Longitude by Cointelegraph - Exclusive Event Livestream with Aurther Hayes, Joesph Lubin, & More

Sa. Sa. Sam. Sa. It. It's. Sa. Sa. Radio. Good afternoon, everyone. We're going to get started in a couple of minutes, so I'm going to ask everyone that's outside enjoying themselves to stop enjoying themselves and come inside, please. Welcome to Longitude. We'll. We'll be getting started very shortly. We're going to have a couple of words from our CEO Yana, and then we'll get underway with the program. We've got some fantastic speakers with us this evening, so it's a great pleasure to welcome you all here. Please stand by it. I know, I know. Hi, everyone. We're getting started. Sorry, everyone. We started with that person. I was. Guys, join us inside if you want. We're going to get underway. We are starting our program. If you guys want to move inside. We are starting our program if you guys want to join us inside. We get excited if you guys want to join us. We're getting started. We're getting started if you guys want to join us inside. All right. The best thing to do is to start talking and then I'm sure everyone's going to come inside. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Longitude Number six. A year ago, we had the crazy idea to start a exclusive side event with the best speakers in the industry, tailored to our fantastic audience that loves to read Cointelegraph and watch all our content. Yana CEO came up with this idea and put a load of pressure on me and the rest of our team to make this happen. And it's. It's a great pleasure to say that it's been a year since we've been doing this and they've all gone really well. We've got Arthur Hayes, we've got Joe Lubin. We've got a fantastic lineup of speakers here tonight. So we're going to give you some alpha. I hope you enjoy it. Take photos, take videos. Please share widely. We're going to have a few words from our CEO Jana, and then Arthur Hayes is going to join us on stage. He's a busy man and I know he needs to get somewhere else. Hi. Hi, everyone. Good evening, dear guests. It's a true honor to see all of you here tonight and obviously I won't keep you. Wait so long. I'm not Altcoin season, obviously. So it's our second Longitude event here in Singapore. One year passed really fast and we have seen so many changes in the crypto industry over the last 12 months. First of all, we are observing adoption among institutions and traders who finally have an access to crypto. Also we can see that Bitcoin continues to grow and Ethereum is getting closer to $5,000 mark on the back on institutional adoption. And not only Bitcoin and Ethereum attracted significant capital from ETFs, but you can also see that Solana is already performing very well. And we are all waiting for the release of new altcoins ETFs in the nearest future. And the market can also see that RWA tokenization has finally become the real thing. It's around $28 billion in total value. And starting from Link, which is partnering with the major web two companies, to Onda, which is attracting more and more capital as we speak. We can see all of this major progress. And obviously, I'm happy to summarize that it's safe to say that it has been incredibly, like, big move for the market. And we can see that the market itself, its players, founders, they get more and more mature. And obviously we are proud to see that. And tonight we have a great lineup of speakers and you will be able to get more insights about the markets and you will be able to talk to those people. And guys, just enjoy this event. There's so many wonderful faces smiling. I see this fire in your eyes. Please keep this level of the energy very high. And let's build. Let's build together because obviously the market is in our favor. Thank you very much. Thank you. Enjoy. Over to Gareth Garris. You're here. Thank you. Thanks, Jana. Let's give it up for Arthur Hayes. The man, the myth, the legend. Come on, guys, let's get some energy going. Get in the hot seat. Right in the middle. Okay. They should. They should turn you on. We'll keep the short, sharp, and brief. Bitcoin's pumping. Why? I mean, 2%. Come on. Like, I'm sure lots of people in this room would not consider the 118,000 pumping. Yeah, that is true. Arthur, I'm going to start off with the burning question. I think, like, the biggest takeaway for me from, like, the last six weeks was you selling all your hype tokens and buying a Ferrari. How much have you driven that Ferrari? Well, it's. I don't even know what the price of the Ferrari yet because the dealer just said, hey, we got this new Testarossa. Do you like, you want it? Like, yeah, it looks cool. What's the price? I don't know. Like, when does it deliver? I don't know. Like, okay, well, you know, I don't really know. I mean, this Ferrari or how much it costs or Whatever. But you sold the hype. I did sell the hype. So yeah, I sold it. Can you tell us why? Like, I mean really, is your long term conviction fading on Perp Dexs? And like, no, I mean, I think Perp Dex is. This is obviously like the second season of Perp Dexs. The first season was DYDX in 2020-2021. I think it pumped to something like 30 billion FDV and that was sort of the first real perp decks and it kind of faded. And so then we came to this like the new age, the Hyper liquid that started this Trend, you know, 18 months ago they really took over at least in the, the deck space. And then probably six, seven months ago started really encroaching on sex volumes. I think like 10 or 15% of, of Binance. And why was it successful? Because they said, okay, we're going to buy back our token with our revenue. And DYDX didn't give any revenue to any of the token holders, which is why it's a piece of shit. And so that's why everyone loved Hyper Liquid. And you know, so enthusiastic and you know, they're putting up these awesome numbers and obviously this is, you know, very threatening to a lot of the centralized players. And now we see, you know, Binance, Bybit, I think Bitget, Coinbase, they all have a perp Dex or are building a perp Dex to sort of get into this ring because, you know, they really realize that it's an existential threat to retail traders who, you know, don't want to deal with all the bullshit that they have to deal with on a centralized exchange. And it's really nice to just connect your wallet, trade what you want to trade, trade the leverage that you want to trade. And that freedom is what Hyperlipic brings. And the fees are very cheap, but it's going to be commoditized. And so I don't know how the industry is going to evolve, but surely I don't want to be sitting around long something that has to earn money to generate the Ford multiple. We'll see what happens. And shakes out in maybe 612 months we'll understand like, okay, what's this? Ecosystems are going to look like who succeeded, who failed, what sort of multiple we're going to put in these revenues. Obviously I believe that perp Dexs are going to grow massively. I still believe that there is a possibility for Hype to be a $5,000 token by 2028. However, they're going to have to go through this period of intense competition, figure out a new revenue model, whatever that is. I don't know what that will be, but there's going to be enough flow there to generate the revenue to get to that price target. Or maybe it's something else. Look, you sold 96k hype like the full bag. Do you buy in like again? I mean, what's your general outlook for hyper liquid in particular? I didn't. I mean if the price, I mean it was like $40 an hour or something like that, like, even if it goes back above where I sold it, the thesis hasn't changed. We're getting into a low or no fee environment for perp Dexs. It's only just getting started. So even if it doubled from here, I still wouldn't participate because I'm just worried that the market might give it a 50 pe multiple. And then all of a sudden some influencer posts on Twitter. People think in their head, oh that's not cool. Maybe I have to put a 25 PE multiple. And even if the volumes go up, I've already lost half my value. So I just don't want to be in that situation. Given that we know that this revenue thing is a problem. Have you been looking at Asta? Because there was a lot of noise after their token generator. I didn't even know what it was until like a week and a half ago. So no, I don't own any Aster. And do you think like it being associated with CZ and obviously YZ Labs is compelling enough to some people to go and buy that token because of course it's, you know, number go up, right? It's the shiny new thing. We'll buy it and we'll trade it and whatever. But you know, I mean Maelstrom has put a very, very small check into lighter and their seed or you know, whatever round. So we have a small position in that. So I hope it, you know, hope it does well in this TG in a few months, but I don't really want to participate in this war in size. Let's just wait till it shakes out and, and then move from there. Let's talk about your. Your4.7 article that you put out recently was fantastic. Read. The model itself is, is quite crazy that you were talking about, you know, this long term 20, 28 price tag of Bitcoin around 3.2 million. You say very clearly at the end of that, you know, post that, hey guys, like, I'm not saying that that's what bitcoin's gonna hit. But is that what bitcoin can hit by 2028? It can hit infinity, right? That's just math. I don't know. But I, I just wanted to mentally check. Okay, well if, if this much money could be printed and you know, here's one way it could happen is the, the magnitude there so that you're directionally right and you can be, you know, you can fuck around with a lot of stuff. If you bought something at 100,000 and it goes to a million, 2 million, 3 million, whatever the price is, you're allowed to make a lot of mistakes. But if you're, you know, in something that doesn't have the potential to have that sort of magnitude of upside down, then obviously it's much more difficult to earn a positive return. Look, you highlighted like $15 trillion in a credit explosion dollarization push like all of this. Does it only go into bitcoin? Is the entire crypto market like the big cap tokens the big winners? As monetary expansion continue, of course the majority of it will go into bitcoin. And I think obviously the new meta is fundamental season cash flows, revenue. So the token projects that do really well in this alt season will have sort of a hyper liquid style, you know, profitable, taking those profits, buying back the token or doing some sort of emissions. I think that's the expectation of traders this time around. What did you think of Tether's announcement about their private round and that $500 billion valuation, you know, puts them on the same level as SpaceX, you know, OpenAI, the most, you know, valuable companies in the world. Does it surprise you that they. No. I mean Tether is the best bank that's ever existed in human history. They're the most profitable bank per employee ever in human history with 150 employees. And they generate something like $8 billion of, of net income every year. And it just goes to show what's possible with a, you know, decentralized public blockchain where all of your costs can be done with technology. And this is what the bank will look like in the future. And that's why Tether is so highly, highly valued. Can you tell us more about like Maelstrom's overall investment thesis? How often you change it? Because like, I mean, obviously no one has a crystal ball, but when you sold all your hype tokens, I'm sure a lot of people were like, holy shit, like what the hell just happened? You know, how often are you changing things as you, as you look at the market? So I mean most of Maelstrom's portfolio is just long bitcoin and eth, right? And you know, I don't fuck around with that. I swing trade maybe 10 to 20% of the fund. So we'll go maybe to 80% invested to 100% invested and we'll trade whatever shitcoin that I feel like I want to trade on the liquid part of the books. We also do some financing trades and then on the venture side we write very, very small checks really just to understand what's happening at that level. Because I think it's easier to deploy capital in the liquid space in the early stage venture just because you have to only invest in the bear market. You have to wait two years to get your tokens and unlocks and all this kind of stuff. So that's our bread and butter. When you go to your team and you're like, guys, I'm, I'm buying this shitcoin, don't hate on me. I mean, does anyone actually like fight you and they're like, no, this an Arthur, this isn't a good idea? No. I mean we have disagreements all the time. And that's, that's why I hire the type of people that I hire. I want them to think and if they have an opinion that differs to me, I am perfectly open to being challenged. And my P L is right there and they can look on the spreadsheet, see how much money I've made this year. I am up, thankfully. But yeah, isn't everyone up? I mean, come on. We've got a panel coming up on digital asset treasuries and it's going to be really great. Joseph Chalom from sharplynx here, Andrew Webley from the Smarter Web company in, in the UK and then David Namdar who set up a BNB token Treasury. And we're just going to be painting this kind of contrast between the different tokens. What are your general thoughts on digital asset treasury companies? But let's start with bitcoin before we talk about the other ones. I mean, it's great. It's another financial product to trade. It's great that this is sort of a backdoor to give crypto exposure to investors who otherwise wouldn't be able to own it. Obviously we have a lot of DAT companies. I think we'll have more DAT companies mostly because the banks make so much money off these things. Someone told me that Cantor Fitzgerald made $160 million last month in fees just doing DAT offerings and sort of a follow on ATMs and convertibles and stuff like that so that's an amazing amount of money for an investment bank to make in a single month. So you know when J.P. morgan and Citi and Goldman see those sorts of numbers they're going to do the same thing too and they have a much better distribution network of institutional investors. So I think that the DAT ecosystem is going to grow but the capital is going to be concentrated in the larger names like a microstrategy or a bit mine. Like they're going to receive the lion's share of the capital. But of course you know you still can do a $50 million dat just not going to trade very much. But I mean when it comes to like bitcoin, I mean you've just said you're a long term holder of Bitcoin and eSight, you know, you're pretty convicted about those. Do you think you know Solana dats and some of the, the new ones that are coming out the BNB debts, I mean BNB is worth a thousand dollars. BNB chain has got a load of users. You know there's a use case for that. I mean in my mind bitcoin is the gold Standard and the DATs that are holding