1:35:40

     expect a person on the average person on the street saying, "I want blockchain service to do this." No, that's a reverse way to think about it. So when we're underwriting a project, number one, we're looking at it from that perspective. Can this be can this add value to the end user, whether it be a business or person, can it make it faster or less expensive? Now to your question about kind of decoupling or becoming more uncorrelated from Bitcoin,

179. 1:36:06

     the reality is uh it is not fully there, right? We see this in public market baskets, right? We see this in private altcoins, right? Uh, Bitcoin still is a tide that raises boats and brings down boats, right? The having cycle is impacting the entire industry, right?

180. 1:36:24

     From bare markets to bull market. Reality is we know it is Bitcoin specific, but the reality is it impacts everything. Hopefully to a lesser degree over time, but we're not fully decoupled. And I it would be naive for me to say uh and there is nothing disparaging to whoever you were speaking earlier because we are all entitled to our own opinion but for my opinion it is we are still um untagtherine in present tense over time right and so um I am

181. 1:36:51

     still expecting bare markets to impact my portfolio companies bull markets to impact my portfolio companies as a as an example we invest in stable coins. Stable coins have nothing to do with Bitcoin, but I expect the velocity of stable coins to increase during the peak moments of Bitcoin pricing. I expect it to decrease during the bare market, the trough period, which actually it fortunately for this bare market, the very first one ever, stable coins actually only went flat.

182. 1:37:18

     They usually the supply, you know, 10 20% pullback, maybe bigger in 2018. You know, you know, we even we hardly even had stable coins. Then 2021, we had like a 30% pullback. this time we went flat. I think what Rob's getting at and I think what your answer is getting at is that there are secular trends here that are at play that are driving sector specific growth. And so one of them is obviously this tokenization kind of boom that you were talking about just kind of inching away with 2 trillion, 3

183. 1:37:47

     trillion, 4 trillion, 5 trillion. My question to you here as an investor, how do you position for this? And so I guess if the tokenization thesis is correct, trillions of dollars of assets come on chain over the next, let's call it five and 10 years. Who wins? Who loses? How do I as an investor, as an entrepreneur, as a builder? How do I position my business, my company, my portfolio for this trend? Whether it be in the liquid

184. 1:38:12

     market, in the venture market, how I think about my day-to-day operation, how I think about who I'm working with, who wins, who loses, if this thesis plays out. So my frame of mind is long-term number one, right? So my funds operate in 10-year horizons. So I'm not looking at the next day, the next week, the next quarter, the next year. I'm really looking at how society and technology trends, technological and societal trends will be moving across a decade.

185. 1:38:40

     And that is number one how the frame of mind I I need to be thinking about. And then what my LPS u enable me to be thinking about. So I'm looking at how tokenization is going to play out over the next decade. I'm looking at how agentic economy is going to be playing out uh over the next decade. And just to help define what even an agentic economy is for your audience, it is not just having an agent out there, you know, purchasing or selling things on your

186. 1:39:06

     behalf, but it is agent to agent commerce, right? So there's an agent on the other side of that transaction. And I'll give you a very crude example. If there is an agent that is writing code and an agent that is reviewing code, right? So you are compensating the reviewer or the editor to look at my code. What if I what if that that editor charges a micro payment less than a penny for every line of code that they

187. 1:39:30

     review? Well, now these agents are interacting with one another, perfecting code and using probably a digital asset, a microp payment to execute that transaction with near zero time settlement uh probably with an interestbearing token, right? So you're using something that could be leveraged 24/7 365 7 days a week while you're sleeping um and is executing functionality operation and general and increasing GDP productivity for you and

188. 1:40:01

     a nation probably perhaps. So these are the societal trends I'm looking for. We are not there yet I want to be clear right but could we be there in the next 5 to 10 years? Um my estimation is yes. Now, to the core of your question, who wins and who loses in this? Well, I think uh financial institutions are right for disruption. Does that mean they lose? By the way, no. Cuz I think they're going to acquire a bunch of companies. I think they're going to build their own solutions. And so, I don't necessarily think that they lose

189. 1:40:30

     in in this overall cuz I think it could be some zero for them if they act quickly and thoughtfully into the fintech sector. Um but if they don't, they will lose. They will. And I think the tokenization playbook has been made and if it scales in the direction that I think it's going to scale over the next decade, uh they need to be thoughtful about how they um manage their own technology in house. And I will give you an example if you if you don't mind.

190. 1:40:57

     During 2000 and 2010, I think a lot of uh financial institutions thought all right, we're going to just hire the best engineers and we're going to build the best technology. I think there was a lot of mixed results uh during that decade.

191. 1:41:10

     I think between 2010 and 2020 there was acknowledgement in in financial services to say let's not build it ourselves. We just probably poured in a hundreds of millions of dollars with conflicting results. Let's engage fintech and let's start leveraging these new startups that are out there. And there was an awareness that we need to have incubators. We need to engage. We might need to even start buying some of these companies. And I think you're seeing an

192. 1:41:34

     acceleration of that mindset going forward. Yep. Yeah. Because I mean I think the the thesis there is disrupt yourself rather than be disrupted by the market. I think that's right. And I I uh I was chatting with the head of stable coins at Mastercard and he was describing how right now their fastest growing business segment is these virtual cards, these one time use for agents to go and conduct a a

193. 1:42:00

     transaction uh with some merchant and that maintains the credit card principles versus like a debit card which is you know again this is a head of stable coins who's saying their fastest growing segment is this virtual card and for so long we were like, "Oh, stable coins, AI agent, it's a perfect match. They're going to be using one another. It's perfect." But no, it's not the case. They're still using these credit cards, but things that are optimized for this. What he did

194. 1:42:25

     say is very similar to what you said about microtransactions. We could arrive at an agentto agent com commerce paradigm where stable coins make more sense for a debit card kind of transaction rather than putting a monthly subscription where you get access to the thing for the entire month on a credit card and maybe even charge back right if you don't want to cancel or whatnot on a payer use basis. My question to you is specifically around

195. 1:42:52

     stable coins. That is a fundamental like rewiring and reshaping of a lot of really ingrained financial commercial transactions and the way that these things work. How do we unravel or rework so much of the way that these payments and this commerce is done so that we're not on a subscription basis and we're on a pay-peruse basis? just given your experience in in the way that these

196. 1:43:17

     technologies are adopted, how does an undertaking like this go through? Yeah, I I I think so I think you hit on a very important piece that I'm I'm literally as an investor on the hunt for right now and that is building out essentially a pro and I'm going to use the word loosely, but a protocol that is going to enable payments for a Genta economy, but it's also an identity protocol as well that needs to be built.

197. 1:43:40

     I here's why I say that. So we will have agents on our behalf. Businesses will have agents on their behalf. What happens when those agents need are are doing something that is outside the scope of what we intended them to do? What if they do something that is fraudulent? What if they do something where they hallucinate? What if they do something that is malicious? Well, who's liable for that? Right? Is it you and I

198. 1:44:02

     that is liable for that for building those agent? Is the business liable for that? So I think we need to have a KYC AML type of process to um identify who these agents are, what they represent, who they represent before money payments really start playing a role in the way we are thinking about them, right? And here is a an extreme example, but it's one that we should think about. If I said to my agent, I want you to make as

199. 1:44:26

     much money in the next 24 hours. Who's to say that they don't go out and start fishing people and start doing something that I did not intend for them to do or want them to do right now? We don't want them. So, we need to put guard rails around these agents from a technological perspect. But we also need to think about what is identity, what is a payment protocol. So, I share all that context with you and kind of the the parameters I'm thinking about because we

200. 1:44:50

     need to invest in this infrastructure and this framework going forward over the next decade. Once again, it's not going to happen overnight. We're going to and from my perspective, I don't know if there will be a singular protocol either or probably a patchwork of different systems and technologies that put all of this together uh over time.

201. 1:45:08

     And so I'm spending a lot of time thinking about this. I'm spending a lot of time talking to startups and I just got off the stage and there were several of them that uh caught me when I was walking up saying, "I'm building something. You got to take a look." And I'm all and I'm all ears to hear what they have to say.

202. 1:45:21

     Yeah. Yeah. Love it. Well, keep thinking long term. I think that's something that us, you know, our younger generation needs to kind of understand more when it comes to investing. There's a lot of prediction markets and kind of like short-term oriented leverage and out of the out of the money options and these types of things. That's one big takeaway for me on the tokenization kind of winners and losers front. I do appreciate the kind of nuance thesis about look, it's not just that

203. 1:45:45

     traditional finance is going to be, you know, up for grabs and lose. It's just that they're we're going to see this kind of M&A process. we're going to see this kind of selfd disruption and then just coming back all the way to the top man the ABCs and D's man I mean it's just where where these things come where they meet there's probably a unique value there and just kind of continuously operating from this kind of convergence perspective I think is uh is

204. 1:46:09

     something interesting to to take away as an entrepreneur so I appreciate great no this has been a real pleasure thank you gentlemen for having me thank you so much all right buddy see you next time all righty guys here we are about halfway the room. Rob, let's say about a quarter of the way through here. We got the Bitwise guys next.

205. 1:46:26

     Just getting started. Just getting started here. Um, what do you say we do a quick little 30 second one minute break, guys. We'll be right back with Matt Hugan from Bitwise as well as Ryan Rasmus. Be right back. quick.

206. 1:47:37

     Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.

207. 1:50:01

     Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget?

208. 1:50:16

     We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212.

209. 1:51:24

     All righty, guys. We're here at the bridge by the Thai in New York City. I'm joined with the Bitwise Bulls, Ryan. Matt, good to see you again. First live show together. Y everyone suited up here. How are we feeling, guys? Feeling great. We're in New York City.

210. 1:51:40

     It's a great event. Really happy to be here. Excited for the rest of the year. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. I mean, we just had a bit of a multi-week pullback there on the market. I think there's a lot of doomerism out there. Maybe we can just start there and just kind of understand, you know, why people want to get this sense of just like being thinking pessimistically like it just it's it's a very alluring thing to think pessimistically with regards to markets or life or just kind of to get bareold.

211. 1:52:07

     right now there's there's the AI thing, there's the quantum thing, there's the privacy thing. There's just a lot of like reasons to be upset. Um, where are you guys at right now on the sentiment of the market? Yeah, I mean, look, I I think the challenge for people is that a lot of the short-term catalysts feel negative.

212. 1:52:24

     There could be a shock moment with the AI bubble. There could be a shock moment from the Fed. There could be a shock moment around the election. And then the bullish catalyst specifically for crypto are very long-term, right? It's about 300,000 financial adviserss deciding finally to make a 2% allocation to crypto. It's about regulation. Like the Genius Act hasn't even really gone into effect. These things take a very long time. So there's these two different

213. 1:52:49

     timelines playing out. A slow bullish timeline and then a short risk timeline. And it's just natural from an evolutionary perspective to focus on those short-term shock moments. I think that that's conditioning people to feel pessimistic in what is honestly a long-term extraordinarily great setup, particularly for crypto.

214. 1:53:08

     Yeah. Well, and I also think that pessimistic and negative tweets or headlines just get more attention. They get more eyeballs. They go more viral and so people are more inclined to do that. Media outlets are typically more inclined to do that and that draws more views. But I agree with Matt. The long-term setup for crypto is incredibly strong. Even if you look out 3 to 6 months from now, I think we're in a much more optimistic situation than what we

215. 1:53:31

     see today. And so I don't think there's any reason to be pessimistic on the long term. I think people that are are going to find themselves sidelined and perhaps surprised for what we see next year. Yeah, I agree. I mean, we've been very very optimistic for the last kind of 3, four months and I think that there's a lot to be excited about.

216. 1:54:05

     what the Fed rates are, right? These are secular assets coming on chain in size over time, right? You say advisors, etc. So, yeah. No, that's absolutely right. And then the other really exciting thing about those is those are still non- consensus bets, right? But if you go and talk to the man on the street, they're excited about AI, they're excited about robotics, they're excited about GLP1s.

217. 1:54:27

     Those are all very crowded trades. Even if they're differences of opinion, they're crowded trades. Most people still aren't paying attention to stable coins, extraordinary growth. So, I do think there are these long-term bullish catalysts growing extremely fast, which importantly, the upside is still there.

218. 1:54:51

     Yeah. And I think the reason perhaps they're they're non-conensus in a way is that most of the investment community outside of us in the crypto world aren't familiar with tokenization or stable coins. I was at a conference last week at with two of the major wirehouses and the questions we got were very simple.