bitcoin make a lot more sense. Of course I understand why the Ethereum that's make sense but I mean it doesn't really matter. The underlying token, this is a corporate finance exercise and so it's all about can you do you have the right connection to issue non dilutive capital and then buy this token, whatever that token may be. And it's all predicated on how much, how large is your dat, how much average daily trading volume you have because then you get added into the index. Once you're in the index in the passive money buys your dat. Irregardless of what you do as a management it doesn't matter, they don't care. It's oh it's in the index, I have to buy it. So you know, it could be bnb, it could be rat poison, it doesn't matter. Like as long as you're able to generate the size you can do the following offerings and buy what you need to buy. So yeah, I of course I have to be bullish on some of the other things I'm involved in UPXI as an advisor I've done one a BNB pipe and another an ENA pipe as well. So yeah, I believe in these things but it is a corporate finance game. So would you buy a strategy? I mean would you buy some of those shares that they're doing have you like looked at any of. No, we haven't really traded any of these in a secondary market. It's just, just. It's a different type of trading. It's just not suited for our, our operation. Last year when we was it. Last year? Yeah, last year when we spoke at token 2049, news came out that you funded a bitcoin grant program. There's been a lot of talk in the bitcoin community about, you know, bitcoin core and bitcoin knots. How plugged in are you to that? Do you sit on the fence when it comes to that kind of thing? I mean, so ideologically I try not to have an opinion on, you know, we don't tell the people that we have grants to what to do. And bitcoin core, we're a neutral party, obviously. We just want to contribute to bitcoin being as rock solid as possible because that is the foundation which our entire industry is built upon. So that's why we give these grants. We've given four grants so far. But, you know, my view is it's an economic game and we shouldn't try to arbitrarily restrict what people put on the blockchain. If they're willing to pay the economic price, whatever that is, then all data should be on the blockchain. So you leave it to your team from here. I mean, are you still going to be investing in bitcoin development in general? Is that something? Yes, it's a program that we operate. I think we've given out four grants. I'm not sure if we'll do any more. Some grants come up for renewal and we choose different person to be a bitcoin poor developer. But I think it's a thing that every successful fund and exchange should be doing. What are your general bull market predictions? I mean, is this going to go way into 2026, you know, the market going up and up, or how do you see things playing out? I mean, especially with your thesis on the, on the Fed and all the money printing. So I just read the newspaper and when I read the newspaper, the politicians say they're going to do this or that, spend money on this or that. Very, very ever rarely do I hear, and I'm going to raise taxes or propose taxes to be raised to pay for any of this stuff. And so that's not a very popular thing. Even in, you know, China, which is an authoritarian state, you'd be surprised at how hard it is for the Chinese central government to collect taxes, which leads to a lot of issues between them and the local governments. So if China can't collect taxes and it's worried about, you know, social people being pissed off at raising taxes, what is going, what is a democracy going to do? So everyone's going to print money and if you read the newspaper it's just like, oh, we're going to give out goodies and we're just going to create this money at a thin air and do it. So I don't know why the bitcoin or crypto cycle has to be four years that's supposedly ending in a few weeks if the liquidity is going to continue to be created because the politicians who are appealing to the people that they represent are saying we're going to do something for you and it doesn't cost anything. Yeah, definitely. I'm going to open it up to the floor because our clock is telling us that. But it's nearly half past and I know that you're busy. Does anyone have any burning questions for Arthur? Now's your chance. There we go. We got one. Let me. He's running. The gentleman behind you has got a microphone. There's a question about stables. We see that a lot of stables, coins created by banks, all this stuff. So what do you think about it? So will it stop? Do we need so many stables? I mean I think there's going to be three major stablecoins, Tether, Athena and usdc. I think most stablecoins will be a US dollar backed thing because outside of America people within the fiat realm want a dollar, they want a dollar bank account, they want to own Treasuries, they want that yield, they want to buy US stocks. It's just that the governments don't let them do that because they want them to buy their local stuff. So that's why, you know, I think it's mainly going to be concentrated in those. They have the distribution, they have all the large crypto exchanges, you know, the large, you know, payment processors are using them. If you're a social media company, I believe they're going to integrate those rather than do their own. So I think it's very difficult for a new issuer to come on the market and gain distribution. On that note, can you just give the audience your views on like Athena and its relationship with usdt? I think you put something out about a lot of people don't understand how you can arbitrage between that or how they're actually quite complementary. Athena and usdt? Yeah, so Athena is think about it as like an enhanced savings account. And the yield is coming from crypto trading. Right. Why do, why do you pay a positive interest rate to go long a perp? Because Bitcoin has gone up however many X since it was created. And it's a fixed supply asset, but the denominator is being printed at infinite. So Bitcoin theoretically should go to infinity. And therefore if you're going to put on leverage, you have to pay for it. And that is what Athena is harvesting is this leverage. And they're paying it out as interest on however long however the period for SCNA is. But that is what Athena is versus Tether, which is a dollar that's held in a bank account that ultimately buys a Treasury. So it's a different product. Yes, it is both. They're Both pegged at $1, but one is a dollar peg stablecoin One is a synthetic dollar. Exactly. Any more questions for Arthur? Okay, there we go. Now we've got some takers. I'm going to. Okay, the man at the back. Yeah. Hello, Arthur. It was a great party in Dubai. Thank you. And my question about what do you think about prediction markets? It will be bigger than meme coins or it just like top right now because it's hot take right now. And it's interesting your opinion. I was just on stage with Tom Lee a few hours ago and he made a great point that Polymarket, at least in the US election got every single. The winner of every single state correct. And so I think that at least in politics in the US context, different countries have different cycles. You have 2026 to 2028, and you're going to find that the politicians and the people are going to be looking at these prediction markets to inform them of what is the popular opinion. Because obviously the media lies to you, the politicians lie to you, but when people put their own money on the line, they're not going to lie to themselves. They want to make money. They're going to only bet on the thing they think is going to happen. So that's why I think prediction markets are going to be a very good social signifier to cut away all the noise. What does someone actually think when real money is on the line? Thank you. We got one more from the front. Do you want a shot at us? What's your prediction for rate cuts this year and next year? Do you think the market has priced them in already? I think they'll cut rates. I don't really know how much. I don't really care. I'm more of a quantity of money guy than A price of money guy. So I think I care more about how much the price, how many more dollars or yen or euros are going to be created and putting a number on that. But the rate cut kind of doesn't matter because we went up from, you know, 16,000 to. Was it 124 on 4% rates. Right. So rates don't really matter if you're printing money. Good. Thank you. Oh, one more. There you go. And he's got a microphone. I think we'll take the last one. Hi, Arthur. So most stablecoins are issued on Ethereum, but we know that Ethereum is kind of slow and expensive for everyday payment. So which chain do you think will enable large scale, everyday stablecoin payment? Thank you. Ethereum, because I own a lot of it. I don't really know, to be fair. Yeah, some of them are. I mean, like USTs. USDT operates on a lot of different. Tron is obviously very. USDT is operated on. I mean, I think it's wherever the distribution is. End client. Yeah. The fees are high, but like, if. If the distribution is there, they're going to pay it. Ladies and gentlemen, Arthur Hayes. Just give him a big round of applause. Thank you. Thank you. All right, we're going to move on swiftly. Cheers, Arthur. He's off to a party or something. All right, we're going to be talking about digital asset treasury companies now. I'm going to call up Joseph Chalum from Sharplink Gaming, Andrew Webley from the Smarter Web Company, and David Namdar. Here we go. I will shift down. Sorry, Dima. Yeah, that's perfect. And we're in order on the. On the screen behind us. All right, I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time because three very different treasury asset companies, three very different assets underlying. I'm going to let you guys do the talking. Joseph, let's start off with you. Tell us about Sharplink Gaming before it became a digital asset treasury company and how this journey to Ethereum came about. Sure. I'm Joseph. I've been Sharplink CEO for a couple of months with the second largest Eth. Treasury with about 3 and a half billion ownership of Ethan. My background is about six years ago, I got into crypto at BlackRock with a goal of fundamentally changing the industry, bringing traditional finance into crypto and getting to the point where we no longer talk about trad fi and defi and it's just finance. And we did it. We brought $100 billion into a couple of ETFs, launched the largest tokenized funds in the world. And I retired, promising not to work for a year. And a month later I'm working for Joe Lubin because I have a belief that most of finance will be fundamentally disrupted on ethereum and its L2s. And I believe we're at the point where it's not just going to be financial markets changing, it's going to be civilization level change. And we've done it from different platforms and I think we're going to do it again. And we're underestimating the impact that's coming really, really soon. Beautiful. We're going to get into the specifics more after that. But Andrew, tell us about Smarter Web Company. A marketing, essentially a marketing agency that allowed people to, you know, build websites or you build websites for people. How did you become a bitcoin treasury company and one of the most successful in the uk? Yes, My name is Andrew Webley and I started my career in 1999 where I joined a very, very small company that became the biggest investment broker in the UK. Today it's got 40% market market share. After 10 years, I, I left there because I didn't enjoy it anymore. So I set up my own small business, the Smarter Web Company. It's a business that's built around a system so everyone would understand what a content management system is. And that's, that's, that's what the business did. And then about 10 years I ago, I found Bitcoin. Then five, five and a bit years ago, Michael Saylor came up with strategy and that was my moment. Then I suddenly realized that if you took bitcoin, the very best asset in the world, and a public company where you can issue equity, borrow money, et cetera, smash the two things together, then you've got the very best thing. And then moving on to our company and how we became a public company in the UK. There wasn't one in the UK. So we're talking about DATs today. You know, they're very topical at the moment. I looked for three years in the UK to find a digital asset treasury company investing in bitcoin and there wasn't one. So that's why IPO'd my business. And in the last five months we've raised over £200 million. We're the most successful IPO in UK history and we're the largest holder of bitcoin in the UK public markets. In fact, we own more Bitcoin than all of the other companies in the UK added together. And, and that's us. Beautiful. I Love it. David, you've been involved in the Binance ecosystem for quite a long time. Tell us about how you managed to raise $500 million to set up a BNB treasury company. And obviously for those of you that might hold bnb, it hit a thousand dollars recently. So it's, it's a great chain. A lot of believers in the token. Tell us the story. Sure. Well, on that note, yeah, I think a couple people have told me recently I've managed in the last couple months to help help share the BNB story in the west and the US particularly more than in the prior five, eight years before that. So I've got that part down so far. But yeah, partly I'm up here because I failed at some of the earliest things I tried to do in the crypto space. I tried to do a Bitcoin ETF back in 2014, two weeks after the Winklevoss twins. So we're really a couple of the earliest ones trying to do that. I was very proud of them. They just got Gemini public in the US and I failed at getting BlackRock into the space. I was talking to people at BlackRock and VanEck back in 2014, 15, 16, and just being a bit too early, but always trying to, in a similar way, trying to bring the crypto markets into the capital markets and help people from the tradfi world, from hedge funds, from banks, retail, understand and see the opportunity within crypto. And so I'd been investing in a lot of the treasury companies recently. I invested in MicroStrategy over the last couple of years, but saw it more as a trade. I didn't appreciate just how powerful of an accumulation vehicle they'd be able to kind of get to it. And it's been really phenomenal to watch. And now with Sharplink and BMNR and a lot of the other treasury companies and following in their footsteps, I'm very proud to kind of lead the leading BNB treasury so far. And to me, bnb, it's just, it's a special story. All of these assets, right? Bitcoin, Ethereum. I was in the Ethereum ico. I've been a bitcoin believer from the beginning. And part of what excites me about BNB is just it's an opportunity that here in the east is very well known and really in all over the world, except for the us. And so one of the things I've been pointing