219. 1:55:09

     What are stable coins? I was asked by one adviser, am I using stable coins today and I don't even know it. Right? So like they're not sure what this technology is, but they've heard about it. They're a bit away from making actual investual investments in it. We sit so close to it. We hear about it all day every day. But once the regulation gets there, once the major banks adopt it, the financial institutions start using it, these are going to be huge booms. And I think the 600% growth rate

220. 1:55:32

     is nothing compared to what we're going to see. So another kind of secular trend that is kind of what you're saying Matt with these consensus bets versus these kind of non-conensus ones is that this rotation of capital from these tech stocks whether it's semiconductors or memory or kind of just the like the broad attention on anthropic IPO open AI IPO that kind of risk capital

221. 1:55:57

     potentially coming into the digital asset space how real do you think that is is there a timeline you had in mind for that and maybe just like what type of investor is the investor who's going to be allocated to that risk capital but then be willing to shift it over to kind of crypto capital. Well, well, I think capital rotation happens faster today than it did historically. One area that I'm finding interesting right now and perhaps we're going to see this capital

222. 1:56:21

     rotation accelerate is the month of November. Well, earlier this year, we saw major tech companies raising capital. We saw SpaceX IPO is the most valuable company in the world and or at the time. And so what's going to happen again I think in November is you have the anthropic IPO, you have other tech companies issuing more shares, raising more capital to fund the AI build out. I think we might see a rotation into that

223. 1:56:46

     category and perhaps out of crypto in the short term in November. But I think once that passes and once we get to December, we see a rotation back in to the crypto industry. And I think it's yes risk on, but I also think it's investors that have just been sidelined and are looking for more opportunities.

224. 1:57:00

     And once they get past this anthropic IPO, once they get past some of the AI opportunities, crypto looks remarkably undervalued relative to all these other categories. And so I think those investors who like to buy things when they are good valuations or perhaps discounted will rotate back into crypto.

225. 1:57:16

     Now they can do that with ETFs and with index ETFs much easier than they could two or three years ago. Yeah. I mean, they can just stay in their brokerages basically. Exactly. Which is which is great. It doesn't seem like it's that big of an ordeal, but it truly is.

226. 1:57:30

     I think it's a huge deal. And actually, I already think we saw a little bit of this capital rotation. I think one of the reasons Bitcoin ramped from 57 to 87 to 85 was that the sort of all-consuming black hole that was AI consuming all capital sort of quieted down after the summer, right? People started to raise concerns about bubbles. They started to raise concerns about valuation. You saw CDS on things like Corewave and Oracle

227. 1:57:54

     start to tweak up and it gave people an excuse to put a little bit of money into crypto. I do think when we get past the anthropic IPO, those floodgates are going to open up and then importantly the other side is all the money that was going to leave crypto already left, right? All the money rotated out from October to June. I think there are no more sellers left. So, if we get just a little bit of this AI capital coming into the next big thing, which is

228. 1:58:18

     tokenization and stable coins, I think the price impact could be pretty significant. I mean, music to my ears. Now, the question is what what what are they going to buy, right? And in the past, you had kind of like the Bitcoin, ETH, Salana, XRP, Litecoin kind of like basket of like the majors, call it, but I think there's kind of a new cohort of majors that the AI crowd as well as the institutional investment crowd is going to kind of wake up to. Um, and so kind

229. 1:58:48

     of just give us the high level of what you think the allocators are going to be most interested in from a sector perspective, right? Whether it's something on the AI side or is it on the DeFi side, the privacy side, the advisers that you're speaking to, the allocators who are heavy in AI stocks, the kind of mom and pop, what do you think that these guys are really going to be looking towards uh kind of sector

230. 1:59:12

     wise, and then we can get into specific assets. Go ahead. Well, I think there's three different ways that allocators are going to be looking at the crypto market, and that's going to lead them down three different paths. I think Bitcoin is going to be the first and largest asset that people allocate to in size, right? Most the advisers that we speak to, most of the non-cryptonative investors start with

231. 1:59:32

     Bitcoin and if they're on zero, they'll add one or 2% there and if they have 1 or 2%, they might level that up. So, I think Bitcoin is one path. I think fundamental assets with strong fundamentals is the second path. So, revenue producing assets that have strong user metrics, which is kind of new this cycle as opposed to prior cycles. that's near hyperlquid, some DeFi assets that have shown really strong revenue and user numbers. And I

232. 1:59:57

     think the third is just simply assets with ETFs. It's easy to access in their brokerage accounts. It's easy for financial adviserss to add positions to crypto assets that have ETFs in their client accounts. Much easier than buying something on a centralized exchange or impossible for them to buy something on a decentralized exchange. So, I think access is important, fundamentals are important, and then Bitcoin is always important. Yeah.

233. 2:00:21

     No, I mean hard to argue with any of that. I basically agree. I do think some segments of that are dramatically undervalued versus their potential, but I do think we'll see broad-based flows both on based on those characteristics.

234. 2:00:32

     Yeah. And then there's been a kind of cohort of assets this cycle so far that have almost been trying to fill in the gaps that Bitcoin has kind of lacked. You've got Zcash on the privacy side. There's a smaller asset called Pearl on the kind of AI side. And you've got Litecoin even kind of perking up in terms of its uh DeFi capabilities as well as its privacy capabilities. What what I you know would have never thought would have happened is happening which is like there's this revival of this new

235. 2:01:01

     era of like money assets. For the longest time it was just Bitcoin. But if you look at the precious metals market, you've got gold, silver, palladium, copper, and then it kind of really kind of fizzles out. Ethereum kind of tried to be that. But I think there's other assets now that are really looking to grab land from Bitcoin. So if today Bitcoin has 99% of the crypto store value market, I think there's a world in 5 10 years where maybe it only has 95% or 90% of that market share. How real do

236. 2:01:32

     you think this kind of trend is of alternative store value assets growing in the crypto market? Um is it a narrative thing? Is it a fad? Is this a real thing that could actually look like the precious metals market? Yeah, look, I absolutely think it's a very real thing. If you think about Bitcoin specifically, for one, the market is much larger than it used to be. So 10% share of a market that's $400 billion is

237. 2:01:56

     not worth much, but 10% of a market that's going to be $4 trillion is a very big market. So you have that element. And then the other thing we can't overlook with Bitcoin is like, look, Sue coiners like Ryan and I have been dragging Bitcoin into the regulatory light. Right now Black Rockck is a huge player. Now the SEC is a big player. Now there's all these regulation that makes space for things like Zcash that have

238. 2:02:18

     more of sort of crypto's OG ethos, more of the privacy, etc. So the more Bitcoin gets dragged into this giant market, the more space there is on the corner. But I think it's just it's it's going to be like the precious metals market. There will be Bitcoin, which will be the dominant factor, and then there will be Zcash, and then there will probably be a few other slivers that are slightly smaller. That's the natural part of a growing market. Well, in the in the

239. 2:02:41

     store value market, which is really what we're talking about here, is growing dramatically. Gold was a $2 trillion asset 20 years ago. It's now a $30 trillion asset. Bitcoin share has grown from less than 1% 10 years ago of the store value market to 5% or more today.

240. 2:02:57

     And so this whole market is growing. So to Matt's point of if they have a smaller market share of this store value market, but the store value market continues to grow at this remarkable rate, we've seen it over the past 20 years. that's going to be okay. We still have a lot of upside there. And we think the store value market's going to grow dramatically over the next decade with fiat debasement, worries about debt and deficits. And so I think Bitcoin's

241. 2:03:21

     carving out a nice chunk of that for itself. There is likely room for other assets to to emerge in that category, but I don't think Bitcoin's at risk of losing its market leadership anytime soon. Yeah, I agree with that. On the kind of other side of this, you know, spectrum are barbells, this kind of onchain businesses or just these these growing companies in the space, not protocols, but companies or, you know, blockchains with fees or DeFi apps with fees, users,

242. 2:03:50

     etc. This is how Robbie and I have been positioned. We keep thinking about it on the per side. Payword came out yesterday saying that they're going to be the first entity that brings licensed CTC licensed per markets to Hyperlquid. uh the the HIV3 star Vlad from lighter was on a investor call I think last week and said that they are not uh quarters but months away from coming into the US so that's obviously happening um tokenization per stable coins these are

243. 2:04:19

     my big three as far as this kind of assets to invest in that are kind of growing with this tailwind how do you guys think about this onshoring of tokenization of per stable coins and kind of investing at the bleeding leading edge of these three categories because these are going to have the biggest tailwinds of growth behind them.

244. 2:04:37

     I believe Fer, stable coins and tokenized assets and so that the protocols and the blockchains and the kind of networks there are something that I really want to be a part of. How do you guys think about that? Yeah, I absolutely think that is right.

245. 2:04:49

     I would add uh lending protocols to that as well. I would add the a and the morphos which are the other piece of that puzzle. But you have what you have is a dramatic expansion of the addressable market for two different reasons. one, we're going from crypto only assets to all global assets, right?

246. 2:05:05

     That's like a 100x expansion of the TAM. And then we're going from cryptonnative investors to all investors as you talked about with Payword and and Hyperlway, what you talked about with Lighter. That's another 100x of the TAM. You multiply those together and we have these protocols that were serving a very tiny market which are now going after all investors on all assets globally.

247. 2:05:26

     It's a massive expansion of the addressable market. If they're able to execute on that, then of course their current valuations are dramatically lower. So that's why we've seen those valuations go up because they're going after a bigger market in multiple ways and it's really exciting. I think they're going to succeed.

248. 2:05:41

     Yeah, I I think this is all actually happening at a perfect time. If if you think about the rise of stable coins, tokenization or pers 5 years ago, the regulatory environment wasn't there. The institutions weren't there to adopt this technology, but today they are. And I think there's great ways to gain exposure to these trends as well for investors that weren't there 5 years ago. And so if you want to get exposure to these three things that you mentioned, stable coins, per

249. 2:06:06

     tokenization, lending, you can do it through crypto equities like Coinbase, Robin Hood, Figure, Securitize, Circle. You can do it through DeFi platforms like Uniswap and A and Morpho. You can do it through other other means like the ETFs and index funds. And so I just think that right now the regulations there, the institutional adoption's there, and the access is there to invest

250. 2:06:29

     in these companies across the entire stack, which I think is really important. And an investor who wants to create a a portfolio to play this trend has really great options to do that and compete and and participate in this market.

251. 2:06:42

     Yeah. you know, when you think about this kind of broad trend shift and then that what you're saying with regards to just kind of thinking about how investors are going to come in, select certain assets and kind of zoom out, think for the long term. What I want to do as an allocator is I want to get to my desired percentage of networks, right? So, you know, obviously Bitcoin, it's kind of hard to get to any sort of desired percentage of that network. It's a lot easier to get to your desired

252. 2:07:07

     percentage of Zcash than it is to get of Bitcoin. and you kind of zoom that all the way down and you start to kind of look at opportunities where you know if Ethereum is overvalued in your in your perspective or perhaps it's just properly valued and it's going to be hard to get to your you know your you know 10,000 units or a,000 units or even 100 then you look at something like a mirror or you look at something like a salon and so I've started to kind of

253. 2:07:31

     think about these things as what is my desired percentage of of the network and then you can kind of do some moon math and look at look zoom out And it's like, well, wow, if I get to this amount of this network and this network becomes very valuable in the future, I'm going to be a very valuable participant of this network. This is a fair way to kind of zoom out and think long term. It's something that a lot of people struggle with, right? Everyone wants to trade.

254. 2:07:55

     Everyone, you know, wants to catch every move. I don't think people are thinking about percentage ownership of networks that are going to be very valuable in the future. How do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, I love that approach. I think that's reasonable. I don't think people are thinking about valuations in the way they should. Like you take even something like Ethereum versus Salana,

255. 2:08:12

     if you ask people which they like better, they will say one or the other, but they never talk about the relative valuation. Like Salana people would like it just as much if it were the same valuation as ETH, but it's actually 1/5if the valuation. I think in the future people will start to think about those relative valuation sizes. It's one of the reasons we're so bullish on NER.

256. 2:08:31

     It's going after a massive market, but it has a very small current market cap, right? If it succeeds in that goal, it has 10, 20, 30x upside. No guarantee it will get there, but I think to your point, you could own a bigger share of somebody that's going after a large market versus one of these established players.

257. 2:08:48

     Well, that's exactly it, right? Is is there is there a valuation mismatch? Can you identify that? And then can you accumulate your percentage of that mismatch valuation and then be, you know, have the ability to just hold on, right? Like that's that's the hard part.

258. 2:09:05

     That's right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you have to hold on. And I would add, I think you can be too cute and try to pick the one asset that will succeed. I think we're so early in this market that that is probably a recipe for failure. I think you need a basket if you want to have a hope of capturing the upside.

259. 2:09:20

     Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think on the other side of that equation is how a lot of the allocators that we speak to that are on the traditional finance side of things think about portfolio allocations. They think about it more from a percentage of their overall portfolio. how much do they want to allocate to tokenization, stable coins, or crypto technology more broadly? And then within that, they might break that sleeve down. So say they want a 10% allocation to these trends that we're

260. 2:09:44

     talking about. They might go 5% Bitcoin, then split the other 5% across five different projects. Maybe they'll rebalance quarterly or or or monthly. But they think about it from a total exposure relative to their whole portfolio against this emerging asset class. And I think that's I'm all in. Yeah, I mean there's no total exposure% the exposure you and I both mean and and I think that is the so if I was to like put this in kind of close this loop it's that is the trend shift from the macro that is going to be

261. 2:10:17

     driving the rerating of these assets that we're talking about that have the valuation kind of miss yeah matter it's like okay so from 0% to 2% it's going to go to Bitcoin that's going to you know lift all the boats then where is there going to be that outperformance and and that kind of valuation rerating um that I think you know is kind of on the precipice h has already started like I think Ccash is very very firmly on its way to potentially onetenth of Bitcoin's

262. 2:10:44

     valuation I think near is going to take a real shot at Salana I don't think people are ready for that one I think too many people are focused on Salana versus Ethereum not Near versus Salana um and then you know there's a couple others obviously I own positions in a lot of these and pretty much all of these uh both the Ethereums of the world and the Salana the world and the Zcap ES and the salon or and the nears and I I

263. 2:11:05

     find it different thesises like there's a different reason why I want to own ETH Bitcoin and soul than why I want to own Zcash you know near and and the likes it's different parts of the portfolio. Yeah, absolutely. That's right. And you have to think about them differently. You have to size them appropriately.