out, it's very rare to have a kind of company or an opportunity where the largest company in that vertical Right. So if you think about Facebook, Google, Apple, the largest company in each of their verticals is publicly listed in the US and they have investors from the US and from every market globally. Well, in the crypto space, the biggest company in the space binance is potentially five to 10 times larger than any other crypto exchange. So they don't have any presence in the US and they don't even allow US investors. So to me, it's just a very special opportunity. I like that a lot. Joseph, I'm going to jump over back to you. Why Ether over btc? When you guys started doing Shoplink, I mean, did Joe give you a call and say, hey, let's do this thing together. What's the backstory? I'm not religious. Like many people sit up here wanting to flip Bitcoin or flip ETH or Solana. I'm a maxi on tokenization. So I think there's a role for Bitcoin in every single person's portfolio. I think there's a role for eth. The reason why I think ETH is really, really interesting as a Treasury asset and potentially a better treasury asset is really for very simple fundamental reasons. ETH has a 40 volatility, maybe because of the ETFs, and maybe I'm at fault, sucked up a lot of the bitcoin, held it without trading and the bitcoin volume came down. So if you want to build a Treasury asset, it's great for it to be a store of value like Ethereum. It's great that at times it's deflationary, but actually more importantly, it's productive. You can stake it, easily earn 3%. If you own billions and billions of dollars of ETH stacks of ETH, you can go out in the defi ecosystem and do two things. Raise the standards and you can king make protocols and create incentive structures that benefit your investors without necessarily taking more risk. And that staked ETH is revenue in a public company. Public companies trade on forward valuations. If you can continue to grow your ETH concentration and responsibly stake it, you should get a multiple that a Bitcoin treasury has demonstrated under Michael Saylor for a long time. But fundamentally it's a productive asset. I mean, I spoke to Joe Lubin and he said some of the stuff earlier today and obviously he'll be joining us shortly. Andrew, let's talk about Bitcoin. Why is it the gold standard for a digital asset? Treasury company, and I don't know if you've publicly said you would never do Anything else. But I take it you wouldn't. Yeah, so there was actually an article in one of the leading papers in the UK that said, over my dead body would we do anything else else? And Financial Times, that was the article I, I did read. Most of them have covered them and that's a really important thing of what we're doing. You know, some people don't like bitcoin treasury companies and the bitcoin community and I'm sure it's the same with, with the other assets, but we're doing a really good job and we're spreading the word with, you know, getting in front of people that perhaps wouldn't get interested otherwise. But for me it's very simple. You know, I've been investing in bitcoin for almost 10 years. I don't believe in the pound, I don't believe in the dollar. With all due respect to everyone else, I don't believe in any other digital assets or almost any other asset. I only own one house and that's a pain. So it's what I believe in. I literally keep almost everything that I own in the world in bitcoin or bitcoin treasury companies because of what I believe the qualities to be. So if I'm going to build a Treasury for what was originally my business and now is a public company, then of course it's going to be built on bitcoin. But you know, I'm not saying that other people are wrong. I'm just saying that that's how I see the world. I would love to encourage you guys to, you know, debate if you feel like, hey, we need to challenge Andrew on, on that, but tell us why, like, what's the core thesis? Is it just because of, you know, bitcoin's protocol, you know, the store of value? A lot of us would like to see bitcoin be used a lot more as peer to peer electronic cash. And my fear and some of the questions I've asked other people that are involved in the space. David Bailey, you know, Jack Mellows. What do what? You know, what do these bitcoin treasury companies take away from people using bitcoin as money? That's one of my fears as someone who really believes in bitcoin. Yeah. So there's, there's simply two qualities that I like about bitcoin, which is the, the fixed number that will ever exist and the fact that no one controls it. And I include the bitcoin treasury companies in that space. You know, it is that simple for me for bitcoin now, you know, I, I would like to see Bitcoin used more as a medium of exchange potentially. And I think that will happen, but I think that will be a lot, a lot further down the line. There's some companies doing some good things in that space. I personally believe that there will be other alternative things built on top of it, some of which do not exist today, that, that will help us achieve that. I think as soon as you get a developed country using it more as a medium of exchange, I think that'll be an absolute game changer massively. But over the next couple of years, I think you'll see the store of value continue what, what some people forget when they talk about the store of value versus the medium of exchanges. The store of value does not exist if you don't have a medium of exchange without another counterparty. So if I want to store some of my value with you, I can exchange it with you without anyone controlling that. So it might not be your, you know, you're buying in a cup of coffee, which everyone says that they want to do with Bitcoin, but it is a medium of exchange because without being a medium of exchange, it can't be a store of value. I'll get controversial here. Bitcoin does one thing and it does it exceptionally well. And I believe everyone should have it in their portfolio. But Etherium is where the civilization level change is going to come from. It's where financial services are going to get fundamentally reprogrammed on a decentralized settlement layer. You know, stablecoins today are about $280 billion. I think conservatively it'll 10x in the next couple of years. Tokenized funds and I was involved in the largest is only about $30 billion. There's no reason it couldn't 100x in the next couple of years. And history tells us it happens on very specific venues where there's trust, where there's security and where there's liquidity. And there is no chain, including the L1s that derive. When I speak about Ethereum, I include mainnet and the L2s. There is no chain that has the history of not being down since its genesis block in July of 2015. And I know financial services is where there's $700 trillion of traditional assets and exchange. It's going to happen where there's trust, where there's security and where there's liquidity. And that's the Ethereum ecosystem, which is why I'm a maxi that if this is going to happen On Ethereum, now is the time to accumulate as much ETH as possible and stack it and accumulate it and use it for really benevolent purposes in the ecosystem. David, tell us why bnb? I mean, we've heard very compelling arguments for Bitcoin and eth. Tell us why bnb? Well, I mean this is where I've been a maxi at different points in times, but I'm also like, look, I live and breathe crypto. Like I'm sure many of the people in the room and you know, one of the things I've done and been very good at in my life and career is create chaos and pull people deeper and deeper into the crypto world. So I think you've been living it well. You're now fully in the space and you know, once you get involved, you can't leave. Right. And so I describe it as the most non zero sum game the world's ever seen. So we've imagined and dreamed up and battled with the traditional financial system and created 4 trillion of value. Well, I was talking to one of the biggest gold investors, a big family office owns, I think the most gold mines in Indonesia yesterday and I was talking to them at lunch and they, they were asking me and they still don't see and understand the bitcoin opportunity. And so starting there and I was like, well, gold as it's broken out now. When we first started in the space, the market cap of gold was 5 to 8 trillion total. Now it's 15 to 20 trillion. All that's done is it's raised the limit of what bitcoin can get to as its next kind of hurdle. Right. So that Bitcoin's at 2, 2 and a half trillion today. I see the next hurdle as being 15 to 20 trillion wherever gold is. Well, what does that also do? It also expands the kind of hurdle and potential for Ethereum, for BNB. Like I see these Ethereum now as a $500 billion asset. To me, a lot of the BNB story is just how overlooked and undervalued it is. It's a $125 billion asset today. When I think about this again, going back to what I was saying about largest company in the space, Tether did a raise recently or is in the process at 500 billion. If Binance potentially would list as a public company, it might be a 500 billion to $1.5 trillion company. Right. That U.S. investors, any of us as crypto investors, we might never get the opportunity to invest in Binance Equity. Well, BNB happens to be the best proxy of that equity where a lot of the value and CZ has said this a number of times. Binance actively contributes to the value of bnb. Right. It used to be directly linked to revenue. Now it's kind of an inherent link based on a burn mechanism that exists within the BNB ecosystem that no other top L1 asset has. So the recent burns, they just did the 32nd I think or 33rd, it's burning over $1 billion a quarter. So a lot of the. When I look at supply demand dynamics coming at this as an investor, that's why I kind of get attracted to the BNB ecosystem. I like that. I think that's pretty compelling actually. Let's talk about the other elephant in the room. Karl Simani's forward industry closed the $1.6 billion pipe and myself and Robert Baggs who co hosts Cointelegraph's Chain Action. If you haven't seen it, it's our daily show on X. We spoke to Kyle and you know, he. It's a very similar play to Ethereum essentially how many more, you know, digital assets are going to be, you know, treasuries, what's what, you know, like I understand the Bitcoin thesis, I understand the Ethereum thesis. But then when you look at Ethereum and Solana and bnb, we can stake these tokens. There are revenue generating opportunities for those digital asset treasury companies but then there's a million tokens. So like who wins? You know, what, what really sorts the wheat from the chat. I'm going to start with you Joseph. I just think protocols and chains and projects that can demonstrate actual real life utility and revenue. Doesn't matter if you wrap them in a DAT token or not. Like look at Uniswap, it has massive revenue potential. That's a business I would invest in. So I'm less concerned about the short term FUD, about which DATs are going to survive, which DATs are not going to survive, I'm much more focused on what is going to drive change in our ecosystem. If a DAT can help accumulate institutional capital so companies like Sharplink or others can use those stacks of ETH to fundamentally bootstrap and provide more security and trust in the ecosystem, I think that's interesting. I would recommend I read a lot and if people want to be challenged, I think there are two things you might want to read and it's not about dats. One is there is a consensus trustware report that talks about the decentralization of trust and how the future of economics and real world activity will happen. That is going to be basically, I think the fundamental basis on how economics will work in the future. And the second thing is Bill Gates has a great quote. We overestimate what we can do in a year and we underestimate what we're going to do in 10 years. Read the proposed ERC standard 8004 around trust list agents, understanding your identity, boundaries, registries. Every single person in this room in the next year will have an AI companion helping them think through their risk tolerance, understanding their predictive value, helping them rebalance portfolios, help them understand their perp trades. I think the world is going to be fundamentally different. So the answer to your question of like what DATs are going to survive or what tokens just be productive, I guess goes for the same as Bitcoin then. Andrew, I'm curious, like the overall longevity because a lot of people we started speaking to bitcoin treasury companies because that's what was there. And to be honest, I don't even think the DAT terminology existed like three or four months ago. It was fairly new to me. I just knew bitcoin treasury companies and now all these other players are there. But how does bitcoin stack up against that? Yeah, so, you know, you're right. The last two months or so has seen a massive influx of all different treasury companies doing different things. I've spent a lot of time over the last few months speaking to different investors, institutional investors, as long as retail as well as retail investors. What's very clear at the moment is that because this is such a new thing on mass, for five and a half years we've had strategy, but this year really is the first year of this new global industry emerging at scale. People do not yet understand how you value these things. So I like to think from the bitcoin treasury side of things that we've really pushed things forward in terms of, you know, as an industry. We've come up with the concept of bitcoin yield, or you could apply, you know, Ethereum yield, BNB yield. You know, obviously everyone knows that M navs and things like that. But you know what, what people aren't understanding at the moment is they understand the concept of a premium or a discount to the net asset value. But, but they're not understanding the very very point of why these things exist. And in my opinion the reason why these companies exist is because they can offer a better return than the underlying investment itself. So we use the phrase compound bitcoin, which is what we deliver. So We've delivered in the Last quarter almost 300% Bitcoin per share increase. And that's the point. And that's perfectly normal when you've got a new industry and lots of different things are coming out. You know, you need to remember what we phrase as proof of work, which is, you know, the work that the company does to earn that premium, which then incentivizes new capital to trust their capital with that management team to then hopefully earn that yield in the future. I like that, David. Yep. So even just in the past week I've developed a couple theses on how I see the kind of, of DAT market to play out. And you know, in one sense I'm super excited about how these are like financial piping and mechanisms that have opened up for capital to flow from parts of the traditional world into the