264. 2:11:20

     They're different points of the risk spectrum. You would do the same thing in stocks. You would think about a large cap stock and a venture-backed startup very differently. Uh I think the same thing is true in crypto. Yeah. I I also think something really interesting has been happening through this bare market that we didn't see previously. I mean, you mentioned that it's already starting to happen. We're

265. 2:11:38

     down significantly from all-time highs in most crypto assets, but through the past 12 months, there's been these crypto projects with green shoots, hyperlid, near Zcash, many others have have really outperformed the market, not just from not being so negative, but having really strong returns. And I think that's reflective of this breakdown in the market we're seeing where investors are rewarding projects that have strong narratives, strong thesis, and strong fundamentals.

266. 2:12:05

     Yeah. And so from that lens, just to kind of come to a close, we got a couple minutes here. Like in the past, it was probably it was easier to invest in crypto per se because you could kind of pick most of the top L1's, L2s, or anything that's kind of like a top 50 and do well in a bull market. Um, there's obviously a lot of outperformers, but now one could argue that it's harder, but from my

267. 2:12:29

     perspective, it's actually even easier than what it was in the past. And trust me, I don't get more sponsorship dollars by saying it how it is in that there's maybe a dozen of comp a dozen companies that I want to own in the space right now. A dozen coins, a dozen tokens that I think are are going to have a really strong chance at, you know, being the the leaders. Is it? And so I think it's

268. 2:12:52

     actually harder to be a builder in the industry. I think it's harder to launch a successful company. You're you're competing with much more established companies now. I don't know. How do you think about the the differences in being an investor in today's crypto world versus being an entrepreneur? And just some context there is that it was very easy to launch a token and kind of have a big valuation growth, kind of get through your unlocks. Maybe you didn't

269. 2:13:15

     really ship anything real or that great, but without getting too pessimistic, I think it's harder to be a builder in the space to compete with the existing builders and easier to be an investor. Am I wrong? Well, I think in one sense it's harder to be a pioneer and the first person to to take on building a new project in a new space in an unregulated market without institutional market structure or adoption than it is to have someone come in new and kind of see the things

270. 2:13:42

     that have worked, see things that haven't worked. The regulatory environment is much friendlier to builders today than it was ever before in crypto. And I think that plays a role here. So, I don't know if I agree that it's a lot harder to be a builder today than it was before. Of course, a lot of these ideas have been explored, but it's also shown what works, what doesn't work, and where there's still opportunities in the market. We're still so early in crypto's evolution. There's

271. 2:14:05

     so many opportunities for things to be created that we haven't thought of yet. And we've seen that happen time and time again over the past year, year and a half. And so, I think there is a lot of opportunity. Hyperlid's a great example of something that came later than much of these other projects that we're speaking about, but has grown its market share tremendously and performed very well despite being an underdog from the start.

272. 2:14:25

     Yeah, I think it's harder to be a bad builder and it's probably just as good to be a good builder. It was easy to be a bad builder and ride the beta and you can't do that anymore. The beta will not carry you to the shore. You need to carry it to the shore based on your own quality. I do think one interesting thing people aren't reflecting on enough, it's going to change the nature of crypto returns in the future because the project that you're invested in now, you're invested from a fundamental

273. 2:14:48

     perspective. If they pull back in price, you're going to add more. In the previous meta, if they pulled back in price, that meant the momentum was rotating away with them. You would sell it and get out of it. And that caused these big momentum cascades. I think you're going to see lower volatility, more fundamental based buying, more differentiation between good projects and bad projects. I don't think you'll see the kind of like 90% pullbacks in

274. 2:15:11

     real projects with real revenue because they now have value buyers like you and me ready to step in if those prices retreat. And so that on that note um has been kind of knocking on his chest and saying that the era of crypto VC is kind of coming to somewhat of an end in the sense that he believes that in 5 years or so it may be it may be much more like a lot of the market has been developed

275. 2:15:36

     and a lot of the technology that has been built has been built kind of that part aside what's happening now though is crypto VCs are being forced to operate in the liquid markets and in a way that they haven't in the last kind of bare market into bull market transitions. And what I mean is that there's always been this cohort of new L1s or new L2s or new infrastructure or new concept. And there still is a lot of that on the fintech stable coins and

276. 2:16:01

     tokenization side, but a lot of that is being eaten up by more traditional VCs and more kind of like Silicon Valleyes or Wall Streetes, not exactly your run-of-the-mill crypto venture fund. And so they are now entering into the the liquid market. And a lot of these winners that we're talking about also have very little VC overhang. And there is not like this, oh, the VC's got in first and early. They're going to win more than the average guy. It's like the

277. 2:16:27

     average guy had the chance to buy hype, to buy, you know, Zcash at $20, at $40, at $100, at $200. Um, you know, and so there's this shift in the market structure, too, Matt, that I think both on the fundamental side, but also on the on the overhang side that I think is is looking very strong.

278. 2:16:44

     It's super healthy. It's super healthy and I think crypto VCs had it too easy and I agree and thank you. In many cases took advantage of retail and early liquidity. Now it's going to be harder and more challenging. The only thing I would say that's maybe a little bit different is I think there's more opportunities today than there were 5 years ago. Yes, a lot of projects have been built but the scale of the opportunity is much bigger. So I still think we're going to see major new

279. 2:17:08

     projects. Right? A lot of people thought pers were done with BitMX. Now look at Hyperlid, right? People were like, "Oh, BitMX is it. There'll never be another big purpose." Look at Hyperlid. You're going to see that happen again and again. So there is an eternal spring to this. You're going to see new projects emerge. But yeah, the crypto VCs had it too too easy. Now it's more fair. Now retail has a shot and I like that market better. Do you guys have an opinion on Pearl?

280. 2:17:30

     Have you guys done research into Pearl? Yeah, we we certainly have members on our team who are very bullish on on Pearl. Uh, so I'm excited to continue to dig into it and start covering it more [snorts] at Bitwise. I think it's an example of these projects that are really finding their footing despite us being in a down market. I think that's a very positive outlook for these projects that have done well in the bare market when we do turn to this bull market in late 2026, early 2027. Yeah, I think I

281. 2:17:57

     like it that it's uh I think there are a bunch of new unusual ideas that people right you know too much of crypto is like ah we'll just recreate Charles Schwab on the blockchain and that's actually not what's going to be interesting. It's going to be more novel interesting ideas that emerge.

282. 2:18:11

     Yeah. And then just kind of last thing just when you look at the state of the market out there there's Arthur Hayes called them busted charts. Um also he just sold a bunch of his positions I think at the bottom you know classic. Um when you guys are looking at the market holistically, you have clients calling about you know different assets etc. How and just generally in the market today, how inclined are you to allocate capital

283. 2:18:35

     to the winners? Um, a lot of them we spoke about today that have that already up X's and X's and X's and versus kind of things that have been beaten down and probably have more risk just from a broad perspective of their market structure, but potentially a lot more upside kind of like Near was at at like a dollar. Nobody really cared, but obviously it had this upside. How do you guys think about allocating capital now

284. 2:18:59

     onto what seems like consensus winners internally in the industry, but obviously not broadly versus like a lot of these kind of beaten down uh charts with with good fundamentals. Yeah, look, I I think the consensus winners still have a long room to run, right? We're not even in really the bull market part of the bull market cycle.

285. 2:19:16

     So, everyone who thinks like, oh, it's up 2x, it could be up 10x, it could be up 20x. I still think many of them are undervalued. There are some gems in the rough on these other things. You have to have a thesis on why to invest. You could look at Near a few years ago and have a thesis on why to invest. An incredible team. They stuck through it through multiple bull markets.

286. 2:19:35

     Interesting tech. That was a thesis on why to invest. If there's a fundamental thesis, you can make those bets. But look, I think a lot of the the the things we've been talking about are not yet widely owned mainstream. I think there's a lot more upside in this cycle for those assets.

287. 2:19:49

     Yeah, I I completely agree. We're still being asked at conferences or meetings with financial adviserss about the the blue chips, right? The Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salanas, maybe once in a while about Hyperlid, Neo, XRP, but the mainstream Wall Street investors really aren't in the weeds of crypto and really haven't heard of many of these projects we spoke about, but they also aren't allocated to the majors yet, right? The reason we're being asked about them is

288. 2:20:14

     because they're starting to think about making those allocations. So to Matt's point, I think the majors still have a lot of room to run once we start to see traditional capital flow into crypto. Eventually, those same investors will learn about these other interesting projects that they don't think about or talk about that much. And I think that bodess well for those projects at well.

289. 2:20:31

     Yes, it's a it's a rising tide situation to some extent, but I think the best projects with strong fundamentals and novel products ultimately win out and I think the blue chips do pretty well as well. Thanks guys. Ryan, Matt, the Bitwise Bulls. Great to be here.

290. 2:20:46

     All right, guys. We'll take a quick break and be right back with our next guest and Robbie. Thank you guys. Heat. Heat.

291. 2:22:08

     Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. N.

292. 2:24:14

     Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget?

293. 2:24:29

     We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212.

294. 2:25:11

     Heat back. Heat. Heat.

295. 2:26:17

     Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.

296. 2:27:45

     Heat. Heat.

297. 2:29:57

     Yo yo yo. So, what's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget? We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't

298. 2:30:22

     be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212. Heat. Heat. N.

299. 2:31:53

     Heat. Heat.

300. 2:34:08

     Hey, hey, hey.

301. 2:35:41

     Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City, getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget?

302. 2:35:55

     We're going to have All righty. We're here at the Bridge by the Tide. Matt, good to see you. Good to see you. Really great. Yeah, it's good to be here. I mean, in a lot of perspectives, but the topics that a lot of people talk about here are still very theoretical, right? Um, at Ano because we do permissionless tokenized assets, the use the usage of them is like super strong, right? So like over a billion dollars in TVL in stocks alone

303. 2:36:32

     and they like really solve a problem for people whereas I feel like a lot of times when you're here you talk about how tokenization is going to bring whatever efficiencies to TRFI instance settlement DTCC something right for us it all kind of starts with the user and so I feel like I kind of have like a very different perspective on where is their actual you know end user demand for all this stuff so It's been it's been a really fun couple years.

304. 2:36:57

     Yeah. I mean, I think the the end user that a lot of these kind of asset managers thought that they were going to get, which is bringing their uh products on chain and getting distribution with uh you know, just the average onchain user. I just don't think that like the it's kind of like oil and water. Like bringing a T- bill product on to the guy that's like levered 20x on like fartcoin. Does it like it's like oil and water, right? Um, but now it seems like

305. 2:37:22

     they're actually just like bringing assets on chain, like not just products, but actual assets, which is hopefully like providing this boost to the kind of total addressable market for DeFi. Um, and I think you guys are playing a part of that, too.

306. 2:37:37

     Yeah, it's kind of interesting, right? Like DeFi used to be like if you didn't know where the yield came from, like you were the yield, right? Um, and so the yield was coming from token emissions and it was coming from, you know, Ponzi games. Um, and that's like a lot of fun, right? Like don't get me wrong. Um, we love we love that. We want more of that.

307. 2:37:54

     Um, but what's kind of interesting now is you have like real world sources of yield. So like I don't know if you know about Saturn. It's like you know it's effectively Athena I think is like you can think of it like similar to economics but the yield comes from STRC and like that's genuinely very differentiated from the yield coming from I mean even Athena is pulling its yield from from positive funding right which is a reflection of like a demand

308. 2:38:20

     for crypto longs right and so in a bare market that product just doesn't work as well and so the speculation winds up being very cyclical and then the product growth and like you know lack of growth is also cyclical. I think with RWA, DeFi can actually be kind of a more evergreen interesting set of money games that we can play because the because the yield comes from offchain. Um, so that that's

309. 2:38:42

     like been been very cool. Uh, with T bills in particular, man, like when we set out to sell those, it was only institutions or like very large treasury managers wanted them. And if you look on chain, like the ownership is extremely chunky, right? It's people that cuz no one cares about 3% on like 10 grand, right? Like you'd rather just leave it in stables so that when the next parkcoin comes like you you want to be

310. 2:39:06

     always know you're liquid to a next park coin, right? Like the number one thing I don't want to do is lock up my assets for like a 9% yield in like some fixed income product and then like not be able to access it when the next park coin drop. Like knowing my luck, it'll drop the next day, right? And so uh stocks are kind of interesting because they're they're so liquid, right?