crypto ecosystem. And one of them is that, you know, I put out estimates that I think over $100 billion to $200 billion is going to flow into kind of the crypto market through different stock markets in the world, through these Treasuries. And a lot of that capital is going to skip centralized exchanges. It's not going to go to sexes and dexes and it's really going to come in through that. So in order for crypto assets to stay relevant, they're going to have to have or figure out a way to kind of have a debt in order to tap into that liquidity. And so, you know, one of the thesis I came up with recently, from one cycle to the next, we usually see something like 25 to 50 of the top 100 crypto assets stay in the top 100, I'd be very surprised if, looking from now till the next cycle, if there are many, other than a uniswap, other than a couple of the most revenue generating kind of crypto assets that already have a lot of institutional buy in, I'd be very surprised if they're able to persist and kind of last in the top hundred from this cycle to the next. I like that a lot as well. How are you going about convincing people on BNB in particular then? Well, I've managed to BNB pill myself, so that's the starting point. So everything I say is very genuine and I actually, you know, quite humbled. But I, I've had quite a few kind of other crypto OG and early investors and friends tell me that, you know, they're shocked that I was able to convince them to buy into the BNB story already. And I think part of it is, you know what I talked about this undervalue, like how I see it as a really undervalued asset despite being one of the top four or five assets, just the buyback and everything. And then I do just think like the people are fundamentally missing the scale of the BNB ecosystem that has grown much beyond just Binance. But at the same time I talk about how important that is to it. If you look at the total users that Binance has today, it's 290 million, pushing 300 million by far larger than Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, any other exchange. And because BNB is used as a kind of fee discount still on the exchange in some cases it's possible that BNB is actually the most widely used off chain crypto asset in the world. So some I've seen estimates that 80 to 90% of Binance users use BNB to pay for trading fees. And I've even seen the potential that other exchanges may also adopt that for trading fees in the future. So I think there's a number of different ways and how I've managed to convince myself of the opportunity and some of that I think rubs off to others. All right, we've been very bullish so far on stage. Let's talk about some of the risks. We haven't had a bear market for the rest of the DAT space. I mean Michael Saylor is probably the only person that managed to weather a full on bear Market and MicroStrategy didn't collapse even though they were holding a huge amount of Bitcoin. Have you looked into this Joseph? Like what are your fears of a really bad drawdown for Ethereum? I mean it might not pose a threat for you or for Bitmine, but maybe some of the other players that are over levered their M nav is really low. These kind of things. I think it's very, very simple. Build a team who understands institutions. Risk management is number one. Two, don't do stupid things in raising debt like secure your debt against your asset so you're one day, when the markets go down, a forced liquidator. That's a really, really dangerous thing. And the third thing is just do the right thing for investors. And when your MNAV is positive, issue new stock, increase the ETH concentration per share. And we had moments and days when our ETH concentration was below zero. And you know what we did? We bought back 2 million shares to help the shareholders. So it's not that complicated. I think the more interesting thing is forget about the cycles. What can you do for your ecosystem with stacks and stacks of your underlying token. And hopefully the answer is you make the ecosystem more productive. That's as interesting to me than what happens in a down cycle because we'll have multiple down cycles. It's really a long term play and an opportunity, which is why I entered the space after 20 years at Blackrock. Andrew, let's talk about Bitcoin then. I think it was the Financial Times article. They were talking about how high Smarter web went and the price going down. How are you dealing with that and looking at some of the other companies, I mean even strategy, I'll be honest with you, I bought some strategy shares when it happened and, and I'm down, I'm not worried about it. But it's true. How do you approach this? Yeah, so obviously bitcoin historically has been relatively volatile, but it's nothing compared with a bitcoin treasury company. That's why we've made a concerted effort over and above what the regulators have demanded of us to make sure that people understand the risks for buying a public equity that's got element of bitcoin exposure. What we've done as a business is we've got an operating business that's been profitable for 15 years, you know, on a small scale admittedly, and then we don't use leverage so we can weather a storm pretty well and just stick to the mission. The mission is a multi decade mission that we're, we're trying to fulfill. And in addition to making everyone understand the volatility and us doing our jobs properly to manage the company in any scenario in terms of making a positive contribution for people that can't access Bitcoin because they don't like the volatility or the risk profile in the future. We can even spin products up around that as well. We're doing lots of things on that. All of you have been buying Bitcoin, Ethereum, bnb, very close to all time highs. I mean BNB is an all time high. How are you thinking about potential serious drawdowns for bnb, David? So I guess when I think about risks, right, like that's one of the reasons why you know, like taking this short. We're forced when you're running these treasury companies to operate kind of at the speed of crypto. And you know, people in the capital markets now see that how crypto is a 24,7 market and we're taking that to the traditional stock markets and everything. So we're forced to kind of live in this really short term world with Announcements with, like, transparency around holdings and other things, but to build for the medium and long term. And so, you know, I approach this. I wouldn't be starting this today, and I wouldn't be standing behind a BNB company if I didn't think this was going to be a significantly more valuable asset in the future. All right, I bought into Sharplank because I. There was one Joe. Now they have two Joes. So I couldn't be more excited over there. Anybody who's been buying bitcoin, you know, I'm still a big. As I said, I'm a big, big bitcoin supporter. I expect bitcoin to be much higher from here. And so to me, when I think about these, as an investor and an operator, I look at kind of people that are committed through the cycles that I expect. I expect to see you guys up here talking about this and leading these companies five, ten years from now. And so that's where, you know, I think the opportunity is. And. And one of the things I've really been trying to be adamant about cautioning investors is, you know, when these pipes get announced and we see the stocks trade up 25 even, there was one recently in World Coin that traded up 50 times, where people don't even know the value of an underlying pipe price. Really trying to caution people from buying into the hype the same way I would try to caution people not to buy into ICOs. Yeah. And one of the worst pipes was Nakamoto. I mean, David Bailey, like, the price absolutely tanked. And we've been wanting. We spoke to him when they announced Nakamoto and didn't have a chance to speak to him since then. But that's a scary situation, right? I mean, when you guys see stuff like that happen, is that an example of like. Like a pipe gone wrong? Yeah. So we have raised money, never at a discount. And we said, you know, several months ago to all of these pipe deals that were happening, you know, don't do it. It's not going to work. Obviously, it hasn't worked particularly well. A lot of people have been hurt. What you've got to understand is that, you know, if you're interested in bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, and then you get involved in, you know, looking into digital asset treasury companies, bitcoin treasury companies. You know, the reality is that you've gone into what some people think is the Wild west, but you've really gone into the Wild West. You've gone into public equity and debt markets. There's A lot of advisors in that space who are probably taking advantage of people that are not used to public markets. You know, that's why we've done it as we've done it, because we knew that some of these things would happen. But everyone thinks crypto is the Wild West. But public equity and debt markets are wilder than that. What did you think of that, Joseph? I don't know if you have any thoughts, because I know David Bailey. He's an eternal optimist. But that is a bitter pill to swallow to see things go like that. I have a completely different perspective, which is we're living in a world where we're thinking about this as a zero sum game of a $4 trillion market, and everyone's fighting one another. And like, I think we're. Someone in this room who I admire said to me earlier that we are underestimating the level of prosperity that decentralization can create in our economy, in our lives. And I'm focused on how to advance that prosperity less than arguing about the zero sum games and who are going to be the winners and losers. People fundamentally underestimate when exponential change is going to come. It's coming now. It really is. Ladies and gentlemen, Joseph, Andrew, David. Thank you so much for your time. Let's give them a warm round of applause. Thank you. All right, we're going deep into the cypherpunk roots now. I'm very excited for this fireside chat. I'm going to ask Joe Lubin and Neal Stephenson to join us up on stage very quickly. If Neil's here somewhere. There he is. I know Joe's over there. How's everyone doing? Have you gone and bought some tokenized stocks? There we go. Best days on either side, Neil. Hey, Joe. Hello again, Neil. Hey, nice to meet you. Very, very good. Nice and comfortable. Hello. All right, who's read some of Neil Stevenson's books? Let's see if there's any fans in the room. Okay. Less than I thought. Neil, initial reaction to that. I mean, do you assume most people have read Snowrunner or Cryptonomicon? Snow Crash, Snow Crack. Did I say Snow Runner? Sorry. My brain. It's all right. Been a long day. Well, it depends on who I'm with, You know, I mean, it's a. It's a very focused kind of fame in the sense that in certain company, a lot of people have read my stuff and know who I am. But in the. You know, I. I've compared my situation in the world to being like the mayor of Des Moines. So the the mayor of Des Moines is famous. In Des Moines, everyone knows who that person is, but outside of that is a completely anonymous person. So I would speculate that amongst the OGs in our ecosystem, the percentage is very high and the influence of Neil's work is very high. At this conference there, there are a lot of youngsters and so you should read the books. Neil, talk to us about these books. Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, they predicted or I mean, look, they fix their works of fiction. But you, you imagined a world that we weirdly live in already. Did you foresee that happening when you wrote these books? I mean, that's not the frame of mind that one is in when you start a project like that. It's not, you're not thinking about what's going to be the case, you know, 20 years or even two years in advance. The, the all you're thinking about is trying to tell a good story. And particularly in science fiction or. But really in any kind of fiction, a key rule that you have to follow to tell a good story is to make it coherent, make it add up, make everything in that story and in that world follow a certain set of rules. And you can set those rules pretty early in the book and you have a lot of latitude with which to do that. But once you've laid them down, you have to follow them, you have to maintain consistency because if you get 300 pages in and suddenly there's something that doesn't add up, doesn't make sense, then the reader notices that and stops reading the book at that point. So particularly in a kind of science fiction setting, what you have to do is think about the engineering and about the business, you know, the kind of economic drivers of the world that caused the whole thing to make sense. So the, and if you do that carefully, you can end up, I wouldn't use the word predict, but you can tell a story that's coherent and people whose sense that coherence and respect it may then go on and kind of use it as a basis for trying to build something. Joe, let's talk about your experience of the books and how they maybe shaped your journey. And when you discovered Bitcoin and moved on to Ethereum, if a lot of the ideas that you read in Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon kind of came, came to fruition. So I was a nerd, reasonably well adjusted techie nerd growing up. And 1992 was when snow Crush. Yeah, was published. And so that was my first encounter. And then I read a bunch of the books after that, and now I grew up on Star Trek, not Star wars, and just got into alternate ways of thinking about things, futuristic ways of thinking about things. And in Snow Crash, Neil described a world that was certainly complicated, that hinted at how things could go awry in society. But the thing that was really positive and compelling to me, the whole story was compelling, was how he articulated what cyberspace might look like and feel like and how you might interact, get into cyberspace and interact with objects and with space. And so it was a crisp, stark vision. But I think it showed the way for a lot of builders of my generation who ran with it. The other piece that was really interesting was the articulation of our relationship with information where you could actually contemplate just cruising around on your motorcycle or in some other way with recording devices, either recording for later download or just streaming information into some store, decentralized store or centralized store, or maybe to living, operating AI. I kind of think that as human and machine intelligences evolve together and hybridize, I think we are going to wear apparatus or direct our social feeds into first to our own agent, an agent that we're bonded with that represents us, that we own, not owned by OpenAI or Google or something like that. And then I think that's a vision that's about to come real where we do want to continuously feed certain kinds of AI. LLMs and foundational models are not good at real time learning. And so we need, they're better architectures for learning. We'll figure that out. But I do think that just the same way that molecules find a better existence as part of cells and cells level up when they're part of organs and organs are part of people and people are part of families, et cetera. I think we are all going to be ambulating very smart neurons in a cognitive apparatus that has as the frontal lobe a super intelligence or something. So I think the first, the first neuron, the first human neuron was, was I think hero, protagonist in, in Snow Crash. Okay, Neil, I have to ask, I mean you coined the term metaverse, which is very widely used in, in our industry now. What's your take on the metaverses that exist and yeah, I mean, do they fit the bill or have we taken it somewhere that is not good or is it going to be drastically different in 5 to 10 years time as our blockchain protocols improve and iterate? There was a great tweet from Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games a couple of years back, where it was just at the fall of the most recent Metaverse bubble. And he was like a little drawing of a gravestone. And it said, RIP the metaverse. It will be mourned by the 250 million users of Fortnite, however many hundreds of millions of users Minecraft had and so on. The point being that it already exists. Not in, in exactly the form described in the book, but effectively that's what systems like, like Fortnite and, and Minecraft are. So you know, it, it has, it has come into existence really through gaming. The, the vision of it that's in the book is more akin to television. It's a, you know, how do we get 3D graphics into the hands of the largest possible mass market? Well, at the time, you know, my, my way of thinking about that was, was TV and, and that's not what happened. What happened was games happened. You know, Doom came out the year after Snow Crash was published and was revolutionary in. That was almost like something that got injected into our world from 20 years in the future. In terms of like when I first saw it, I could not believe that the computers of that day were capable of making the illusion of a three dimensional space that, that rapidly and that seamlessly. And you know, that was made possible just by incredibly ingenious hacking and use of the available technology of the day. So anyway, that, that set the world on a path to where gaming was the driver, the economic driver and the creative driver of, of the Metaverse like systems that we have today. It, you know, created the market for, for hardware, for, for GPUs that would gave us ever more powerful renderings of these 3D game worlds. And then in a really odd twist of fate, the, the that GPU technology is now. Sorry about that. Is now driving, is now driving AI systems. So, and the reason that it, it's so easily made use of by AI systems is because crypto essentially gathered all these GPUs together and, and all these power systems together in these data centers in order to mine. Did you just take credit for that? I apologized for that. Ethereum moved away from that. I know they did. I know they did. It was sad when they did because everyone with their 1080 ti's was making a load of money and they don't anymore. Neil, I'm quite curious how you came into this industry. You've held the title of futurist at some of the biggest companies in the world. Why did you decide to move into this industry? Obviously you're with Lamina one and we can talk a little bit about your partnership. Obviously with consensus is linear. But tell, tell, tell the audience how you got into crypto after writing all those books all those years ago. Yeah, so the, I mean, I had friends and contacts in the, in this world going back to the early 1990s. The. After Snow Crash came out, I met some of the people who'd built a early Metaverse system called Habitat and who had done a lot of deep thinking about what would be entailed in making a system like that at scale. And one of the things they'd figured out was that you couldn't do it without allowing other people's code to run on your computer. And so they had thought about the security implications of that and began to think about, you know, sort of cryptographically how to, how to make that work in a manner that would be secure. So, so what year was that? Well, the system was called Habitat. It was from the late 80s. It was. The people I know who, who worked on it were Randy Farmer, Chip Morningstar, Doug Crockford Douglas, and the. But there was then a big sort of handoff or crossover from the work that they were doing to the Bay Area cypherpunks of the, say, early to mid-90s. And, and they started out focusing more just on the privacy and kind of decentralization aspects of crypto, and then kind of moved into money when it became clear that, you know, the stuff they were working on would be good for that. This is all, well, pre blockchain, pre bitcoin, but I'm just saying that. So going that far back, I had some, some, some contacts with, with people in the, the crypto world. So the, the thing that kind of triggered my sort of re. Entry into it more recently was the, was the big metaverse bubble that happened starting in, I think it was October 2022 when Facebook changed its name to Meta and announced that they were a Metaverse company now. And then within 48 hours, a number of other big companies had announced that they too were big metaverse companies companies now because they didn't want, you know, to lose that. And then, you know, six months later at south by Southwest, you couldn't turn around without seeing that word somewhere. So the, so my, my thought at the time was that it would be nice to, to if we had a decentralized alternative to the metaverse being a thing controlled by big companies. And to make that work on an engineering level, you've got to solve a lot of the same problems that those Habitat guys had been worrying about even circa 1990. You've got a Lot of moving parts that have to come together basically in a game engine to, to render an interactive Metaverse. And those you, you've got whole, many, many different classes of assets that have to be created by different, different categories of artists who know how to use the tool chains that feed into, you know, animators, sound designers, texture artists and so on. And how do you, how do you compensate those people? How do you create the economic rails that makes that causes that to be a logical economic decision for a creator? You know, oh yes, I'm going to build Metaverse content, you know. And it was clear that there was a big overlap between what Blockchain was capable of and the requirements needed to set up that economy. And so that's kind of how, how this whole thing originally came into to being. How did you get conversations going with Neil to come and build on linear? How did I get conversations going? So I was approached by one of the, the early founders of the project before the, the current founders of the project made it viable. And I liked the vision of the project mostly I was very attracted to the idea that Neil had convening power, that he had certain philosophy through line running through his work. And I thought that he could participate in the project in a way that would be consistent with decentralization and something very significant, not just art, not just user generated content, but something even political, even societally moving could happen with a project like this. Also, selfishly, they were moving in the avalanche direction. You had to course correct. It's like really. But I knew that they would end up coming around to a. Avalanche is doing well, God bless Avalanche. But I was hoping that at some point it would branch out at least. And it's been a branch, not a migration. So I stayed close to the project. I read the updates. Rebecca Barkin came on board, Will came on board and the project just became really excellent and viable and even much more promising than I thought. Neil, can you give us a brief overview of what Laminarone is and why people should be using it and perhaps why you think it might be one of the best sort of places to own and create digital assets and these kind of experiences? Yeah, it's, it starts with what I just said, which is the, the requirement to, to make it make economic sense for creators to, to build in, in these worlds. And along the way there's a, there's other things that we can do be doing as kind of intermediate stepping stones to a full blown metaverse. So there's all kinds of, of reasons why artists of various creative Disciplines, movie makers, musicians, what have you, you know, have a need to see their work financed. They have a need to make connections with communities of fans and creative connections with fellow artists. And you know, properly configured blockchain is, is good for all those things. It is. There's a lot about it that is, is that can be off putting, even kind of terrifying to, to people who aren't of the, the crypto world. The. I myself, you know, despite having a certain amount of knowledge in this world, you know, find myself breaking into a cold sweat whenever I'm trying to, you know, transfer something or you know, work with, with one of these systems because I'm, I'm, I don't understand what I'm doing and I'm afraid I'm going to do it wrong. Joe's working on that. I break into a cold sweat every time I walk into a bank. So yes, different, different sources of that existential terror. But the, and, and there was a big, you know, there was a moment a couple of years back when a lot of people from the Web3world were, were really pushing the idea that game developers should use more cryptocurrency in their games and a lot of game developers ended up becoming kind of hostile to that, actively angry and hostile to that. So a couple of years ago, Rebecca and I were at dice, which is a big convention of game developers and I gave a talk that attempted to be a kind of olive branch to the game developing world, explaining why I thought they had kind of unique superpowers to actually do creative and useful things with tokens. Anyway, so what we're trying to do is build a framework that is artist friendly, that gives them what they need to build their communities, build their fan bases, hopefully get financing and monetize their work in a, in a way that'll bring in kind of new participants into this, this world. Beautiful. I love how deeply you, you think about all of these things. We've got a couple of minutes left and I'm really appreciative of both of your time. I'm sure a lot of people in the audience want to just hear from you very quickly, Joe, about obviously sharply gaming these kind of things. Can you give us in a nutshell why you decided to pursue this and your philosophy on eth. Treasury companies Bullish. So Ethereum was approaching, is now in its broadband moment. We are scalable, we are affordable in terms of block space and transactions were usable. We didn't have a lot of applications and users and transactions largely because the United States was trying to Kill us for a while. And that kept the builders away, the builders from web 2 from the traditional economy, kept companies, financial companies and just enterprises away from using tokens, from issuing tokens, from, from using defi. And so Ethereum was heads down building scalability. We ended up with a glut of block space and a lot of ether, a glut of cheap block space. And so the supply demand dynamics grew slack over time. Bitcoin was doing great. It had a great clear value proposition. Its time was now, Solana was, was on the upswing and, and there was a bit of demoralization in the Ethereum ecosystem. So was tracking Michael Saylor for quite a while, was able to have a dinner with him in December, talked through his rationale, his origin story and it was just obvious that that ether would be because a productive asset because it's able to yield more ether in so many different ways. It was obvious that it would be a better treasury asset. And so we raced to market as quickly as we could. We did our research, we found an opportunity and it was not just a good business idea but it was a way to light a fire under the Ethereum ecosystem to tighten up supply demand dynamics. And we were actually hoping that a bunch of projects would follow us into the space. We were confident that there would be a bunch of these things because it made so much sense. We were confident there would be a really important construct that was part of this thing that we're seeing in a lot of different ways right now, which is the onboarding of Tradfi to defy the merging of these two parallel streams that it should never touch and should never cross or something horrible would happen. But that's not what the financial world is thinking right now. That's not what politicians, regulators are thinking right now. And so we lit a fire. Ether surged great DAT companies came into our space. Sharplink is going to is differentiated already with its intimate association with Consensus, the broadest and deepest blockchain company on the planet. And we are going to raise tons, continue to raise tons of capital. We and the others are probably going to have to stop at a mix. Maybe it's a 5% level. We will have I think best in class risk adjusted yield earned on our giant pile of high powered money ether. And then we're going to use that, we'll borrow against it. We'll essentially be like a Berkshire Hathaway for building out the decentralized protocol economy. So we will invest, stake, essentially lean into and king make some of the best protocols that further the development of the Ethereum ecosystem. Why that 5% cap? I'm sure you've spoken a lot with Tommy about this. Just, just because Tom Lee of BMNR said so. So he, he sort of cognitively anchored everybody there. I don't know if that's going to be the case. I think they're going to be a, a bunch of these. I, I think we're just not going to want to get blowback from the Ethereum ecosystem. It would be a centralization risk if a lot of big players. It would appear to be, yeah. So we'll see. I'm very curious, have you spoken Vitalik to Vitalik at all about his thoughts on the Ethereum treasury companies? So I've heard him say something publicly and he, he sounded tepidly supportive. I know I've talked to lots of people in Ethereum leadership and they're very interested, curious. We've done some things with them related to Sharplink. And so I think if you remain prudent, you don't get over your skis with leverage is a very important construct for decentralized protocols to be attached to. Fantastic. We've got a couple of minutes. I just want to make sure all our speakers are here for the final panel. Does anyone have any questions for Neil or Joe while we're, while we're going? Yes. No, now's your chance, Neal Stephenson. You're not going to get another chance. Oh, there we go. David, the man is running with the microphone very quickly to you. That was fast. All right, so