311. 2:39:25

     especially with like has this like instant minting and redemption setup and so as a result like instead of holding your money in stables you can just hold it in the S&P and then the second you change your mind 24 hours a day 5 days a week and then a lot of these this stuff is pretty liquid over the weekend too you can you can ape whatever you need to right um and you guys just got plugged into.com which is like I don't know if you guys have um or if you heard like this like

312. 2:39:49

     harness term in AI it's like what's your harness it's like is it like clawed or gruckbot or like How do you access your AI harness? Near.com is like the onchain harness. I like that. And so you guys are a you guys are now like the the you know main tokenized stock uh provider there. Um and so you know the ease of getting into something I think is very important too. Um and so you guys did a good job on that.

313. 2:40:16

     I mean your.com is just like an amazing product, right? So we've been like super excited to work with them for a long time. I think where it's going to get even more interesting is on the AI side, right? Um because for me, like, you know, we'll go back to like stables versus T bills, right, for a second. I would never in a million years remember to move my money into T bills because also like I'm hoping it's a bull market tomorrow, right? It's like obviously bull market. So I I I'm like always

314. 2:40:40

     hoping that the period of time where I keep my money in stables is going to be really short. Yeah. And so I'm I'm just going to keep it in stables because I don't want to get 3% or whatever over, you know, a year. Who knows what it is.

315. 2:40:52

     You know, if I'm hoping that everything's going to pump tomorrow, then I might not even hold it overnight, right? With AI, I can just tell my agent, look, when I'm not using stables, just put it into T bills for me, right? And then it'll just handle that. And with your.com, doesn't matter what chain I'm on, right? And like I don't have to worry about all the privacy issues, right? of like everyone, you know, if I like have this if I have this kind of strategy running, I tell people about it on the rollup, then like it's going to be pretty easy to figure out who I am on

316. 2:41:18

     chain, right? Right. But on your.com, I don't have to worry about that. So, and I think that's kind of big for people, you know, a lot of like we'll talk to family offices, right? They're trying to evaluate onchain versus offchain and they they own some crypto. They're bullish on it, but they also own stocks.

317. 2:41:32

     They're trying to figure out like why would I ever come on chain? And one of the key reasons is they might want to move between crypto and stocks easily. A product like near.com gets that for them. But then it's never worth it for them to sacrifice the privacy they get in the trady system with a near.com or a similar kind of thing. They can, you know, they can rest easy knowing that their portfolio isn't out there for everybody to to to peek at.

318. 2:41:56

     Yeah. Do you think that that that the average DeFi user like wants that onchain privacy? Dude, it's hit or miss, man, right? Like cuz like you know social trading and like trading in public is like super cool. Dude, I tried FOMO for a little while and I was just like I can't I can't do this. I can't put any amount of money on here that it's actually meaningful. I I I pulled a lot of mine off. I still like it a lot, but it's just like Yeah. The the public social trading is just like wow.

319. 2:42:22

     What a grind, right? Like Yeah. And it's like I'm getting notifications from like Frankie God's bot, Frankie God sold, dude. They're just grinding out there. It's insane. Yeah. Like I think I think where we're going to wind up is kind of interesting cuz like in the same way that like tokenization democratized like access to like buying and selling and using and building on top of all these assets we're also seeing kind of a democratization of investment research

320. 2:42:45

     right so I I like used to work in the hedge fund world and it was very gatekept right like you have like 10 sellside banks right and you got to study finance to like get a job at one of them and what we're seeing across Twitter but especially across like social trading is that There are people out there that have very like highquality alpha on a lot of names and they don't have anywhere to share their thesis outside of these platforms. And I

321. 2:43:10

     think putting them on a platform like that like I'm I'm working you know on has ono perks, right? I think one of the things we need really badly there is an open like alpha research section. I don't think it necessarily needs to be copy trading because the problem with copy trading is everyone has different time horizons, right? And everybody has different capital bases. So for whoever's running

322. 2:43:29

     the the copy tradable account, maybe they're putting 10% of their assets into it, but then I might as a user copy trade with 50% of my assets. The second it goes down 2%, I'm freaking out, right? So you have this like misalignment of like portfolio management um and like ability to weather a draw down and whatever that like I think is problematic for copy trading. But I think you know something

323. 2:43:52

     smarter where it's like I can have an AI that's reading the investment thesis that you wrote on like on like Near let's say and then my AI can see that it actually my portfolio is missing a little bit of alt exposure like maybe I should buy some or maybe I need to diversify out of Zcash and Near is sort of Zcash beta or something right I I think I think the future of of research in particular is going to be really

324. 2:44:16

     interesting that's where I see like this trading in public moving is like in in order to get people to like follow you in the first place, it's good to show that you have a track record of being able to make money. It is good for that reputational like that like verifiable identity tracing to your ability to perform in the market.

325. 2:44:33

     Yeah. But then but then the thing about it is like trading is a very personal thing, right? And you know people talk a lot about like you should have conviction, you should hold something for a 10x or whatever, but holding some no one ever went broke holding something for a 2x, right?

326. 2:44:47

     Exactly. or selling half on a double or whatever. Yeah. No, like it's you got to just treat it very personally, right? And uh it's the same with stocks, right? It's the And you know, someday we'll have options too, right? Um it's the same with PES, it's the same with crypto.

327. 2:45:00

     Like you got to just trade according to your own style and sometimes that's very difficult to do when you're trading in public because now all of a sudden people are like trying to throw shade at you for like selling on a double, right?

328. 2:45:10

     It's like there should be no shame in that. No. Or or um sell shaming as well, right? If that's what you're saying, right? Yeah. Well, Matt, I think we're coming to a a wrap here in just a couple seconds. When you're thinking about the the trajectory that Ono is on, just to kind of close us out, like where where do you see Ono going in 2027 and like how is that different from potentially where it's been?

329. 2:45:32

     Yeah. So, I think over the years, if you look at like Ono's trajectory, it's moved more and more from like B2B, you know, large treasuries buying tea bills, right? Uh to like very direct to consumer, right? Uh, and I think with auto per like you can see that that's like the most obvious like example of that, right? Um, I think where we're heading is even more in that like direct to consumer, you know, what does the end user actually want kind of place. Yeah.

330. 2:45:59

     Um, and so, you know, the the kinds of features that we're going to build are things like, you know, first like end consumers really want access to international equities, right? Um, it's expensive. It's not easy to like get access like you can get access on interactive brokers but it's expensive to like the Korean market. Not everybody wants to do that. Not everybody's going to do that. And if you just want to tell your AI to like go buy some SKH highix like you don't really want to have to like onboard it to like interactive brokers. Yeah.

331. 2:46:24

     But then I think you look at like the global capital markets and this is where it gets kind of trippy is like okay if people that are if people are able to invest cross border like easily because of the chain and the chain doesn't have borders right. So that that's kind of that's kind of the use case, right? Um it's non-s sovereign and so you can permissionlessly trade assets from whatever country. Why wouldn't you be able to then also permissionlessly raise money from any country? And so we just launched ono,

332. 2:46:54

     you know, preo stocks, right? So our first one is OpenAI. A lot of people out there never, you know, like I don't know about you, but I I got like a million emails about like, hey, you can buy OpenAI secondaries. Like there was like a round at like 1.1 bill or something. there's like 800 or 800 bill.1 trail whatever.

333. 2:47:11

     Um but like we're in the US, right? And outside the US it's so much harder to like find someone that you trust to be on the other side of that SPV or whatever. So this is like our goal is to kind of move earlier in the capital stack to like being able to to truly facilitate an international or global market for capital regardless of whether it's private or public, regardless of whether it's USlisted or somewhere else, right? Um, and regardless of whether

334. 2:47:36

     you're a human or an AI trading it, um, I think that like truly global vision is like that's what crypto is here for. I think that's where a lot of the power of tokenization comes from. I love it, Matt. Well, hey, keep keep uh keep the industry culture, you know, alive. All right. Keep doing the lord's work out there.

335. 2:47:54

     You got to stay you got to stay true to the values, you know. Thanks, buddy. Thank you, guys. That is Matthew, the head of DeFi at Ono, uh, and the tokenization super cycle. One could say it. Guys, we're going to be right back with Will Peek of Wisdom Tree and keep the show going.

336. 2:48:07

     Thanks for being here. Thanks for being a part of the bridge by the tie here in New York City. It's a lovely Tuesday, October 27th. We'll be right back. Are you

337. 2:49:59

     Heat. Heat.

338. 2:51:37

     Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget?

339. 2:51:52

     We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212.

340. 2:53:00

     Hey, hey, hey. Heat. Heat.

341. 2:54:02

     Hey, hey, hey. Heat. Heat.

342. 2:55:37

     Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.

343. 2:57:20

     Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets and we're back after the lunch break here at the bridge by the tie powered by Near and we've got Will Peek of Wisdom Tree. Will, it's a pleasure to see you again. Uh Wisdom Tree is our partner on the convergence series. You guys are going to be hearing a lot more about that over the coming week. And so you guys know Wisdom Tree,

344. 2:57:45

     you know them well. Uh congratulations on the partnership with Bitco earlier today as well as uh just generally all the success that you guys have had as of late. It's been very very cool to see how AUM has increased. Um maybe you can give us a sense of how this has evolved.

345. 2:58:01

     I'm just curious like what are some of the fundamental underlying catalysts that have led to an increase? I think you guys are above a billion in uh the tokenized fund AUM. Um so give us a sense of what is driving that growth. Yeah, absolutely. I I think this partnership announcement that we did with Bitco is a good indication of that.

346. 2:58:19

     Uh so uh our largest uh tokenized funds are tokenized money market fund WTGXX really see three different main use cases around that today. Uh one of which is cash management treasury management. Uh especially with rates where they are today. I mean the risk-free rate you can look at fed funds rate is like north of 3 and a half% I think today it stayed elevated like I don't see it coming down

347. 2:58:40

     in the near future right. uh people are demanding that they can get uh the risk-free rate uh on their cash and uh but they want to do it in a way that's convenient for them. So like what we've just announced with Bitcoin of Bitco in their custody and settlement platform can access WTGXX via Bitco Mint. So you can think about it if you're a large crypto hedge fund or some other business that's doing a lot of uh

348. 2:59:03

     custody with Bitco Bitco effectively a a money market fund or truly a registered money market fund. So trying to make WTGXX as convenient as possible for clients is a big area of focus for us in distribution. Yeah. I uh I was at Cyos before this stint in Asia and a big big theme in amongst these banking uh giants right the these you know very very uh influential systemically important banks

349. 2:59:32

     is to go 24/7. It feels as if there's a mandate from their executive team guys you got to go 24/7. uh and that's probably driven by, you know, regulatory and competitive uh uh forces and they don't really care what seemingly they don't really care how it gets done as long as it does get done. However, we really do know that blockchains and tokenization is the way uh to achieve

350. 2:59:56

     24/7. You guys have launched this money market fund. Obviously, there's other money market funds out there, but a tokenized one 24/7 allows some strategic advantages above some of the other ones. Maybe you can just speak to the power of a 247 tokenized fund because there's other banks that are looking at breaking into the space.

351. 3:00:14

     Yeah, absolutely. I mean one thing like blockchains are very very good at kind of a continuously updating recordkeeping system that functions 24/7 that can update for this being a transition from like that sort of model towards a more continuously updating model and sometimes you can look like ETFs which you trade not 247 seven in all places, but created market hours day trading was just a big innovation

352. 3:00:50

     over what like historical mutual funds could even do with tokenization and public blockchains. You can see that just like continuously increase, right? Where you've got this ability for these recordeping systems to be updating constantly, removing some of the frictions of that and just onchain assets are one major way to get there.

353. 3:01:14

     issues that they need to navigate around capital requirements and making sure that they're getting lowcost deposits that they can then lend out and uh that's their net interest margin. So the net interest margin that's the margin that money market funds really attack right where the money market funds just saying we're going to pass through the treasury yield less a management fee uh directly to the customer. That's different from how like banks need to do it where they have a whole maturity

354. 3:01:37

     transformation and lending and deposits right fractional reserve banking. So the money market fund is really a ideal way to provide exposure to the risk-free rate to people and um I think doing it on chain just makes it more of a 247 product if it's structured appropriately. If we put ourselves in the mind of a bank and we see how we're democratizing access to the risk-free rate and how most of our customer

355. 3:02:03

     deposits are coming through in checking and savings accounts getting much less than the risk-free rate. How am I as a bank, an executive at a bank going to react to this? Agents might make it even easier, right? If we kind of bring in the agentic angle to kind of maneuver deposits amongst different institutions and access these products so that I'm always getting, you know, the best rate on the market. You guys are making partnerships that again make this more

356. 3:02:29

     and more accessible. How as a banking executive am I going to react to, you know, these competitive forces? It's a great question. And it was fascinating when uh Meta announced Muse, right, that uh Schwab of all stocks, right, uh traded down that day on this news. Schwab has built one of the great cash businesses in financial services, right? They have the the the ability for the to cut commissions to zero, offer commissions for free. So many services for free. Uh they could do that as they had, you know, 20% of brokerage

357. 3:02:59

     customers would keep their accounts in cash and uh they were able to earn a good spread on that cash, right? uh via the their setup. So just very interesting that that type of move would happen on that day. Um so I I think the easier it is for people to access things, the more that businesses that were based on customers maybe not paying attention or frictions kind of setting aside any specific company that's um that would seem to be under threat in

358. 3:03:24

     this model. Now um that that's really one of the big advantages from doing uh treasury management uh in these 24/7 vehicles like we're talking about with our tokenized money market fund. So, uh, if I'm a bank, I mean, depends on the type of bank that you are, but I don't know that you can count on having zero like zero interest deposits forever. Uh, and that could just raise your cost of capital, could affect other things.

359. 3:03:47

     Obviously, a lot of lending is happening outside the banking system as well. So, there could be a real change in the way that banks actually conduct their business as we're seeing more things happen with this. Yeah, absolutely. and and you know this is one element and one evolution from a corner of the market particularly stable coins tokenization um and I think you know very similarly to the way that we saw crypto kind of evolve in the zeitgeist it was a catch-all term for everything that was

360. 3:04:13

     happening in both you know the store of value world as well as the blockchain world crypto kind of gobbled up all of that but over time the market became more educated more sophisticated and started to untangle some of these things crypto still sort of got this negative connotation, but stable coins, blockchains, tokenization, smart contracts have kind of been these positive exports of the industry and we've left left behind some of the, you

361. 3:04:36

     know, the baggage of the crypto world. I I have a feeling that we're going to go on a very similar journey with tokenization. You know, I'm sure you saw this Wall Street Journal ad, you know, full page issuers, here's why you should be, you know, objecting to these guys, you know, tokenizing your stock, right?

362. 3:04:55

     But as we sort of untangle and unbundle the different kinds of tokenization, I'd imagine that we're going to go through this market sophistication and then arrive at a more nuanced view. I'm just curious, maybe you can help unpack this term and provide us with your nuanced view of the different kinds of tokenization, what's good from what's bad.

363. 3:05:14

     Yeah, that's exactly it. So very interestingly earlier this year the SEC a couple of uh divisions there put out a statement around tokenized securities really defining like these different models of tokenization. So you say you're tokenizing something that can mean lots of different things. It can mean you've got an SPV that's offshore that's issuing some sort of node against it. It could mean you're doing some sort of like total return swap, a similarish model. It could be that you're doing the security entitlement thing that like the

364. 3:05:40

     DTC and some other people are trying to figure out. Or it could be that you are actually the issuer is like issuing the shares on a blockchain via a transfer agent. So Wisdom Tree does the last model primarily where if you're a holder of one of our onchain funds or tokenized funds like you're on the fund shareholder register, you have all the rights and privileges that come with being a shareholder of the fund. You're not doing it through some sort of intermediary that takes away those

365. 3:06:03

     rights. So we think with blockchains, what they're able to do is really extend that model and make it more useful for people in lots of different ways. If you gone back a hundred years, you would have seen a lot of securities that had a transfer agent that was keeping track of like everyone who owned the stock. That model uh it still exists in some ways, but it was largely replaced by like a central depository like you see with DTC where there was literally a paperwork crisis of people running around stock

366. 3:06:28

     certificates down where we are downtown, right? Uh and then they had to close the market for something like 2 weeks while they'd wait to catch up on it. So like the central counterparty fixed a lot of that. what you're seeing now with public blockchains and getting back to we were talking earlier this recordkeeping system that constantly updates it is very keeping to date constantly the ability for issuers to actually issue shares on chain and that can travel around and the records can continue to

367. 3:06:52

     be updated so you see these different models for tokenization how they work um I I think we're just going to see shakeout might be the right term but like these different models can all kind of compete and allow people to try to get the best possible customer experience for what they actually want.

368. 3:07:08

     Um I I do think there needs to be a lot that's figured out with onboarding and also liquidity. Making sure that these are like liquid assets. Like it's one thing if you want to say I can trade Nvidia onchain, you know, you could trade that essentially with like pennywide spreads in traditional formats like what are the spreads going to be like in these various onchain versions

369. 3:07:24

     of it. Uh same thing with like uh US 500 ETF for example um or similar. So that's really what I think needs to be shaken out over time. But I mean kudos to the SEC. They spelled that very clearly how they think about these different models and like what might some of the differences be within them.

370. 3:07:41

     Yeah. And uh it is refreshing to see our regulators in the SEC and the CFTC uh be forward thinkers rather than kind of you know battle from behind like they had uh in previous administrations. Will quick one today as we wrap up. Give us a sense of what we can look forward to wisdom trees. Always got a lot cooking. Just curious what's most exciting right now.

371. 3:08:01

     We have a lot cooking. You know we're very excited about this Bico collaboration. This idea about making the money market fund or similar products as convenient as possible for investors taking advantage of this standardized nature of public blockchains is a major major focus for us. Uh we've also got some stuff cooking on the ETF side. We've got a concept in with the SEC around a tokenized ETF. Uh so we're very bullish on extending that

372. 3:08:23

     model to variable NAV assets as well. So I think you know as more and more businesses are incorporating stable coins more and more individuals you're just going to see continued growth in wallets and then the things you can put in wallets right uh which is where uh a lot of what we play comes in. So very excited about uh where things are here.

373. 3:08:42

     Epic will the man guys we'll be right back with our next guest and uh yeah very exciting stuff. Glad to be a partner. Uh we'll be right back. Don't go anywhere. Cool. All right. No time.

374. 3:09:49

     Hey. Hey. Hey.

375. 3:12:05

     Nat. Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget?

376. 3:12:28

     We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212.

377. 3:12:53

     Heat. Heat.

378. 3:14:30

     And we're back. We're here. The bridge, the tide. Very institutional event. Everyone's buttoned up. A lot of tokenization talk. Everyone's bullish. Uh everyone's got a longer term time horizon, which is uh very refreshing. Uh we're here with Aren uh and uh it's a pleasure to meet you. It's your first time on the show. So why don't you just give us a little bit of a background? You're at CMT digital, head of research.

379. 3:14:51

     Um give us a sense of what you're doing at CMT, but then also, you know, what you what you got going on here at these uh conferences broadly. Yeah, for sure. And thank you for having me. Um it's great to be on. So at CMT, I'm the head of research. I work as an investor as well. So I'm looking at sourcing deals, talking to founders, getting to know what they're building, uh presenting that to our team. But as head of research, I really get to focus

380. 3:15:13

     on thesis formation and getting an understanding of where we expect the market to be going, what we think of certain trends, what we think of certain innovations in the space and uh whether that changes our view. Yeah. Incredible. And so what are some of the thesis that you're particularly interested in spending a lot of time on?

381. 3:15:29

     I mean uh you know, we've got quite a few here. 247 markets leads to tokenization and blockchain. Those tokenized assets flow into a lot of these protocols. Where are you seeing a unique perspective in the market? And then maybe we'll untangle some of these thesis.

382. 3:15:44

     Yeah, for sure. I think most of the time that we're spending in the market today is on things like tokenization, stable coins, as you said, we're in a period where adoption is ongoing and it's happening for the first time. And so we get as venture capitalists, we get to look immediately at the things with traction, which is something that we haven't really been afforded before. Um, so I'm really interested in the the the downstream effects of things like

383. 3:16:08

     tokenization. People talk about 24/7 markets. I actually think the mo more relevant immediate term thing is collateral mobility, uh, composability. You know, there's a lot of growth in tokenization and tokenized assets, but the actual underlying composability of those assets hasn't caught up yet.

384. 3:16:27

     There's about 220 billion in tokenized assets represented on chain, but only about 39 billion of that is transferable. So, there's a lag in utility and the actual representation of tokenization. Okay. And I mean, obviously, we've heard a lot about tokenization as of recently. There was a Wall Street Journal ad.

385. 3:16:46

     We're literally on Wall Street right now down in the financial district in New York. And yet there's a Wall Street Journal full page ad right before the midterms right in this the the heat of this tokenization super cycle that is urging issuers to object to these you know OKX ICE different you know platforms tokenizing their stocks. There was a few of the um objections in there

386. 3:17:12

     that you know were like hey you don't know who's on your cap table. This could fragment liquidity. This could have, you know, potential cyber security concerns. Of these objections, which ones are myth? Which ones are fact and fiction?

387. 3:17:25

     And then maybe we can just talk about overcoming, you know, these concerns on behalf of an issuer and ultimately getting them to where, you know, they agree collateral mobility on behalf of the investor. It is beneficial to tokenize.

388. 3:17:37

     Well, I think there are certain, you know, tokenization and blockchain more broadly has become unfortunately politicized. And I think that the the ad in the Wall Street Journal, was it uh could be a reflection of that politicization as well. And I'm curious kind of who paid for that ad. But there are concerns and this is a new technology and this is a new kind of market structure that that participants

389. 3:18:02

     haven't had to deal with before and so that clearly comes with concerns. I think the majority of the concerns will be handled through regulatory positioning and uh just kind of market structure forming but that's not to say that there aren't edge cases to be worried about such as KYC such as AML making sure that governance rights do extend to kind of the full cap table and I do think that that stuff will come I more broadly though I think tokenized equities is just a representation of

390. 3:18:32

     that same underlying and at the end of the day as long as it doesn't hinder a company's ability to raise capital, they shouldn't really have any concerns. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, look, I'm I'm a fan, especially on this collateral mobility angle. I I you know, one of the most things that I find most exciting is unlocking so much of this idle capital. When you think about

391. 3:18:55

     settlement T+1, T+2, you know, that doesn't seem like, you know, a lot of interest would be generated on that much cap on on, you know, over a day or two. But on billions and billions of dollars, there is so much idle capital that is just locked and, you know, prevented from flowing to where it should be. And it seems like an a programmable economy would be so much more efficient at bringing liquidity where it's needed and

392. 3:19:20

     then ultimately can pay those who are, you know, the the the places that are most in position to do something productive with these assets. And so unlocking idle capital I think will just lead to this unbridled you know innovation and efficiency for the market globally. My question is you know I guess twofold. One there's a lot of entrenched interests. So like all of that friction, right? The people and the

393. 3:19:46

     institutions that have that capital on that T+1 day or that T plus2 day, like they don't want to just get innovated away cuz they're making money when it's in their hands even if their job is just to hold it for, you know, 24 hours for regulatory purpose. So So on one side hand, how do we overcome these entrenched interests because they're not going to go quietly? And on the other hand, who are the biggest winners? Like as an investor forming a thesis, right?

394. 3:20:12

     We have this idea of how this, you know, technology is going to, you know, reach adoption in the market, but where do you position? Where do you allocate uh to capture most of the upside? I think um and you're absolutely right about the companies being entrenched.

395. 3:20:27

     And to be honest, I think that there's a there's a benefit to them being in the position that they are today. So if we were to switch fully to tokenized uh settlement and clearing at the beginning we might see a increase in the amount of liquidity that we need that that might seem counterproductive but or counterintuitive but clearing houses net transactions against each other and they

396. 3:20:50

     reduce the capital requirement you actually need to clear at the end of the day. Blockchain wouldn't be able to replicate that today. And so I think there's a certain level of attaching to the existing market structure that we see today to begin with. But at the end of the day where I think the opportunity lies is in the modularization of that market structure. things like custody uh clearing uh exchange don't necessarily need to be part of the same

397. 3:21:16

     stack and if they maintain that underlying composability that of at the asset level then they can become interchangeable and I think that's what keeps the pressure on the intermediaries on keeping their fee structures such that they're beneficial to the consumer.

398. 3:21:33

     I think that's the power that's the force that keeps them behaving. Yeah. And you know, I can't I can't help but think that, you know, this is going to kind of cap catch a lot of people off sides, right? Like a lot of these institutions are now starting to take it seriously, but they're playing from behind. They might have to acquire companies. I I do really really enjoy the perspective of, you know, more granular market structure for different asset classes. So when you look at

399. 3:22:01

     tokenization, right, I I do think that there's on on one hand, you've got these this cohort of people that believe in tokenizing all the value, right? All 500 trillion of real estate and equities and commodities and all these things. And then there's also like kind of chipping away at that. I I'm curious also about this integration because it feels very messy in the middle like when we utilize permissionless infrastructure like Ethereum and some of these underlying

400. 3:22:26

     components and then we layer on permissioned venues like how do you see that playing out cuz it feels like that is a very tangled sort of jumbled up mess. Yeah, it's it's it's for sure uh complex to look at but at the end of the day I think it's the structure that makes the most sense in the future. So the the underlying infrastructure should always be permissionless but the issuers of the

401. 3:22:52

     assets that exist on that permissionless infrastructure are absolutely free to put controls and restrictions on top of those assets. Now it's contained at the asset level you know and I think that's the important aspect of this and ultimately I I think look I've written about this extensively that I think Ethereum becomes a neutral infrastructure settlement environment and you have a whole array of different

402. 3:23:16

     execution environments that exist on top of them as exchanges. But if they have that composability at the asset level, then it really allows for the velocity of that underlying asset to increase, you know, within that economy, within that broader economy.

403. 3:23:33

     And and I think Vitalik has written a lot about this more recently as well, where, you know, there's arbitrarily complex uh uh computation that can take place and can take place pretty much anywhere and then it can all settle back to Ethereum and be verified on Ethereum.

404. 3:23:49

     And I I think that's a very exciting proposition for Ethereum uh because it means that there's all kinds of different use cases, value propositions that can be that can be happening. All of it is still standardized on Ethereum.