just quickly. Thank you. Thank you for that incredible panel. And Neil, I told Yana a minute ago, you've been, I think, my, my favorite author, really everything, like, just the way you've seen the future. So I guess if I put it out there, like, what are some of the wildest predictions that you have for the future over the next 10, 20, 30 years? Predicting the future. My, the. I, I think the two big problems that we've got right now are that we can't agree on what's real. That's a social problem. And there's a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere. And I don't know how to solve the first problem. I wish I did. I think that the second problem is going to be solved by building a lot of big machines. And I think it's going to be the biggest engineering project in history. And it's going to be really interesting and transformative. And so there's, we can see the seeds of this already in kind of this phenomenon that Goes under the heading of American dynamism. You know, the idea that we need to get back into the habit of building big things again and building them fast. And there are young people now who 10 years ago or even eight years ago would have gone directly into software startups who instead are getting involved in building things in places like El Segundo and other kind of hotbeds of this kind of thinking. So I find that to be pretty interesting, interesting and exciting and I, I look forward to seeing where that all goes. Here we go. We've got another one in the front. Yeah, can I take a shot of that one please? So Satoshi showed up, invented decentralized trust because there was something wrong that she, he, they perceived essentially it was the way everything around us was constructed. Top down command and control authorities, overlords, imbued intermediaries with power intermediaries trusted third parties, maintained ledgers of ownership and privileges. And you need to have that sort of organization in order to do important things in order to build a civilization. But that is, that's an overlord generated civilization. The reason we built Ethereum, bottom up trust layer, decentralized finance and now we can use that infrastructure to disintermediate those who are there already or enable them to do things better. In terms of Lamina 1 and Linea, we are now at a point where content can be created in a user generated fashion. So my prediction for the future is that we will have user generated civilization and user generated content on Linea and other places. Question at the front. Well, I was, well I was hesitant when you first asked because I mean I did public speaking in seven countries but with Neal Stephenson here is, I'm a fan so it's been a journey and thank you for everything you have written and my question is how firm is your belief now for digital, financial and data related sovereignty? When everything is going super, I guess institutional and it's becoming almost impossible to do on and off ramp without Kyc Kyb. How do you see that dream now? How do you consider it? And are you still a firm believer of the sovereignty and do we have a chance? It's, but it's, it's very informative to come to gatherings like this and see the caliber of some of the people involved in that, in that world. Because the impression that one gets otherwise, you know, is that, that it's scammy and that it's somehow kind of a disreputable industry. And um, the, and that doesn't tally with the reality of who's actually involved and the kind of visions that Joe is describing. So that's kind of the fundamental clash right now is what it could be versus where it is at the moment. So obviously, the regulatory environment has gotten a lot more favorable in the last last couple of years. So that's something. And the, you know, there are, I think what's maybe not widely understood is just how much engineering effort is going into creating new innovations in this industry and putting those innovations to work. So, you know, I, I think that the picture is definitely promising, but there's just a lot, you know, a lot that has to be done to get there. Yeah, we got another one there. I am just waiting for one of our speakers. So I'm gonna let a couple more questions and then you, then you guys can be free. And I know Stanley and everyone else are here, so please go ahead. Gaurav, how's it going? All good, Joe. I have like 15 minutes fireside chat worth of questions from whatever you said in the last 10 minutes. But, but I'm going to make it concise. First, as an Ethereum DAT Co directly competing with Solana DAT Cos, which is almost Ethereum directly competing with Solana as much, there's a yield product sold for about tens of billions of dollars. That is 16%, which is the Solana validator yield to the minimum, versus the 5% that you said, you know, Tom Lee benchmark, which is, you know, sort of just acquire and yield. How do you think these two things compete while there's already a massive competition of scale with Solana and Ethereum? I don't really think there's a competition. I think Ethereum is in its lane. Ethereum's lane is wide and maybe it's multiple lanes that move in a bunch of directions. Ethereum is a much bigger, much more mature technology and ecosystem. Ethereum has been recognized now by the financial industry to be the dominant choice of technology. Solana is a cool technology. It's a cool ecosystem. I think it needs to find a new Meta. Its previous Meta was exciting, but may not be serving it well and people well. But Solana will survive and it will thrive. On Monday, I was in Frankfurt, the CEO of Swift, a cooperative, the largest DAO in the world. Cooperative. 11,500 banks announced that they're building Swift Ledger. He didn't say Ethereum technology. He didn't say Linea I can. And that's big news. They had to soft roll that announcement. But what happened after his announcement was he got a standing ovation. He got positive feedback from Central banks and major banks and said I believe the sentiment was thank you for doing this. It's about time, is about time to bring the two streams, DeFi and Tradfi together so that we can all just be fi. And so we're building technology for the banking industry now. Dtcc, the equity, the securities repository for the United States, they have been building on Ethereum already. So they announced that, that they're a platform for real time tokenization of collateral, again built on consensus Ethereum technology that went live a little while ago. NASDAQ just announced that they're tokenizing all their equity in collaboration with the SEC and the DTCC on consensus Ethereum technology. So we got a big lead. We've been around for a longer time. We've been been up non stop for 10 years. Solana is going to do great things. We'll be in maybe some overlapping niches or different niches and the. I think the Ether DAT companies have a better shot in the near and medium term of being more solid, of earning more yield. And so we'll see how, how to luck to all the debts. How is the question like. Because it's a 16% visible yield while you're officially claiming 5 so I wasn't claiming 5% yield. I was claiming that it would be uncomfortable possibly for the Ethereum ecosystem if Ethereum DAT companies got above 5% ownership of the total monetary base. Gotcha. But we can, we can significantly exceed 5% risk adjusted yield. Thank you. And if there's no other question, can I ask one more? Go for it, Gaurav. Okay, this is, this is like a perfect philosophy question to end things. This is a Fireside chat. Yeah, welcome. Thanks for coming. Turned into a press conference. Where do you, what do you think about the. The philosophy going into, you know, when, when Satoshi, where you started, came up with the non inflatable asset Bitcoin and created this new financial world for us and now we are wrapping that asset into an inflatable economy of issuing new shares and raising more capital and advocating it on the top of the vice, which includes me as an equal sinner by the way. So what's the philosophical stance of legends like yourself and others on this? So I've been a deep Bitcoiner since early 2011. Big fan. And Satoshi invented decentralized trust, showed us how to do it. And 21 million was kind of arbitrary. It was quickly doubled when Litecoin showed up. It was then trebled when Name Coin showed up, then peercoin and then all sorts of protocols. Yes. There's one true way. It's bitcoin and only bitcoin. That is reification of a beautiful set of ideas. That's a religion. And what we need are lots of protocols that subserve different functions that interoperate with one another, that are accepted because of their different functionality into the systemically important systems of the world, into the frivolous systems of the world, into different political philosophies. You're not going to have the same kind of blockchains in North Korea that you have in, in Singapore or the United States of America, though. They'll have different purposes, I think. And so we're builders. We're just trying to identify problems and opportunities. Beautiful. I know there are a few other hands up. I'm gonna, I'm gonna. If they're very brief, thank you. Because I know our speakers have been waiting. I see Sriram and Stani. We're actually waiting for Mert. So when Mert comes in, everyone can just give him a nice slow clap. And I don't know if you saw his sweet tweet, but you can just one clap. One clap will do. Yeah, that's all he deserves. There was a question here at the front, the back. Shout at us, please. Go ahead. Yes, yeah, go on. You got a microphone, he's got a microphone. Sorry, go ahead. All right. So during the token week, there are quite numerous ideas about crypto winter coming. And as before, many expect 80% decline on Bitcoin, on Ethereum. What would you suggest to people who hold Bitcoin and Ethereum, who actually believe in that? But at the same time, do you think that, is it the best to wait and hold even with a 80% decline? I didn't understand the question and I'm not licensed to provide financial advice. Are you licensed? I don't think Joe can comment on the price of Ethereum and Bitcoin, so I'm going to have to. Not on the price, but actually, what strategy do you think is the best? If you believe in bitcoin, don't sell your bitcoin. It's going to be the future of money. I mean, I, you know, Yes, I. Dollar cost average. Invest into it, do your own research is a good strategy. Bitcoin is money. Why do you need to sell money? Thank you for your question, though I'm sure Joe will take. Maybe he'll be able to speak to you after the panel. The last question at the front and then I'm going to call up the final panel. Yes, he's gonna. No, he's not gonna run. You can shout it from there. Hi. First, before I make a question, I would actually, as somebody who's In Ethereum since 2015, I would really like to thank Joe because essentially you've been at every pivotal moment in the Ethereum's history, giving it support and the push and the stuff. The list of things that you've built and enabled from Ethereum, Enterprise alliance and consensus, of course, and everything that consensus built. And I think, well, thank you. So my question is not to aim for financial advice, a little bit provocative and maybe a summary of the discussion. In your opinion, will there be a flippening? Oh, yeah. I'm on record. So there's $20 trillion of gold in the world. Bitcoin's a better gold. Currently, bitcoin has some other functionality. It'd be great if it did develop more functionality if the protocol was a little more plastic. A lot of people in the bitcoin ecosystem believe bitcoin is finished and perfect. So it may not get quite as expressive and powerful as Ethereum. So if Bitcoin is digital gold, Ethereum is digital oil, or it is this new trustware that will fix all the problems in software. And ether is a new kind of commodity, a virtual trust commodity. And if you re architect all the systems of the world on decentralized rails, what will. Adding guaranteed execution and verifiability and the ability to do all that with all of your transactions, all of your agreements, all of your processes, it's essentially going to massively accelerate, massively grow the economy. So that's. I don't know how valuable that's going to be, but it's going to be a lot, a lot bigger than Bitcoin. It's a bold prediction. Thanks for that softball, ladies and gentlemen, firstly, thank you so much to you guys for buying Mert sometime and giving us 46 minutes of your very valuable time. Joe and Neil, thank you so much. We're going to move it on to the final panel. I don't know if Mert has arrived yet. Is he here? No, he's not here. He's going to walk up on stage. But Sriram, please join us. Stani, please join us. And then, of course, I've got Marcos and Kirill joining us up on stage as well. And when Mert gets here, we'll give him a slow clap. He's going to run out. Hey. Hey. Finding you. Thank you so much for. For waiting. Marcus, thank you so much. There we go. And. And Myrtle slots in as he gets here. I'm. I'm sure. There he is. One clap. Thanks, Mert. We. We bought enough time. I think you owe Joe Lubin and Neil Stevenson a beer. Please join us on stage. There we go. We literally just started, so that's fantastic timing. Ladies and gentlemen, it's our last panel, so please don't run away. I'm looking forward to this one. We've got a lot of people on stage, so we're going to keep it short and sharp. I'm going to start off very quickly with a few quick fire questions just to warm us up. Stani, when are we going to have a on Solana? That was a very easy opener. Well, from Mavis perspective, we want to see the technology everywhere where there's users, and obviously we started to build from Ethereum and that's where most of our activity is. But down the line, obviously we want to support any technology and stack that that gets adoption, has user bases and has a potential for profitability because lending is a little bit of different type of infrastructure compared to automated market makers and Dexs, in the sense that you have running costs for risk management and other types of operations. And that's kind of like an overall assessment. But my kind of vision is to have it to be everywhere. Moats. I'm going to throw it over to you. I'm going to give you a choice of three perpetual Dexes, Hyper Liquid, Aster or Pacifica. You tweeted about this recently. So do you have a microphone? Yeah. You do. There we go. So pick which one. Pick which one you would pick right now. I know what you're going to pick. But for what, though? Like, for farming, for trading, you pick. Okay, for trading. Let's start with trading. Okay, for trading, I would always use Hyperliquid. It has a very good track record, very good experience. The team obviously knows what they're doing. Very credible. I use it myself. And then if I want to feel adventurous and I'm okay with taking a little risk, I'd probably try Pacifica. I mean, that's what I do today. And then Astor, look, I mean, I