405. 3:24:02

     And I I think that is the value. But at the same time, we've got like some fragmentation when it comes to the standardization. For instance, like tokenized deposits is one of the things that I'm hearing a lot, and I I kind of think this is coming from banks. They missed out on the stable coin wave.

406. 3:24:18

     Yeah. Got caught off sides when it comes to the Genius Act and now they're the biggest proponents of tokenized deposits. So now you're gonna end up with like a JP Morgan dollar, a Wells Fargo dollar. How do you think that this tokenized deposit ecosystem is going to play out? Cuz it is sort of like a uh a lens through which we can see kind of this private venue permissionless infrastructure. How do you how do you think this is going to play out? At the

407. 3:24:43

     end of the day, they're competing for deposits. And I think that banks are going to continue competing for deposits, but they're also now competing with the USDC's of the world and the USYC's of the world. And I think that we're going to see far more competition between USYC and the tokenized deposits on one side and then switching in and out of USDC or USDT where it where it's makes sense. You're going to have the stable coin without yield aspect and

408. 3:25:14

     then you're going to have tokenized treasuries, tokenized deposits that increasingly look to compete with each other on how they can retain that idle balance. Ultimately, I think it's part of the competitive cycle and we should let it play out. And if banks can earn their right to stay by keeping the consumer happy on a yield basis, then I don't see anything wrong with that.

409. 3:25:36

     I I JP Morgans and the Banks of the world, they're not going to go quietly. Like they're going to they've got so much of the these entrenched interests where I I can also picture them maybe acquiring some of these different companies, but then a lot of this capital rotation and movement happening in the background and and to an end consumer, maybe it just looks like I'm earning 8% of my checking account. Do you think that's like a reality, especially like, you know, with making

410. 3:26:04

     it easier to navigate across these different accounts that we might move into? I mean, I I would hope so. I I I I don't know if it'd be as high as eight, maybe closer to four, but we don't know what's going to happen in the rate environment as well.

411. 3:26:15

     Yeah. I mean, but ultimately, yes. And I I would argue that historically that's been a um business model that hasn't been profitable, but ultimately should have been extended to the capital owners in the first place. um it's just a business model that's been allowed to exist for perhaps too long and maybe blockchain is just the answer to why that will structurally never be able to exist again.

412. 3:26:36

     Yeah, very cool. Well, Erin, uh it's been a pleasure. Uh I'm just curious, you know, as far as when you're looking at the market, last question here is like what are you most excited about in the market right now? What do you guys do a lot of liquid stuff or is mostly It's mostly venture.

413. 3:26:51

     It's mostly Yeah, pretty much all venture. Um, I mean, look, this it's it's hard to uh not get it's very easy to get excited in this market and primarily because we're seeing so much real adoption. I'm really excited about new uh markets coming up. You know, architect and what Brett Harrison is up to with compute is super exciting to us.

414. 3:27:11

     Really excited for just overall composability between DeFi and the the real financial world that we know and love today. And uh yeah, I'm excited to get this sort of technology in the hands of people, ordinary users who can really stand to benefit from uh adoption.

415. 3:27:27

     Fantastic. All right. Well, uh it's been an absolute pleasure, guys. We're going to be right back with our next guest. Don't go anywhere. Arian, pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having uh and we'll see you next time. Thanks.

416. 3:29:02

     Heat. Heat.

417. 3:31:01

     Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget?

418. 3:31:16

     We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212.

419. 3:31:41

     Heat. Heat.

420. 3:32:47

     Heat. Heat. Hey, hey, hey.

421. 3:33:52

     Quick.

422. 3:34:59

     Heat. Heat.

423. 3:36:44

     Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget?

424. 3:36:59

     We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212.

425. 3:37:34

     Should look mostly at you or All righty. John, Darcy, we're here today at We're not at Salt. We're at the bridge by the tie. We should be at Salt. Next week, we'll be at next week in London. Yes, sir. What's the What's the vibe there? What are you expecting?

426. 3:37:50

     Yeah, the vibe in London, I guess. Last time I was on, we were in Bermuda, um, which has a big regulatory focus given Bermuda is a big hub for Coinbase, Kraken, Circle, and a bunch of other companies. The event in London is very asset allocator centric. So, you know, we at Skybridge are a fund of hedge funds. We're an allocator ourselves. So, the genesis of Salt was bringing together GPS and LPs for sort of capital raising discussions. And uh London is

427. 3:38:15

     more like our old school traditional salt conference where we have tons of family offices, over 200 family offices and other institutional allocators of different types having conversations about, you know, how they're deploying capital right now and we sort of help them meet technology executives and and fund managers that we think are unique and differentiated. So uh yeah, London's a very LPentcentric event. We have over 500 people coming uh which is our capacity there at the Chancery Rosewood.

428. 3:38:41

     So we're excited about that. Yeah, man. Yeah, it should be good. Um, I mean, I think that there's both on the AI side and on the crypto side as well as just kind of on this broader kind of secular investment side there there's just a lot of interesting little pockets right now. Um, and there's also it feels like we're kind of in the midst of this rotational period too. Um, one thing that that that we've heard a lot about this week, but really today is this AI

429. 3:39:06

     to crypto rotation. this kind of AI tech stock overvalue to crypto in a value rotation. How much uh credence do you place on that? That sounds like a bit of hopeium to me. We're getting ready to have a $2 trillion IPO of anthropic. I would imagine OpenAI will be not far behind if the Anthropic IPO is as successful as many people think it will be. Uh I think some of the fear that's come into sort

430. 3:39:30

     of the semiconductor data center trade is a bit overblown and I think Anthropics S1 dropping this week sort of put to bed some fears about sort of the macro environment for the AI trade. Um so do I think there's going to be a tsunami of capital that's leaving the AI trade into crypto? Not at the moment. I think there might come a time, you know, as US debt situation continues to deteriorate um you know, as other macro conditions sort of cause people to lose more faith in in the US and and uh

431. 3:40:03

     interest rates continue to rise. Do I think we could see Bitcoin return as sort of that safe haven? Yeah, I do. But I don't think we're going to get that. I mean, Bitcoin might rally in the next couple years, but I don't think it's going to rally because for some reason the AI trade trade implodes. I think, you know, are we in a bubble? Maybe. But I think that bubble has plenty of room to run given um some of the IPOs and and events we have on the horizon.

432. 3:40:27

     Yeah. And then when you're kind of thinking about where we're at specifically kind of that's the macro view. On the micro view, I've been just kind of pounding the table, pounding my chest since June saying like guys, it's time to go. Like it's been, you know, a seven, eight, nine month bare market.

433. 3:40:43

     The last bull the last bull run was a bit kind of shortened in terms of it topping if you're a four-ear cycle believer a couple months prior. Looks like we bottom a couple months prior. People are still in disbelief. There's these secular trends. Tokenization per stable coins. The regulatory headwinds of the past have now become tailwinds of the future. There's a lot lining up for the digital assets ecosystem. People don't believe yet. Where are you at? Are you are you and your firm allocated? Are

434. 3:41:11

     you guys looking to buy more assets? Are you kind of going out down on the risk spectrum? There's almost like this evolving cohort of new names kind of popping up. Where are you at? Yeah, I mean we started 7 years ago from a Bitcoin first perspective. I would say we started as Bitcoin maxis and now we're Bitcoin enthusiasts and we also invest in other tokens and ecosystems. I would say for Bitcoin, I think it's a little bit uh counterintuitive from what most people think about in terms of what

435. 3:41:37

     is the best macro regime for Bitcoin. I think, you know, we've seen an inflationary environment with uh large deficits and and all these factors that you would think would be a bullish driver for Bitcoin. That didn't necessarily materialize. Um but I do think we're entering a macro regime potentially with Democrats taking control of Congress with, you know, probably a Democrat being the front

436. 3:42:02

     runner for the 2028 presidential seat. I think for a lot of other tokens I think that environment will not be conducive to um great performance but I think for Bitcoin as a alternative to the US dollar as that safe haven asset sort of these aspirational um characteristics that people have for Bitcoin I actually think counterintuitively if we get President AOC in 2028 god forbid she might be very you know anti- crypto very anti- bitcoin but bitcoin actually thrives in that

437. 3:42:31

     environment it's a libertarian asset that was created as a respons response to the global financial crisis. And I think yeah, while it does create some headwinds to have, you know, your regulators in the United States being sort of opposed to tokenization and the buildout of this technology, I actually think for Bitcoin, um, it could end up being very positive because I think it crystallizes in people's mind the value proposition of Bitcoin in the first place.

438. 3:42:53

     Yeah. Yeah. And I think like I mean we're also just in an environment where there's just a lot more of that rhetoric about the um $40 trillion debt that the US has. We're coming up to midterms, right? I think that's next week um into early next month. People are just kind of realizing again about this kind of inflationary regime that fiat capital markets kind of put you in. So I think

439. 3:43:18

     that there there's a lot of ducks lining up. Do you believe in this quantum situation for Bitcoin? Are you a believer that QA needs to be addressed? You know, you know, you see Zcash kind of perk up a little bit because it's this private quantum resistant version of Bitcoin. You see these fears, these kind of guys like Shamoth is going on all in and saying that Bitcoin is going to get hacked and go to zero in the future. Like what's your read as a large

440. 3:43:42

     allocator from Skybridge perspective on the Bitcoin quantum fears? Well, whenever anybody makes comments about any asset, you have to understand their motivations for saying it. I think I like Chamath. I like the All-In podcast. We've had Chimath, Jason Calacanis speak at our events in the past and and I think they're smart people. I think if you talk to people that have been close to Chimath for a long time, he was once a very big holder of Bitcoin. He no longer is a big holder of Bitcoin. And part of that is probably

441. 3:44:12

     um you know his thesis around other assets and around you know potential threats to Bitcoin. But I also think he's probably talking his book a little bit. uh you know somebody who doesn't maybe have the exposure that that he once did. Um so yeah I mean in terms of quantum fears I think it doesn't hurt to have the community come together and think about how do we solve this problem before it becomes a problem. I think

442. 3:44:34

     like AI and AGI and quantum these things probably will happen in an instant. You know it'll seem like it's building slowly and then overnight suddenly we'll have AGI or you know quantum will will ramp up. Uh, so it doesn't doesn't hurt to try to solve it, but it also I think if Bitcoin gets cracked by, you know, quantum computers, I think the world is going to have much bigger issues on a number of different fronts. And so

443. 3:44:56

     that's not to say like, you know, the world burns, Bitcoin will burn, too, and we'll all just have to, you know, uh, live in our misery. But I don't think it's nearly as a near-term issue as as people make it out to be. But that's me as a non-quantum expert generally just observing, you know, history and and people have had similar fears about Y2K and and all types of different things.

444. 3:45:18

     So I don't I don't put the quantum stuff uh as top of mind as as some other people do. But sort of perception and sentiment is reality sometimes. So I think you've seen that bleed into the price of Bitcoin for sure. Yeah, Zcash.

445. 3:45:29

     I don't own any Zcash personally. I've I've sort of tried to maintain my discipline around my Bitcoin exposure being the dominant um asset in my book and it's the same approach that we've taken at Skybridge. Um but Zcash I think certainly it has some characteristics of early Bitcoin and it has a lot of prominent people behind it that are pushing the narrative. So uh do I think it could probably you know outperform in a risk-on environment? Yeah, probably.

446. 3:45:53

     Yeah. Then kind of looking at the institutional allocators that are coming to Salt in London next week, family offices, meeting fund managers looking to allocate capital in into funds that they, you know, guys that girls that they trust, that they like, that they have a good thesis on their heads. Where are those guys at? Is it just Bitcoin still? Is it Ethereum? Are they looking

447. 3:46:16

     at, you know, the likes of a near of a hyperlquid Zcash? like are are Yeah, it's just it just still feels like we're like way way way farther. I don't think they're nearly that far down the rabbit hole yet. Yeah. Um I think if you looked at overall LP interest in digital assets and tokenization, it's down one because prices are down and two because AI has sucked so much oxygen out of the room. is that they're looking at incremental capital and they're saying all right you know is

448. 3:46:45

     is now the right time of the cycle to be allocating to crypto assets or should I be looking at AI infrastructure you know if you have access to invest in frontier labs and things like that um so I would say yeah the the traditional LPs like family offices and sovereign wealth funds endowments pensions I'd say the ones who are already been orange pill they're probably adding a little bit to their Bitcoin exposure maybe exploring

449. 3:47:09

     the world of tokenized products, but it hasn't really taken off yet. Um, but yeah, I mean, some of the some of the larger institutions, I will say, are are more sophisticated and and patient capital. You know, you've seen some sovereign wealth funds like the UAE continue to deploy more capital into Bitcoin. Um, and I think that'll, you know, if you look out 5 10 years, that'll prove to be a very savvy move at a time when enthusiasm is a little bit lower for digital assets related to AI.

450. 3:47:36

     Yeah, I would say in general LP interest is is lower because of asset prices and because of the AI trade sucking some of this oxygen out of the room. You know what? It's kind of a blessing, man. You know, this AI thing has been so awesome to just use now as an entrepreneur. There's so many tools that have made scalable opportunities inside of our business become way more clear and just actionable. A lot of nooks and kinks to kind of work out.