tried using it a few times and I did not really have a good time. I mean, like, I've sent in a deposit. It was stuck for like 50 minutes. And I was like, okay, this is over. I'm just. I'm broke forever now. And so. But I mean, you know, it's also a very early product, so I don't want to talk badly about them, but I think the whole point is these Things should be on chain and those two aren't really on chain. And so hopefully we can build the infrastructure as the panel suggests to actually get on chain. Perp sexes. I like that. Kirill, I'm going to throw it to you. Why would Unlimit get into crypto? I'm sure your business was pretty profitable before that. It's going to be super large. So we need, we need to serve any large industry, right? And crypto, everything going to be crypto. And of course stable coins would replace classic way of wire transfers so completely. So that's why the, for us is like this future is super clear. So that's why we need, we need to serve this industry. We need to, we need to connect stable coins into, into the current financial system. And yeah, that's, that's, that's making like, that's making us even more profitable. And finally, finally the stable coins, Stable coins is much more efficient way, you know how to transfer value and like. But this is, is quite, quite problematic now to off ramp it especially in the local currencies, like if you want to off ramp it like let's say to Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, whatever. So that's not super easy and we're solving it. All right, Sriram, please tell us why you rebranded Eigenlayer to Eigencloud. I mean obviously I know you're in the data availability business now, but I mean Eigenlayer was the dial. I mean I've spoken to Joe Lubin and he speaks very fondly about you, but why this rebrand? Thank you. The whole idea of Eigenlayer, Eigen in German for your own, your own layer, anybody should be able to come and build a decentralized protocol without having to go through the rigmarole of I need to build a community, I need to build a decentralized set of operators, I need to issue a new token, all of these things. So that was the idea of Eigenlayer. It was directly inspired from the cloud. When you write software, you don't need to actually build all the hardware that goes with it. Just take the cloud, write your software, deploy it to the cloud and you're done. And so we wanted exactly to make that experience for crypto and any decentralized protocol that you can dream up. So that was the basis of Eigenlayer. And to power to secure Eigenlayer we needed eth that is basically the token of security. And we gathered like you know, $20 billion worth of ETH that is staked in the Eigenlayer protocol. So why do we rebrand to eigencloud. So if you look at a cloud, the base layer of a cloud is a data center, right? It's physical nodes, all of this infrastructure. But no developer directly goes to a cloud and build on a data center bare metal. Like they always use abstracted services like EC2 for compute, S3 for storage, bedrock for inference. So these kinds of services exist, those give abstracted access to these data centers. In the same way Eigenlayer gives bare metal access to build any decentralized protocol that you can dream up. But most app developers do not and cannot build on top of this bare metal service. What we did is we have built Eigen Da, which is a data service on top of Eigenlayer. Recently we launched Eigen Compute, which is an off chain computation service where you run the computation off chain but bring the results verifiably on chain. So if you look at crypto, what is the value proposition of crypto is to run unstoppable verifiable systems. Unstoppable runs forever verifiable runs as stated. And so that's the whole idea of crypto. And what we want to do is to scale unstoppable verifiable compute to cloud scale. So if you look at the evolution of crypto, Bitcoin runs on a $5 hardware, Ethereum runs on a $500 laptop. Solana runs on a $10,000 server. We want to run on billion dollar cloud scale. So that's the whole idea of Eigencloud. We wanted to the rebrand gives coherence to all the things we've already been doing. Beautiful, that was very good. Marcus, tell us why Rails is on EVM and not svm. Well, as Joel was saying, EVM has been the standard of the industry. And again you see especially our focus as Rails is the blockchain for banks. We've been contrary to Joe, I don't quote sweat in front of banks. We kind of, we're very used to it. We used to be From TradFi and Evme, kind of being accepted as the standard within the financial industry. And I think this will continue to be in the coming years. You have huge resource of talented people built on top of it like AV, you know, the data will ability, et cetera, the L2s. And I think this will continue to go. We what we're doing is we're bringing primitives to the, to the infrastructure that allow banks to feel comfortable with like we've built this privacy preserving technology. Rails, Enigma, which we've been tested with JPMorgan Kinaxis. We've been working with like two, three central banks around the world. One will be announced soon and we have 16 banks running the private networks on Rails already. We still haven't launched our token, but we are revenue generating company, we're super happy with that. So coming from bank and having a very good team, we kind of build a product that fit for the requirements with compliance. So we're being primitives for on chain suitability, on chain KYC verification and so on that on chain credit score verification. And this resonates really well on this ecosystem for banks, right? For financial institutions. I want to get kind of philosophical here and talk about building trillion dollar infrastructure. Is it about TVL milestones, developer adoption or verifiability or privacy? Perhaps we can just start with you Stanley, like what matters the most with this infrastructure that we're building in this industry to you? Yeah, probably all of those I think. But what truly matters for me as a kind of like a, from a DEFI perspective is whatever we build is safe and secure. And I think it goes all the way to these protocol layers and not only to the networks. And when I think about DeFi, I think a lot about resiliency. I think the word of decentralization isn't really the kind of like a key point because what decentralization can provide is resiliency and the resiliency is what provides a better financial system and can provide access to people, to these new financial primitives. So from that perspective what's important is to build and design a system that can withstand all kinds of typical issues that we have in traditional finance. For example, that self custodial access actually helps, transparency helps and the fact that you have automated smart contract based execution can provide better efficiency. And then from lending protocol perspective what is important is to design a system that you can manage risk really well. And looking kind of like the history of DeFi. I think we're reaching into a point where a lot of these protocols are starting to be quite mature. And AAVE as of for example today we've seen multiple market cycles. We have 70 billion in net deposits at the moment, 30 billion is borrowed out. And just to put into a context that will be like 35th biggest bank in comparison in the US for example. And we're not thinking of kind of like being that end user product. I think we think of AAVE and DEFI as an infrastructure that is then embedded into these fintechs and traditional financial services that will distribute this all the way to the end. Users. So I think the resiliency is the key way to. How do we, how I think about the kind of like philosophical design principles, it's not exactly sexy like mert. I mean, tell us about Helios and RPC technology. Like most people don't really think about this is what the underlying infrastructure, but it's worth trillions of dollars. It's going to power trillions of dollars. What's your kind of take on what's the most valuable part of building this infrastructure? So when it comes to building infrastructure, there's no cookie cutter answer. It's entirely dependent on the use cases that you're building the infrastructure for. Right. I mean if you were to give an analogy, right. Every city is different. The infrastructure evolves, maybe path dependent based on, you know, for cities, you know, if it's a fishing town or if it's, you know, and maybe you have docks or maybe, you know, airports are there roads, et cetera. It really depends on how it works. And Solana is obviously very focused on what we call ibrl. Increased bandwidth, reduced latency. So for us, like I used to build RPCs on EVM or I think EVM doesn't really make sense, but Ethereum itself and some of the earlier L2s or side chains like Polygon and like when you do it on Solana, there's a few differences obviously, right. One is that if the latency is off by like 2 milliseconds, then my customers yell at me and they say like, why am I getting this data 2 milliseconds slower than somebody else? And on EVM that generally doesn't. Or on Ethereum or something that's not specifically designed for HFT type trading and whatnot, doesn't really care as much about that. And then there's differences in state growth, historical data, and so it really just depends. But for RPCs, to make an American analogy, it's kind of like being a lineman in football, American football, where you basically get none of the credit but all the blame anytime something goes wrong. Infrastructure is one of those things where you don't want to ever actually hear about it. It should be super boring. And if you're hearing about infrastructure, it's probably because like Anatoly is saying I suck on Twitter, like, oh, like his RPCs didn't work or something. So and so like you have to take like everything that Sonny said into account. You know, obviously there are some general things like it has to be reliable, where in crypto it has to be verifiable Right. You can't just. You don't want to increase trust assumptions. But then it also has to work just as well as web2 because otherwise you know, you might get the early cohort of ideologically based people that will use it. But like for any sort of usability at scale you obviously need to be just as usable. Kirill, I'm curious in your take on you know, building this kind of infrastructure. Something that started in tradfi and then tipped over into crypto. There's a lot of things you have to get right for both kind of audiences. Right. If you're serving a tradfi customer and then you start serving Web3 customers, what they want it are two different things. How did you build the infrastructure? Not simple question. Okay, so for in few weeks from now we're going to launch stable.com stable.com it's non custodial, non custodial cleaning house for stablecoins. That's to exchange one stable coin and one chain to another Stable Coin, another chain. You know, there's headache now. So it's quite like that's not a simple solution for this. For the moment we will provide it for gasless and like it will be like super simple service and off ramping globally. That's I believe it will like it will help for adoption even for trade fire industry of course because like I mean stablecoins is extension of your own US dollar and US dollar is, that's for savings and for international tradings. So if you're getting revenue locally, let's say in Singapore. In Singapore. So you have all your expenses nominated in local currency. You can't pay here like in US$. Right. So that's why you need at least anyway part of your revenue you need to convert to the local currency to be, to be able to pay salaries. Salaries, you know, your rent, whatever. And that's, that's our. You would say our. So that's how we're helping like 3.5 industry, you know, to be mainstream and. Yeah, so that's my answer. Thank you. Sure. I'm very curious on your take on building infrastructure because at the end of the day you know something like you like you know, Eigen layer in general many people use. But when it gets to the complicated infrastructure that you're serving it, it goes to a very specific, you know, market. It's not quite retail facing whatever. It's again not sexy. Tell me a little bit about what's the most important thing for you when you've been building this infrastructure. Yeah. Maybe I can spell out our thesis for what the output properties we're looking for. So I mentioned earlier that our decoding of the value proposition of crypto is unstoppable, runs forever, verifiable, runs correctly. And so we think a lot about these two properties. And so the question is, what kinds of use cases, what kinds of problems cannot be solved by chains today that we need this additional infrastructure? And, and one of my most bullish use cases is AI agents. So if you think about agents today, over the last three years, agents, AI has just grown exponentially to the extent that we can't distinguish reality from synthesis. Not only that, agents are going to take more and more central position in our lives. Whether it is financial applications where you delegate your actions to an agent, whether it is more complex actions like adjudication, which might be done by AI agents, whether it is even more interesting extreme scenarios where you can create things like fully sovereign agents. This year, for example, 500 billion maybe trillion dollars have been invested in AGI with the bet that artificial general intelligence is going to take off. If you think about what is the extremal form of artificial general intelligence, it is an intelligence that is self sovereign. You know, it's not my agent or your agent, it is an agent that operates by itself. And what you know is a very interesting podcast with the Microsoft CEO Satya, and he's asked this question, do you think AI is a new kind of species? As a bizarre question the guy answers, he says, no, it's not because an agent cannot own property, cannot, cannot take liabilities, cannot enter into contracts, cannot create companies. Our legal infrastructure is not built for any of these things. You know what, that's what blockchains are really, really built for, for a program to be able to own property, right? The Eigenlayer program owns $20 billion of property. The AAVE program owns $70 billion of property. People put money into it because they know this program runs verifiably. That's exactly what we can do for AI and agents is agents that are sovereign, self sufficient, they can have their own money, they can do their own actions. These are really, really powerful ideas. And we don't see you can't take an AI agent and put it into a chain right? Now what happened in crypto is lots of people talked about AI agents and chains. They think an AI agent holds a wallet and goes and transacts on a chain. But this is neither unstoppable nor verifiable. This is a centralized agent. You can also give a centralized agent A Stripe API or a Bank of America keys, it can trade on that. The main thing that crypto provides is unstoppability and verifiability. So what we did, you know, in the couple of days back, we launched Eigen AI, which is AI inference done verifiably. So when you call a ChatGPT or any of these interfaces, you don't get deterministic answers. Every time you query, you get a different answer. Part of it is due to random seed, like you want different answers each time. But even if you control for the random seed, you don't actually get the same answer each time because of hardware level non determinism. And so that's exactly the problem we solved with Eigen AI is you can have exact determinism in our AI stack. And what that means is now if your inference is verifiable, it's replicable, it's slashable, and you can now bring AI verifiably on chain. So you can build things like completely autonomous trading agents where people can put in money and go straights for them. So that's the kind of infrastructure that is completely missing today. And we need to build like three levels of infra to actually get it there. No, an AI agent is composed of inference, compute, data, all these things. That's exactly why we build those three products. I love how passionate you are, Marcus. Maybe you want to follow up with that. And what's the most important thing that matters to you in terms of the infrastructure that you've been building out? Yeah, when it comes to infrastructure for banks and financial institutions, it needs to be secure, reliable and abstract the complexity for the end user. So our focus has been to provide this to banks so they can serve clients in a way that the client doesn't know that's being tokenized, but will take the benefits from it. And also a bank offers services. Our view is that everyone is talking about tokenization. I want to tokenize funds, I want to tokenize stocks. Our view is that there will be on chain banking services. So a bank deploying a horizontal app and saying, hey, I will provide liquidity on this lending pool. Those are the eligible assets I accept. If you deposit those assets here, I will lend you money, infinite money. And we're talking about money that currently is not possible. I mean, a company want to borrow $100 million, $300 million and has assets tokenized and they're going to deposit there and they're going to borrow money against it. Who is going to provide liquid big endowments, pension funds, banks so the way we see it, this infrastructure needs to be secure obviously because a company will deposit their assets there and then banks will be providing the back end of this services using protocols like av. As I mentioned on AMM side, you know we've been working with a bank or group of banks to deploy a name AMM for non US dollar stable coins to US dollar stable coins. So they provide the liquidity on, on, on the, on the AMM and again focus on bringing big transactions clients, corporate clients doing 30, 40, 50 million dollar transactions on chain again converting the deposit. I think this is what will be required to be again financial markets for good or for bad. They work still not 24 by 7 still with their friction on decentralization or siloed liquidity. And I think the way we see blockchain will solve those problems but will require security, resiliency and so on. Sriraman and Stani, I want to ask you a little bit about this. AAVE's got $73 billion in deposits, Eigenlayer secures $28 billion in restaked assets. What are kind of some of the biggest bottlenecks that exist for the infrastructure that you've built or some of the big challenges that you still face? I mean even considering these mind blowing numbers. I think from like the biggest problems I currently see is getting this technology to, and the financial opportunity to the mainstream. I think as much as DEFI has grown, it's pretty much unusable for most of the people for so many reasons. And it's a little bit like a stupid problem to have because DEFI has existed for quite a while. But there's reasons why it's so difficult to use a DEFI protocol. You have to go to an exchange on some funds, withdraw the funds, have a wallet, have some gas and blah blah blah. And there is some improvements there, some sort of abstraction and gas sponsorship at the moment as well. So some of the things have improved over the years. But I think that the DEFI user is kind of a prosumer type of a user and early adopters. And I think what's really important at the moment is that now that we kind of were able to prove that this set of stack of technologies are working really well. There's great examples of great protocols on Ethereum, on Solana and other networks that are basically being battle tested, the next kind of mission is actually like how do we actually get these opportunities and distribute them to every single person in the planet. And I think one important thing for every kind of financial evolution is a really good macro opportunity. So in the early days of DeFi in 2020, obviously a lot of Was anyone during the DEFI summer farming coins? There were a few people. So farming governance tokens was one thing, but actually something that a lot of people didn't notice is we were living in an environment where the tradfi rates were at zero. Also we had Covid at that time and people had a lot of time and find financial opportunities and there's concerns about the economy. So you'll find things like yield and having that difference in defi early days of DEFI compared to tradfi on existing yields you create an opportunity. And I think now we're moving to a new set of cycle in finance where the interest rates are going to go down in the next 12 months and the defi rate is going to be higher because defi rates are are much more or less correlated with the tradfi rates. So as these stratify rates are going to go down, defi rates are relatively high. These fintechs who have more flexibility are starting to look into these new yield sources and provide new financial services through DeFi. And I think that's where kind of like the larger distribution will happen. And then obviously there's the question of, I mean stablecoins will play a big role because that is the only way to actually access and consume decentralized finance, but also extract opportunity. But how much yield there is actually that exists in the system and I think that's where things like RWAS are interesting because it's some sort of way to scale DEFI beyond the value we actually have as of today. Because once we start onboarding hundreds of millions of people into DeFi, that yield gets compressed and you need new kinds of collaterals, new kinds of use cases and produce new opportunity. But I think the UX is still kind of not there and we probably see more like embedding into fintech in the next 12 months. Yeah Sriram, I remember when Eigen Layer came out and I heard the sort of concept of restaking. I was like wait, what? That sounds kind of scary and perhaps dangerous. Was that one of the challenges when you first kind of started out? I mean, I know value just flowed in and I understand the why, but maybe you can explain to the audience anyone that doesn't why Eigenlayer made sense? Yeah, I mean when you're staking a network to run Ethereum, so what you're doing is you're staking eth and then promising you're going to run the Ethereum protocol correctly. What eigenlayer allows you to do is to stake eth and promise that you're running the Ethereum protocol correctly and some other protocols correctly. So you know, it's like you had a deposit at a mall and then you say I'm not going to steal, I'm not going to steal from one store or I'm not going to steal from three stores. It's up to you to not to make these promises. So it's very different from like a normal kind of financial leverage. So which is what most people associated it to. But I think the biggest development challenge for us right now is communicating this new unlock that we've done with developers where instead of building your entire application on chain, we have this idea where you build your financial logic on chain, but build augmenting logic off chain on Eigencloud. Like think of a stablecoin issuer who wants to make sure that transactions are risk screened before hitting the chain. We don't have the ability to do this on chain today because you can't write an AI ML algorithm to do risk analytics. You can do it on iGencloud, run it verifiably and then those transactions then hit the chain. You can do agentic finance where you put money in and then an AI agent verifiably does only the actions that it said it does. So that's another kind of thing. You can build the metaverse. We just had Neal Stephenson here. So when you think of gaming assets, you put the assets on chain, but at the end of the day the game was run centrally by somebody else and they could always rug your asset if they didn't like it. But if the game is tight by running on Eigencloud verifiably, your game assets hold value all the time. So this communicating, this new set of unlocks that we've done with Eigencloud and letting developers build on it, that's our next frontier. I'm going to finish off with this and I'm going to let anyone kind of answer like I was very surprised after ASTA did their token launch how many people went to ASTA to trade on earth perpetual stacks. Just considering how popular hyperliquid had been. We had Arthur Hayes on stage earlier and he told us why he sold his hype. But yeah, is this kind of, you know, decentralized infrastructure, perpetual sticks is the kind of the directionality that the entire industry is taking Very short answers from everyone. Stani, what do you think of ASA in the per decks space? In general, I mean I'm a lending guy. There we go. He's going to skip it. Kirill. So that's super popular because of regulation. Right. Just like that's completely unregulated stuff. And that will be probably impossible to do the same if you're doing centralized exchange. Exactly. Like perpetual. With 100. Like leverage. Like hundred 300x 300x leverage. Right. It's just impossible like in most of the countries. But because it's a dex and people love it, I mean that's it. What will be. I don't know. I would say it will be many, many more. I actually quite surprised at why it came so late so. Because that's super clear, people will love it and. Yeah, so that's finally here and it will stay. Shuram, any thoughts on the perp? Yeah, you can't build a cash cow without many people trying to attack your revenue source. So that's the obvious thing. But our thesis is over time many more people will be not directly trading, but trading through agents in verifiable walls. So that's our big bet. But bullish, lighter. I'm very bullish. The thing is the one, there's someone making money, there's someone losing money. So there's no way that someone. So I think this, especially the level of leverage that you have today, that hurts a lot of people. And the sophistication that some of the systematic traders and quants are applying to this poor of the crypto investor that are trying to compete, I think there's an imbalance there which will create a lot of problems. Obviously there's some guys that are lucky one end. But the sophistication of quants systematic. They're making a lot of money, I tell you. And people are losing money. Merit give us a spicy take to end things off. Well, okay. Well, I mean I think for sure that the purpose X meta will cause the next black swan in crypto. Undoubtedly. That being said, it's never going to go away, right. I mean if you just look at crypto, you have meme coins which is, you know, betting on attention. You have prediction markets, which is betting on events and you have perps, which is betting on price action. Right. It's all basically the same thing in some derivative form. And so it's never going to go away. But it is important that they be on chain in some regard at least because risk management is super important for this. You know, a lot of people do things like, like cash carry trades where they'll buy spot and then Shorten a perps exchange and get that yield. But like if everybody is now levering and increasing leverage in the crypto system and you know, I mean, I'm doing this too, by the way, I'm not gonna lie, you know, like long on one deck, short on the other, long on the other, I'm like, okay. And I think the second you get like a, like a classic Arthur Hayes movement of price action and somebody blows up up, I think it's going to cascade. So that is going to happen. Just not sure when. Yeah, it's definitely a risk and it was something I wanted to ask him because I think no one expected him to just offload all his hype tokens. And it hurt a lot of people. I think we expected it. But the ones united, the ones who know what they're doing. Ladies and gentlemen, it's been a long day, it's been a long evening. Gentlemen, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for joining us. If you have any questions for them, you can ask them afterwards. Unless we have one hand up, if you guys will indulge a question. There we go. We've got our gentleman running. He's the best. Yeah. Well, first, thank you because I guess that this panel, the speakers so far the best of the whole event in Singapore. Beautiful, thank you so much. It's not kind of a question, but it's like I know all of you like all the products that you're building and I would like to say something starting you mert about like platform building for boosting for developers in Solana. It's really, really, really nice. Also Mark is about like focusing on the banking platform. A blockchain for banks. I guess it's not a better way to talk about infrastructure growing. Sriram, huge fan of restaking and your platform. And by the way, I guess that David Nader is one of the best dev rel in the whole ecosystem. So thank you for being here. Kirill. Your platform I guess is now the best way to show how the Web2 ecosystem is passing to the Web3 and the payments. And by the way, the party of the unlimited was really nice. Thank you for creating this and I guess that I have more things to say to you because I really love the Finland guys. I guess that you are in my top two after Linus Norvalz. And I remember I read that you start learning programming and using Linux at 12. Is this right? Yes. Okay. So yeah. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. By the way, Aave is of course like everybody around the world. The platform, the Lending understands pretty well about aave. And we are building a platform to scale ethereum called Gear EE. Decentralized cloud platform. So if you have time, we can talk. Five minutes, and that will be really awesome. Thank you guys, all of you. Beautiful. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for the shield. That was good. Yeah, he got to it at the end. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Please enjoy yourselves. Drinks, food. Go for it. And we'll see you in Singapore next year. Thank you. Bye bye. Thank you, gentlemen.