451. 3:48:02

     It's definitely it's definitely separating the uh the people who are really bu building something real and and people that are building fluff um you know in moments like this and it also just gave the crypto industry like 2 three years to not be in the limelight and to like get everything together and we did.

452. 3:48:22

     Yeah, I agree. I mean I I I would point to Andre and Horowitz as an example of you know they've renamed their fund A16Z Frontier and there was yeah there was some data that came out that I saw the Crypto in America podcast Elanor Terret published around LPS and and if you put a crypto label on something or even a blockchain label on something LPs tend to be a little bit allergic traditional LPs still

453. 3:48:46

     to those narratives but then if you frame it in the context of Frontier Technologies or FinTech they're much more likely to show an interest in it. And I think crypto in general and blockchain has matured to the point that it can be folded into those categories. Now um these are novel technologies that I think have proven that they have efficiencies and and um will create a more efficient system.

454. 3:49:11

     But you know there's a stigma attached still to the crypto bros and the dgens and all that. And so I think, you know, as much as it's sort of a copout for folks to start ditching the crypto nomenclature, I think it's also probably good for the industry to to move past that.

455. 3:49:27

     Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think, you know, I I spoke to CZ yesterday actually here in New York, and he's just like, "Look, man, you know, I I didn't ask him specifically like, "Hey, man, how is jail? How was your pardon?" Like what a crazy run, right? he'll talk about it but you know maybe in a long form but you know I asked him I was just like how does it like how does it make you feel just to see that these regulatory

456. 3:49:50

     um headwinds have just turned into this kind of accelerant for the industry he was like look man we used to be so decentralization kind of this ethos there was such a maxi about the way that this was going to work and now it's just blockchain is just a technology man he's like it's just a technology it's going to be used at the underpinning of a lot of the financial stack that it currently exists And that's where we're at. It's just that this convergence is happening and

457. 3:50:14

     that's where we're at. And I'm just like, wow. Yeah. I mean, I think Bitcoin is going through a very healthy consolidation period right now. You've had trillions and trillions of dollars flow into the AI space. Yeah. You've had a macro environment that's been up and down in terms of, you know, whether you think it would be conducive to bullish price action for Bitcoin. Um, you have, yes, some regulatory progress, but we didn't get the Clarity Act. And you know, now you probably going to have some headwinds post midterms and into the next election cycle.

458. 3:50:43

     I think the fact that Bitcoin has sort of lost a little bit of that libertarian ethos, you know, now it's been co-opted by the black rocks and the institutions and you've seen, you know, large Bitcoin whales that have owned it for many years start to sell and that uh selling pressure be absorbed by institutions. I think that's all part of a very healthy digestion. I think actually Bitcoin trading here above 80,000 given all of

459. 3:51:07

     that is actually pretty encouraging. Um it won't go under 80, man. It just won't do it. No, it seems to jinx it, but I think we're looking some support at 80. So hopefully we can get just some more digestion. I know people are used to the volatility and the Yeah.

460. 3:51:21

     And the the DG traders want to, you know, see volatility and and all that, but I think this is healthy. Yeah, John, best of luck on Salt. Uh it's going to be a great conference. It always is. It's kind of like the uh the yin to the bridge and the ties yang. And so wish you the best and uh thanks for coming on tonight. Thanks for having me.

461. 3:51:39

     Cheers, guys. All right, guys. We'll be back with our next guest after a quick break. I'll be back with Robbie as well. And we'll be right back, guys. Stay tuned.

462. 3:52:41

     Heat. Heat.

463. 3:55:09

     Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget?

464. 3:55:24

     We're going to have people from all over all different investment classes. People who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212.

465. 3:56:57

     Heat. Heat.

466. 3:58:41

     Heat. Heat.

467. 4:00:53

     Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget?

468. 4:01:07

     We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212.

469. 4:01:32

     Heat. Heat.

470. 4:03:37

     Hey

471. 4:04:57

     All right, guys. We are back here at the bridge powered by the Tai and Near. We are going to be chatting with our new friend Spencer from Multicoin. Welcome to the program. Appreciate it. You guys are 100% crypto, no AI. So when everyone else was running for the hills, pivoting to AI, dropping crypto from their A16Z fund handle, you guys said no, we're still in this.

472. 4:05:19

     Yeah, it's it's a great question and again, appreciate you having me on the show. Um, if you think about what's happened in crypto over the last 24 to 36 months, we've basically gotten all of the regulatory clarity that we've been asking for over the last decade, right?

473. 4:05:33

     We got genius passed. We're now getting a lot of rulemaking from the SEC and CFTC. And so, I think the addressable market for the industry has probably grown an order of magnitude, if not even more than that. And at the same time, you know, without saying anyone specific by name, I think a lot of other funds have started to uh to pivot and look at other buzzy sectors like AI and robotics. And for us, you know, we've

474. 4:05:56

     been investing it all the way from seed through Bitcoin and everything in between for about a decade now within the crypto space. And I think we know where we have an edge and we want to continue leaning into it, especially when there's such this hu there's this massive tailwind for crypto right now.

475. 4:06:10

     And you had mentioned before before we hopped on live, eight and a half years at multicoin, been in the game a long long time. So a true legend. You guys, you you've seen this market go through girrations and evolutions to understand when there's opportunity at stake and it feels like right now is a time of maximum opportunity because so much attention is on AI. We're looking at, you know, Elon's tweet about the credit crunch and then Anthropics S1 and, you

476. 4:06:35

     know, people are debating on whether or not the AI bola has burst. Meanwhile, you've got a ton of opportunity in crypto and you're talking about this, you know, potential TAM expansion, this order of magnitude more potential value at stake because of the regulatory clearance that we're now getting in the UX. I I I tend to agree. I think we're in a very similar spot. We've got the regulatory clarity. we're going to see

477. 4:07:00

     this increase the potential size of these assets, but at the same time, we've now sort of been in the heart of what we call the revenue meta. Yeah. And so, you've got this like kind of strange paradigm where, you know, price to earnings or price to sales or valuations as a whole have contracted because we've really prioritized revenue. But at the same time, you've got this massive great opportunity

478. 4:07:26

     that's sort of on the horizon, not right now, but that we're working towards. And so, you've got this growth potential expansion at the same time that you've got this focus on revenue. It feels like we're missing the forest through the trees.

479. 4:07:39

     Yeah, it's it's a great question. It's like the classic question in v or the classic I guess uh phpa in venture is like you always want to be pre-revenue because the second you turn on revenue you start getting valued as a multiple of your earnings right and I think we have started to see that I think one of the more interesting stories in crypto this year has been the diver in the public market specifically has been the divergence between highquality assets

480. 4:08:01

     and lowquality assets and that's not just revenue generating assets right Zcash has obviously had a tremendous year and I I I think you guys have talked a lot about it that produces no revenue but like there's a real use case for it right on the other end you have things like hyperlquid and lighter that actually do generate real cash flows and those tokens have benefited from that as a result and so I don't know if we're at the stage of the cycle where you have to

481. 4:08:24

     be producing revenue in order for value for you to be valued by the public markets but I think you do have to have a unique use case and real product market fit otherwise you're going to be thrown into this category of we'll call them zombie chains from the last cycle where you know if no one's using it uh no one's going to buy it.

482. 4:08:43

     Yeah. And interestingly a lot of the it it feels like the technology is starting to matter again. like a lot of the ZK stuff has started to crop up again in response to the SEC's calls for like decentralized identity doing some AML KYC stuff on chain because we're now at the point where permissionless infrastructure think Ethereum but broadly some of these smart contract primitives are starting to power permissioned venues like we might get into a world where we get some sort of alternative trading system. You get

483. 4:09:15

     controls by these venues and these issuers, but it relies on permissionless infrastructure. And so you actually get a a a world where a lot of that that in you know that last generation infrastructure slop zombie chains like there's actually some skeleton bones there that actually matters again in a permissioned world.

484. 4:09:36

     Yeah, for sure. And you know, one of our biggest investments in our venture fund is a company called Zama. Uh they have a token partners with Zama as well and programmable privacy. were big fans. Yeah, for sure. And I think look, look, if you talk to institutions today, um I think they've mostly crossed the Rubicon on being willing to explore building and issuing assets on top of public chains.

485. 4:09:57

     But one of the the primary considerations they have is they don't want their trades or their um intents to be public. And so I do think we're very close specifically on the public chain side. So Salana for example, I think we're very close in getting institutions on board. And you know, we already have I I don't know what the exact number today is, but tens of billions of dollars of real world assets, excluding

486. 4:10:19

     stable coins. And I think to get from the call it 30 or 40 billion we're at today to a trillion, we need more primitives to enable institutions like privacy that Zama's building. Yeah, Zama's incredible. Uh you know, near Zama, Zcash kind of make up this like privacy cabal. Uh, and then you've also got the AI twist on it with Venice and you've got a lot of these guys that are working together to ultimately build out a more private ecosystem. And you

487. 4:10:44

     know, this is seen a very, you know, positive react on the heels of, you know, the traditional AI buildout. You kind of ver get on the verge of this like surveillance state, right? especially around like Navier Stokes and Open AI solving some of these math problems potentially you know kind of preying on some of the math research that was being done with their models these private AI companies have been response to that and onchain private AI

488. 4:11:13

     has been particularly seen as this reaction to what's happening in the traditional AI world and so how much of what we're seeing on the onchain crypto AI world do you think is kind of is kind of a response response to the traditional AI. I guess what I'm asking here is like there's kind of this this speculation that we need the AI bubble to pop in order for crypto to really do

489. 4:11:35

     well and I think you're kind of seeing that in the leaders on the crypto world with Zcash and Near and and these guys Zama as well but how much of that is just kind of like the market front running this rotation versus like you know actually finding product market fit yeah as much as as much buzz as there's been about the intersection of crypto and AI I actually think there's a lot of interesting use cases that have largely

490. 4:11:58

     gone underexplored. So for example, and and you were kind of alluding to this, AI is about abundance, right? Abundance of content, abundance of video, abundance of copying, for lack of a better word. The whole point of crypto is scarcity, right? Like cryptographic primitives are about proving scarcity.

491. 4:12:14

     And so I actually think there's a very good pendulum that's going to happen where AI creates a lot of abundance on the internet and crypto is actually the thing that's kind of that kind of acts as the counterforce to that. Um, so I think I think AI is actually a massive tailwind for crypto. Another example that I think is very interesting uh that we just made our first investment in is on the compute derivative side. Um and then the third thing I I would touch on

492. 4:12:37

     is the Aentic stablecoin payments. I think there's there's obviously a lot of hype out there right now about agentic payments. And I do generally think it's early, but I think agentto agent commerce, it's so clear to me and to a lot of people in the industry that those are going to happen over stable coin rails. And I think we're now just starting to see that in flex.

493. 4:12:57

     Okay. And so when we're thinking about these evolving narratives, categories, this general addressable market expansion as a result of this regulatory clarity and you have the tailwind from AI it's like okay well what's the trade like where where is the value capture?

494. 4:13:14

     What's the the value acrruel right? some of these companies still have this like equity labs kind of foundation, you know, uh, structure and so where is the upside and and how do you position yourself for maximum, you know, value as these things play out?

495. 4:13:29

     Yeah, it's funny you asked this. So, we have our multicoin summit in two weeks and I'm actually giving a presentation about value capture in DeFi's new era. And basically the case that I'm making is in a world of AI where creating new financial products is extremely easy and is basically a weekend and clawed code whereas maybe three years ago it took $2 million 6 months and a team of five engineers. You really need to think

496. 4:13:52

     about who actually has a moat and who can capture value over the long term. And so the framework that I've been using is there's really three modes. One is capital, right? So if you think about a prime brokerage business for example, if you have more capital and a lower cost of capital, that's not something that AI can easily replicate or distribution, right? You you can see a

497. 4:14:12

     $10,000 trade on Phantom, for example. I think Phantom makes something like $46 whereas Uniswap maybe makes like $5 and then Ethereum makes like 10 cents. And so the the company that owns the distribution in the front end has a lot of power. And then the third category I would say is data which again is not easily replicable in AI. And so what we've started to do is look up and down the crypto stack specifically in the context of DeFi and figure out which

498. 4:14:37

     companies actually have one of those three modes and like how are they going to retain those modes over time. Okay. Okay. And so you know we we've seen how these things have kind of led to more value acrruel mechanisms in the way that you described. I mean Robin Hood is another good case study as well as the the phantom example. We're happy holders. You're you're what? We're happy hood holders.

499. 4:14:57

     Happy hood holders. And so, you know, there there was also another investor that we've had on the show recently, Santiago, who kind of said like, look, it's not really the tokens themselves. It's those who are implementing these strategies who are going to capture most of the upside. Like Robin Hood has implemented blockchain technology. At the same time, I mean, you you see like Microsoft making this like very large swath severance offer to a lot like

500. 4:15:21

     twothirds of their employees, 60,000 employees. And so they are implementing this technology. When you're looking at say, you know, take unis swap maybe as a good example because they're, you know, the exchange, the kind of the the de facto exchange on Robin Hood. Which do you think has more upside, right? Is it Robin Hood or is it Uniswap?

501. 4:15:42

     Yeah, I think it's all valuation adjusted. I think Robin Hood is a really interesting example, though. And we, you know, we hear from a lot of investors like, you know, Morpho, they're just getting wrapped by Coinbase and Robin Hood. How are they ever going to capture value? Same thing with lighter for example and and obviously unis swap. And what I would tell them is Robin Hood for you know a incumbent we'll call them an incumbent for the sake of this is

502. 4:16:04

     probably the most crypto technologically forward company of any incumbent and instead of choosing to build they chose to buy Morpho lighter and unis swap. Um, and so I think that, you know, everyone talks about the DeFi mullet, and I really think that's a real thesis where you have all of these DeFi protocols on the back end, some of the ones I just mentioned that are going to power all of

503. 4:16:27

     these various fintexs around the world, and Robin Hood is just the first example. What do you think about this tokenization uh hoopla that Robin Hood is at the center? I mean they had AMC that kind of objected to their tokenized stock and then now you've got OKX ICE you know and and how I think upwards of almost 30 companies have now objected to you know them tokenizing their stocks

504. 4:16:50

     and it costs nothing to object to this right now and then see it play out. But how do you think this will play out you know on the tokenization front? Yeah, I think a lot of it depends on how the regulatory environment evolves. What I will say is in the meantime, I think the opportunity for synthetic derivatives on equities specifically with hyperlquid, lighter and other and other per exchanges grows by is is extremely compelling just given the fact that on

505. 4:17:15

     the spot side it might take a little bit longer. Um so basically all of these issuers saying hey we don't want our equities to get tokenized. What I actually think that means is be bullish the the per exchanges. Oh, okay. That might be that might be a different kind of take. And so you guys are 100% crypto, you know, no pivot to AI like we talked about. What about liquid versus venture, right? You guys have been around for a long time. So a lot of

506. 4:17:40

     these things have graduated kind of maybe out of the venture fund. How do you split your look into okay this is, you know, liquid port versus venture port and generally the time horizon that you guys are thinking? What's really unique about us is we have both a hedge fund and a venture fund and those vehicles are actually managed by the same investment team. So there's five people on the investment team today. We have uh a hedge fund uh that's multi-billion dollar hedge fund and then we have our $422 million venture fund.

507. 4:18:07

     Um I think there's opportunities candidly on both sides of the market. I think on the venture side specifically uh like we've been talking about other investors kind of pivoting into other industries. I think that creates a lot of a lot of interesting opportunities on the early stage side. And then I think on the on the liquid side, as I was saying before, we're starting to see this real divergence in the asset class between high quality names and

508. 4:18:30

     lowquality names. For example, I I I haven't looked at prices today, but Bitcoin is basically down year to date. And you have other ass other large assets that are up over 2x. And so I think for an active active trading strategy in the public markets in crypto right now, there's honestly never been a better time to do it. Yeah, I'm uh I'm extremely bullish. I mean, sometimes we play this segment. It's called Be More

509. 4:18:51

     Bullish. And uh I I think you're the guy to uh to ask this. So, I'm just curious about your most radically bullish take right now. We already talked about how you know the the opportunity here is an order of magnitude larger as a result of regulatory uplift. Just I mean the AI tailwind. Give us your most radically bullish take.

510. 4:19:09

     Yeah. So, you know, tokenized RWAS are 30 billion 3040 billion today. I think in 3 years they will be north of a trillion. Um I also believe that of the call it 100 largest fintexs and neo bankanks around the world more than half of them will be implementing crypto rails into their core product in the next 2 years.

511. 4:19:33

     There you have it. Spencer is bullish. Appreciate it, man. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. Guys, we're going to be right back with our next guest. And uh don't go anywhere. Stay bullish. Be right back. What Heat. Heat.

512. 4:22:07

     Heat. Heat. Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City

513. 4:23:14

     getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget? We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets.

514. 4:23:36

     We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212.

515. 4:25:05

     Heat. Heat.

516. 4:26:50

     Heat. Heat.

517. 4:28:41

     Hey. Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget?

518. 4:29:05

     We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212.

519. 4:29:30

     Heat. Heat.

520. 4:30:48

     And we are back at the bridge. uh one of uh the more institutional conferences here which is very exciting because it feels like there's a lot of capital in the room uh and then you know obviously that means that there's a lot of downstream implications uh to where this capital goes our next guest Marcos is a partner at accolade partners Marcos it's your first time on the show thanks for being here

521. 4:31:13

     thank you so much thank you for having me and uh would love a little bit of a background into yourself but also accolade partners maybe what your specific interest in crypto is and then ultimately why you know you find yourself at the bridge here today.

522. 4:31:27

     Absolutely. Yeah. I'll start with a partners and I'm going to talk about my my my background and how I entered this world but acquake partners we are a DCbased fund of funds primarily. So we invest in venture capital funds and growth equity funds. Since 2018 we've started investing in crypto venture and we have a separate product for that. So we have 8 billion in assets total and

523. 4:31:52

     about a billion and a half in our crypto VC fund of funds which is separate and uh we've been doing this for a while. I mean we've we've been through our generalist funds we've been investing in in uh in the crypto space since 2012 but then we made our first dedicated investment in 2018 in a crypto specialist venture fund. And we've been in this industry you know through various booms uh and cycles. And so

524. 4:32:17

     we've seen a lot change and a lot evolve in multiple ways. Now I personally became interested in in blockchain crypto back in 2017 and then since then I've been an allocator in the space you know and we we backed numerous funds um you know throughout this time. We've been the first institutional check and in in several managers that you know.

525. 4:32:40

     Yeah. Incredible. And so what is the considerations for you know a fund of funds versus a traditional VC? We have a lot of conversations with VCs in the space think through portfolio allocation strategy value acrruel these sorts of things but I imagine it's quite a bit different thinking about these things from a fund of funds perspective. maybe you can just help unpack some of uh the

526. 4:33:06

     nuances between a traditional venture capital strategy and you know when it goes to looking at and surveying the funds that are available to you and then ultimately placing your allocations. Absolutely. I mean I'll I'll keep it uh in the context of crypto venture right and since the topic of our discussion anyway so I mean we've seen since 2018 we've seen 600 or so funds in the space

527. 4:33:33

     right and you know that ranges from you know very very small funds 5 10 million all the way to these mega funds in the space so we've had to sift through 600 deck X if you will and 600 data rooms and uh eventually allocate to you know 8 to 12 funds and I think um you know a few of the criteria we've used there in order to narrow down the universe is like the background of the people the way they reference with entrepreneurs on and off the record. uh also their

528. 4:34:07

     portfolio construction right which if you have high ownership in um in a fund relative to the fund size always you know your odds of succeeding are much higher assuming that you get deal uh good deal flow as well. So this sounds very basic very high level but the nitty-gritty is uh going into these things much more in depth and we ended up creating you know very specific portfolios with with with preferred

529. 4:34:34

     managers. The last thing I will say is that diligence in this space has changed over time. You know, back in 18, I'm sure we'll talk about that in a minute, and 19 and 20, there's so many more token launches, right now, it's much more equity kind of oriented, financeoriented kind of group. So, it's it's different. The things you're looking for are a little different.

530. 4:34:56

     Yeah. Um, I also think it's going to be helpful for our audience to understand the customer segment that you have. Where is the LP in a fund of funds, right? I'd imagine that it is quite a bit different from someone who goes into traditional venture. What is the the swath of investments come from? Where where do you see your investor profile?

531. 4:35:17

     Yeah. So, why would somebody come to a fund of funds, right? Why wouldn't they go direct to some of these managers? And on the crypto VC side, um there's a very specific reason on the venture side, traditional venture side as well, but the crypto VC side even more. Um, so think about that. You know, there's endow our our uh LPs are endowments, families and so on. Think think about what their options are like. Their

532. 4:35:40

     options are to go out and speak to 600 managers for what? For a 1 to 5% um allocation of their portfolio because crypto is not going to be more than that. Um they wouldn't hire staff to do that for them as it's a very labor intensive process.

533. 4:36:00

     So that's where we come in. We're we're we are the outsourced in a way uh research arm of these people. I mean they invest in a fund through us and then in their underlying funds but they basically outsource the diligence and portfolio construction process to us. Um and it's a a real value that we provide to them. So otherwise you know for a small part of their portfolio they would

534. 4:36:24

     need to hire you know develop the expertise and it distracts them from from their core allocations. Right. Right. And what are the core allocations just so that we can understand the market share the relative market share that you know crypto has in say an endowment right for a university or something. I'd imagine that they're primarily across equities and, you know, traditional index funds and these things, but they do realize now that crypto should make up at least a small

535. 4:36:54

     proportion of their portfolio. And so rather than go and invest all the time and research and energy into doing the due diligence themselves, they realize that maybe they should make up one to five or, you know, single-digit percent of their portfolio. They're going to go outsource that diligence to a team such as yourself. Not always, not always, just to be clear, but many have opted to

536. 4:37:18

     go down that route because, you know, with a trusted partner that that we've become for them. So, uh, Exactly. And you know the these endowments mostly have equity, they have private equity, they have traditional venture capital. And then crypto, it used to be back in 18, it used to be almost nothing for most of these endowments. Now, you know, there are some endowments with, you know, 1 to 5% allocations, but they're still small as a as the part of a whole, right? Still at that level, they're small. Yeah.

537. 4:37:50

     Yeah. Make makes sense. And so, give us a little bit more insight into what you're doing here at the bridge, right? There's obviously there's people from all walks of life at this conference. Everyone is, you know, looking at either asset allocation or or coming at it from more of an industry perspective. I take it that you're probably here looking at different funds to potentially, you know, allocate capital into. Take us through your diligence process once you maybe meet a prospective fund manager at

538. 4:38:16

     one of these events. What is the the investment process and the diligence process look like? Yeah, absolutely. Uh, so yeah, a few things about this event. You know, I've been going to blockchain cryptoreated events since 2018 consistently and I'm blown away by how different this conference is versus 3 4 years ago. 3 4 years ago it was crypto uh people in the ecosystem here. I'm looking around everybody's half the people are or more

539. 4:38:45

     are wearing a suit and they're from traditional finance. So my purpose for coming to this conference has been twofold. one is to meet the managers and I'll talk about the diligence and second is to meet with some of these traditional financial investors and understand what they're looking for uh what types of um uh you know as are they looking at stable coins are they looking at DeFi lending are they meeting with uh

540. 4:39:09

     with our managers right so I can make introductions to our managers um the two the two worlds are converging as you know so what do we look uh for I mean high level very very uh very simple like we meet somebody we do we have a meeting we talk about their strategy we go through some of their portfolio um investments or angel track records if they don't have um investments and then we after that we sit down and determine

541. 4:39:39

     whether we want to do a second and there are various criteria that we use there uh it's more soft than quantitative at that point then we take a deeper dive and we go talk about more company examples and we we ask more questions open-ended quite often and and then we uh if if if all these go well and we take a deeper dive in portfolio construction and we take a deeper dive into uh you know fund size and other matters and then you know a lot of

542. 4:40:10

     referencing as well like on and off the record. So it's a multi-part process. Um it's at a high level it sounds pretty easy but there's a lot of like nitty-gritty work like we do you know for all of that. And what are what is a typical check size that you'll write into these funds?

543. 4:40:27

     We uh we write pretty substantial check sizes because we uh historically because we've been a large fund. I mean it ranges. I don't want to give you like specific number but it ranges but we write we we tend to be one of the largest investors in some in some of the blockchain venture funds. And and you mentioned how the way in which a fund of funds is able to get outsized returns is

544. 4:40:49

     typically to own a larger share of the fund that you're investing into. And so what is your target say ownership stake in a particular fund? Are you targeting 5% 10 like I'd imagine that there's somewhat somewhat of a range there too because you don't want to overwhelm the fund, right? And get too much but you don't you want to have you know enough where where the stake matters. Maybe you can just help unhappy.

545. 4:41:11

     Yeah. No, that's a good question. Um I think um we we we we don't I mean we want to write our check size that um that is the optimal check size for portfolio construction and um you know we we will be a substantial percentage of of funds quite often. However, um you're right. I mean, uh we're not going to be one check the entire fund, right?

546. 4:41:34

     Um on the other hand, what I will say it's a bigger problem if you're a large investor in an open-ended fund than a closedended fund. Why? Because if you're in an open-ended fund and you're like 60% of the capital and you decide to redeem then you can wreak havoc to the portfolio because um you're creating you know massive outflow in an you know in a specific period of time and so it's a more of a business risk I think for for the open and the funds on the closed end. Makes sense. Well uh Marcos you got a panel starting in uh in a few minutes.

547. 4:42:10

     We want to make sure that you get there on time. So thank you for spending some time with us today. giving us a little bit of an insight into, you know, an area of the industry that we don't hear a lot about being the fund of funds. Uh so we are going to be right back with our next guest. Appreciate. Thank you so much.

548. 4:42:25

     Thank you so much and uh have a great panel. Thank you very much. Awesome guys. We'll be right back.

549. 4:43:38

     Heat. Heat.

550. 4:45:28

     Hey. Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget?

551. 4:46:08

     We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets.