Are DATs Sustainable, Stripe Launches Tempo & WLFI’s Token Launch | Weekly Roundup

I've said it time and time again, distribution is incredibly important. It is no surprise Stripe has incredible amount of distribution. They have all these clients and they've been super bullish on acquiring assets that position them nicely to, to transition into leveraging stablecoins. And so I think it's a natural evolution. Like, logically, if I were in their shoes, I would have done the same thing.

Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice, or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

What's up, folks?

We're live.

What's up? What's up? We'll wait for like 2 more people to get in. Um, yeah, I was catching up with Threadgun. I was like, I just can't compete with you in the livestream game. You are just— you're built for this. You are— you're a livestream machine.

I, I went on— I went on— shout out to him because I went on to— on his show like a week or so ago, and he has like a nice setup. He's like Phantom neon lights, like this green, like It looks like a putting green. It's kind of, kind of, yeah.

I went on in July and like, I didn't really like know his like audience and like what the vibe of the show was. And I got hit up by a bunch of people and they were like, you don't seem right for Thread Guy. You know? And I was like, and I enjoyed it.

Too much gray hair for Thread Guy, Rob.

Yeah. I enjoyed it, you know? And then, and then I think in the chat, the whole audience was basically like, who is this boomer?

Like, what's the CA? What's the CA? Yeah.

What's the price target? You know, when you also go on Ryan's show, it's, you know, I just feel like out of place.

Who's Ryan? Oh, Rand.

Rand.

Yeah. Rob, dude, what's going on? How are you?

I am sleep deprived. I'm working, working a lot these days. It's good though. You better— you'd rather be busy than not busy. And so like when the market comes to you, you've got to, you got to take a hold. Yeah, take advantage.

Yeah, why are you so busy?

Well, I think, as you guys know, the things that I focus on are a lot of the, call it, like, crypto traditional finance crossover, payments, stablecoins, traditional capital markets. And I think that part of crypto right now is just ripping at the moment. And we're just seeing a lot of deal flow, a lot of new entrepreneurs, a lot of people that are really excited about building in this space. We're also, all of the dApp stuff, there's some work that we've been doing around that specifically. That's been, I think, taking up some time for me specifically. I will say that there's been a lot of stuff happening in the dApp space, because I got to be honest, there are so many people in this space who do not understand public markets. They're just doing some wild, wild west stuff that makes no sense. You know, I saw a wall cross script from one of these things that was like, it's got known falsehoods in the wall cross script. They don't— like, it's craziness.

Wait, wait, say what that means. Say what that means.

So when a digital asset treasury company, uh, wants to go and actually market the equity, and so they want to tell you like, okay, this is the public company that we're putting in a pipe into, or this is, you know, maybe the SPAC that, you know, is helping take this thing public because it is already publicly traded they have to go through what they would call a wall cross. The wall cross has a certain compliance standard to it, and the lawyers actually agree on what the script will look like so that when the bankers or the placement agent goes and they send that to potential investors, they make it very clear that they understand they're getting nonpublic information and that they will not be trading in that public equity. But there's a whole standard around the way of which you market these things for for public company equities that has to be done. The stuff I am seeing from some of the crypto natives, or like, you know, think they're trying to make a bunch of money, is unsophisticated at best, and in many cases, just like, I got to be honest, just complete haphazardness, and to put it the nice way.

Yeah. All right. Let's dig into that. There's a couple things I want to talk about. One is WorldLibertyFi. Their token became tradable. There's some, I feel like, shenanigans that are happening there. There's Tempo. So Stripe and Paradigm just launched Tempo chain. I want to talk about that. I want to talk about stocks and crypto are really starting to converge. You had Galaxy listed on Solana. So Galaxy listed their stock on Solana. You had Coinbase list— do some crypto stock, stock crypto convergence thing. So we'll talk about that. But maybe we can talk about DApps first. MNAVs are doing what I think we've been saying that they would eventually do on Empire for a little bit. And it's starting to happen, right? Which is the MNAV is going sub-zero on many of these. So I can pull up the chart.

Hopefully not sub-zero.

Sub-zero. Yeah, it's going negative. It's going sub, sub, sub 1 for many of these. So if we look up the— look at the Blockworks data here, the basic MNAV is, yeah, 0.95, 0.91, 0.77, 0.89, 0.97, 0.93, 0.67. And you got a couple of these, you know, Strategy still at 1.35, GameSquares at 1.05. Some of these are still above 1, but a lot of them are sub-1 now.

So just to give you guys a little, like, a little feedback on this, I think the ones you have here that are SPACs are wrong, like the 0.11 from Ether Machine. I think they're actually trading at a premium right now. Um, and the, uh, the 21 Capital is the same thing, the 0.06.

You know what, I wasn't going to the right enough. It's— I was looking at the basic MNAV. I should have been looking at the MNAV enterprise value.

MNAV makes sense. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, you're not wrong that the MNAVs are collapsing, which we expected. They're, you know, for the best ones, the strategy is like, you know, the maybe the Aspects, you know, maybe 21, you know, a few of these others that have best really good management teams, have good capital structures that are able to continue to increase that token per share, and potentially also have really good ways to interact with the ecosystems, they will probably do well. But do well means trade at a really good REIT. And what does a really good REIT trade like? A really good REIT trades at 1.5 times its NAV, right? Or we saw some of those REITs when the— like in, like, uh, in the data center REITs when AI was really starting to pick up the pace. Some of those traded up to, you know, over 2 because there was so much excitement about AI. But these things aren't supposed to trade at 3, 4, or 5 times, and that's just not going to be steady state in any way.

Yeah. Santi, have you been paying attention to this, or you staying out of it? Uh, you're muted, sir.

As I said, I have some exposure to some of these stats, uh, Oh, so you ended up doing some of them? Well, I did the UPX way back, contributing cash, not in-kind. So that was kind of the early ones. And then, yeah, so I'm actually paying attention for the reasons that we've talked about here. You know, even if you're not investing in that, it's just, it's one of those things where you have to pay attention. There's a good thread by Galloway's Capital. I think he's generally a smart guy. That maybe we can pull up and—

yeah, here it is—

anchor the discussion around that. You know, again, we're not, uh, the point that Rob made, which I think is, is not just related to DApps but just generally public markets, I think it's a theme that we should continue. Like, if we think about the major themes this year, public markets are— because of the regulatory environment, clear— be more crypto in public markets, uh, from the Robinhoods, Coinbases of the world, more public companies So DApps obviously fit into that equation. And then we've— kind of the lurking question that one might have is, if some of these DApps that are poorly structured or trade really poorly because they have some debt and forced selling, how much of contamination risk does that have? And I think it also fits into World Liberty to some extent, right? Because I've been hearing a lot of chatter around, you know, that potentially being detrimental to crypto long term, potentially after 4 years. And so anyways, back to this thread of, of, of Kevin.

Um, so what's Kevin saying here for those who didn't read it?

Rob, you want to go or should I go?

I, I didn't read this, so you, you please fill me in.

Yeah, if you want to pull up higher, um I think you're—

yeah, basically saying— I mean, I can skim it if you want me to and say it out loud. It's basically saying like some, some folks think that the DApps are the next Luna. It's not. Others are saying there's nothing to unwind. There is. Think carefully about the mechanics. Um, you can skip this part. Um, basically says imagine an underlying where the distribution of DAT holdings isn't as extremely skewed towards one mega holder. There's one small handful of mega DApps for a single underlying. This becomes a prisoner dilemma coordination game where the good outcome is possible to some extent. At like 0.9 mNAV, it's conceivable that none of the players go for the ARB. But if mNAV drops to 0.5, now the ARB profits are much bigger and could outweigh the negative consequences of underlying market cap compression, reflexive selling, reputational considerations, etc., etc. So in other words, the gain in ARB values individual, while the compression of the underlying market cap, and hence all DApp market caps for the same underlying, is socialized. All else being equal, more big DApps is worse than fewer big DApps for this game.

Yeah, so I think—

I mean, I do think he said a lot there, some of which I agree with, some of which I don't. What I would say I do agree with is that especially when you go beyond, call it like Bitcoin, maybe Ethereum, You don't want a lot of DApps. You do want, call it, you know, one per token for that, call it, next group of people that you think are probably big enough. When you go beyond the 15th or 20th biggest market cap token, you probably don't want a DApp at all. It probably doesn't make a ton of sense for there to be a lot of liquidity in the open market. I think there is a lot more risk around, like, just liquidity fragmentation, but also lack of liquidity generally. And so you're going to see a lot more like volatile price swings that don't necessarily make sense. Um, but like, if you look at that group of— okay, let's go to the next group, whatever it is.

What is your threshold? Uh, look, Solana, you have Sui, you have Athena, you have— like, what is your threshold of fully diluted or circulating market cap for crypto project to say, okay, it makes sense? Because You've seen like Story's— Story Protocol's of the world also launch.

But did you see what happened with Story, right? How did Story get funded, right? There was a $360 million, I believe, in total value. I believe only $100 million of it was in cash. The vast majority of it was bought from the founder himself, which looks a lot like exit liquidity. And then NASDAQ has not allowed them to end up delivering the shares. Why? Because it was all in kind and they didn't get a proper shareholder vote in place, right? And what we're going to start seeing is these like listing rule problems.

I didn't, I didn't know that, Rob. So what, what happened here? They— because this was, this is what, this is what I was seeing is like NASDAQ is now— now both, both exchanges are now tightening that listing positions where it's like, I think I was just reading NASDAQ's where any in-kind contribution of digital assets, um It's a long update. I won't read it here. But can you maybe give an update of what that really entails?

Yeah, so what it really means is most of these PIPEs into these operating companies— so specifically, so let's put away the SPACs for a second, right? But the PIPEs into the operating companies, they're doing these PIPEs with very little, if any, shareholder votes. And then often, they're doing it with no shareholder vote. They're just maybe giving getting the majority shareholder or shareholders on their side. And then, you know, call it after putting the pipe in, massively diluting everybody, they're just getting those people additional equity to make them whole. And those people are giving the thumbs up saying, hey, listen, we control the shareholder vote, so, so we're okay with, um, with this deal. But the problem is they haven't gone through the proper full shareholder vote where they have to go get a quorum of shareholders to say, yes, we want you to do this deal. We want you to— and then there's a threshold for how much equity you can, uh, you can issue to be without needing that shareholder vote. Typically, usually it's over 20— it's between over 10 and 20%. Um, what the NYSE and the NASDAQ have been saying is they've been saying, well, these deals as they've been done haven't gotten the appropriate shareholder votes And so we are not going to allow them, especially if it's in-kind, right? So this is not the SEC pushing back yet. It's the listing, it's the exchanges themselves. And they're saying, we think that you need more appropriate shareholder governance before you go and take, basically stuff a microcap company with a bunch of in-kind tokens. Like, imagine you're an investor, and I forget what this company did that Story put money, that the Story Protocol one, um, you know, was put money into. But imagine you're an investor in some, some company that is a, you know, some of these are like cannabis companies or they're biotech companies, and then all of a sudden, and you're not, you know, a large shareholder, you said, hey, listen, you're going to get diluted by 300% or 1,000%, and also now you're— this entire company just holds this IP token, and you're not— and you have absolutely no idea what's happening, right? Like, that is clearly not potent— they were potentially not good for that shareholder. So the NYSE and NASDAQ are saying, listen, you need to go through the right shareholder voting rules to be able to allow you to do this. And so what happened in the Storj Protocol deal is they didn't allow the company to actually issue the shares that the investor should have gotten, because they said you had not gone through the right vote now. So now what they're doing is they have to go through a shareholder vote. It's going to delay this for many— for probably a couple of months. And it potentially could even cause an unwind of the transaction if they don't get that vote done.

Wait, but then how does this work in— oh, yeah, go, go, go, something.

I was just going to say, You're going to see more and more of this, specifically in this focus on shareholder governance at the exchanges.

That's a good point, Rob. This is something that I paid a lot of attention to. Is there a stated threshold for the locked portion?

So the threshold is 20% of the asset value in kind. But I believe what is happening is they are being more strict in giving kind of a discount to the locked in kind. Right.

OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you could game it in some way.

Correct. Yeah.

Hmm.

What are—

yeah, wait, so then what happens, Rob? Like, let's keep using the Story one as an example. What happens where— so Story, I think, just started buying on the open market. They just started their purchases.

I don't know where the purchases are, to be honest.

So, so maybe, maybe— so like, don't use the Story one as an example, but like, what happens when— all right, so this thing gets cash and then it starts buying the token on the open market, but then what if there's an unwind? How does that work?

They would have to sell, right? So let's say that NYSE and NASDAQ came out and said, actually, a leading question. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A lot of these, uh, the way it's structured, if you look at the docs, they, they spell this out, which is there's like a 90-day period, and, and if there's— if it delays after that, there's some sort of compensation or return kind of, um, um, mechanism. On that point, Rob, I'm curious what you've seen on your side. Um, if for instance there's an unwind, uh, and you invested in this, uh, cash, do you get back the cash? You get back tokens? Because then it— couldn't you protect it, uh, where if you— if it doesn't get listed and if they end up buying the tokens, like you just return the tokens, uh, return in kind versus cash?

So what most of them are doing, not all of them, is they're saying you have the right to receive your pro rata portion, less expenses, of the token that we bought, or your cash, right? And so I— it depends on who your investor base is, right? But like, if, if this thing unwinds, Andreessen will take their Story tokens back because they were already a large investor. And I mean, I assume, right, that they will take their Story tokens back. But call it, will, um, some TradFi investor who maybe put some money into this thing, want to take their IP tokens and figure out how to custody it? Probably not.

Probably not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What, uh, so I was having this long discussion with someone that, um, was it a trad fi and now in crypto, super bearish on that. And they're like, I was on a, I was on a pod with Avi and he was like, well, this is good because hedge funds can't buy ETFs, which is not necessarily true. Um, A lot of hedge funds can't touch tokens. My point was, couldn't you get it like a waiver? Or I guess the question is, out of all TradFi, is it still true that like 90+% of TradFi can't touch tokens? Or do they— can they structurally buy tokens per their LP agreements? They just don't want to do it themselves and prefer to just buy, uh, stock.

I don't know what the number is, but, uh, yeah, but I would guess that 80% still, uh, cannot actually—

on paper cannot touch tokens.

So it's a, it's a mix of two things, right? So one is it's a mix of, okay, my LPA doesn't allow me to buy tokens. In most cases, my guess is that the LPA doesn't actually contemplate whether or not you, uh, you are touching tokens or not. And most of them, they really wanted to get around it, potentially could Right? But then it goes, okay, well, are we comfortable doing that or not? How risk-on are we? Or do we think the LPs will come back and if they find out we're doing this, will potentially raise a fuss? But then it's also, okay, well, are we comfortable with the counterparty risk of a BitGo or an Anchorage or a Coinbase? And a lot of people still are not. Right? You and I look at those companies and we're like, okay, public company. I don't know what Coinbase's equity value is now, but tens of billions of dollars, right? Like, you would think that some people would be comfortable with that, and a lot of people aren't there, and they're still very concerned about it.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, even as a fund, right, they're— I remember in my days of ParaFi, like, it was always an issue, right? If you're an RIA and you're custodying, like, assets that are, you know, you invest in a project, it listed, it's still not supported by a custodian like Anchorage, it's, it's a challenge, right? It's sort of—

well, it's, it's definitely a challenge when you go beyond, you know, Bitcoin, ETH. Right. And so like, you know, when it, it also, a lot of it matters too. And people, I think, underestimate how big of an issue accounting is for these guys. Right. And especially if you're a taker who is not. So a lot of like the quantitative makers, like the, the Cumberlands or the DRWs of the world and the Jane Streets and, you know, the Jomps and all these guys, like they've been working on this for a while. They want to get involved in every market in the world. They, and they employ a lot of engineers. If you're like— I'm just going to throw out a fund. I have no idea what they're doing. But if you're Ballyhasney, right, or you're one of these guys, you don't employ half of your employees as engineers who are comfortable with understanding how to operate any sort of wallet infrastructure that then integrates into their accounting system that they were sold by FIS, right? And FIS, like— they don't really know what they're doing there either. Right. And so it becomes, do you really want to like go through the headache for what would be probably a 1% position in the fund? But if you can do it in an ETF or in a publicly traded equity and it works with everything that you have already, it's much easier conversation. Yeah.

I know we got to go through it now. Who is the biggest winner in this game? Is it Fidelity? Is it the New York— what is the biggest custodians in TradFi? State Street, BNY Mellon, BNY Mellon, or Fireblocks, Anchorages of the world, um, insurance companies. Like, who are the biggest winners if you take a view that like crypto is going to continue to proliferate into the mainstream?

I mean, I think it's definitely the crypto natives, right, who are the biggest winners because like, you know, you have the, the tailwinds of like the whole market. I mean, Coinbase clearly, like, they're trying to become the everything app. They're trying to do a little bit of all types of different types of businesses. So I think those are the biggest winners. But is State Street also going to build a bigger business on the back of this? Absolutely. This is good for them. This is growth for them in a way that State Street hasn't grown in years.

Let's— guys, let's pivot. I want to talk about World LibertyFi. And on a semi-related topic, let's do a quick ad break and then we'll be back in a minute.

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Oh, quick ads today, guys. Nah, not bullish.

Damn, I have a bull market.

I was ready to go get some water or something.

Wait, on the other side, maybe just you're making so much money now, Yana, you don't need to sell so much ad space.

Bullish, bullish lack of ads.

Bullish unlocks, baby.

Bullish unlocks.

All right, let's look at WorldLibertyFi. So there's like two stories here, probably. One is like a story about WorldLibertyFi, and one is just a broader story about like Trump's involvement in this. And we can go anywhere we want to go, or we cannot not touch the hot button. But basically, so WorldLibertyFi token began trading on Monday, I think it was. So it's WorldLibertyFi is World Liberty Financial, very associated with the Trump family and stuff like that. It began trading with 20% of presale tokens unlocked, got listed on a bunch of things— Binance, Bybit, Coinbase, maybe. I forget where exactly it listed, but a bunch of the exchanges listed it, had like a $6 or $7 billion market cap, and it started falling. Volume is pretty big, couple billion in volume. A day later, which was, I think, Tuesday, they announced they were going to use trading fees to repurchase and burn the WorldLibertyFi tokens to obviously reduce supply, stabilize prices. Then you start getting these like big funds that say that they're investing more. I think there was one called Aqua One Foundation in the UAE investing $100 million. And then as of today, like an hour or two ago, they just said that trying to find the headline, but basically they're, uh, blacklisting, I think, Justin Sun from being able to sell. Something like that is the headline. So Rob Santi, thoughts on just like, I don't know, World LibertyFi in general? Like, I don't know, I guess my skin kind of crawls when I say— I'm just like, oh man, I'm not touching this with a 10-foot pole. But you know, obviously some people are making a lot of money on it, and I don't know, it just feels kind of like—

well, it feels a little grifty to me, but Let's, uh, let's start objective and then introduce our own opinions. Like, what does this thing actually do for someone waking up? Like, what's the one—

it's primarily what WorldLibrify, as I understand it, and I've, um, there's two things essentially, right? So there's the lending app, uh, which is— I actually— people call it a fork of Aave. I think as I actually understand it They are actually just sitting on top of AAVE. Yeah, so AAVE is actually— yeah, go ahead.

I think the AAVE treasury got a decent amount of supply because they sit on top. It's my understanding.

Yeah, it's on top, right? It's not even actually a fork, right?

So you've got the WorldLibertyFi app, you've got a mobile app, right, where you can like deposit crypto. It's like, um, yeah, it's a mo— it's a mobile app where you can do that. You've got USD1, which is the stablecoin, and then you've got lend and borrow.

Yeah, so the USD1 is the one product that's live, essentially, right? So you can mint USD-1 right now. I think BitGo is actually the person who is minting it. And they've publicly announced that they funded the MGX-Binance transaction in USD-1. I think there's maybe been a couple other announcements specifically around USD-1 and them getting involved as a funding partner for some of these deals. It's about $2.7 billion outstanding right now, of which over $2 billion of that is that MGX transaction, which I think after they funded the deal, hasn't moved since then. Then they had originally— before USD WON, they had talked about the AAVE application, or the lend-borrow application. The app is new. I guess it's going to be a direct-to-consumer crypto wallet. But I'm not quite clear on exactly you know, what it will look like, or, you know, what, what it will offer, and it will have, or, or when that will even come out. But I don't know, uh, Santi, I don't know if you know anything else.

Look, I think it's generally true, only in crypto do you see 3 people that are doing this full-time struggle to articulate what an $18 billion project does. Um, but look, I mean, of course, yeah, it's, it's a wallet. It's like TradFi meets DeFi. It has a stablecoin component, it has a wallet component. The W— what's the ticker? The World Liberty Token is a governance token. And as you alluded to or mentioned, Yano, it will receive some fees from trading. So yeah, the question, I think it's, uh, if you work through like, how are people valuing this, putting aside kind of the political affiliation or connection, would this be like competing against, uh, like Ripple is the comp? Because I think the way crypto markets trade is like You have Bitcoin and you have Litecoin and everything is a comp to something, right? And so what are people comping this thing to? Is it Aave or DeFi protocols? Is it more like Ripple, Coinbase?

I think it's a meme coin. I think it's a meme coin. I mean, I think Hasib said it right. It's like WorldLibertyFi is a $22 billion token, $5.6 billion to the Trump family. With token buybacks, yet no revenue. You don't have to like it, but it's here. It's like, I think, and I think it's this, right? It's, um, there's a New York Times article about just like how much of the token is owned by the, you know, the Trump broader family and agencies, I guess I'd call it. It's like the Trump family itself controls about $22 billion of the World Liberty token, suggesting that its holdings as of Monday afternoon were worth about $5 billion, making World Liberty one of the most valuable Trump assets, worth far more than their real estate holdings.

I'm going to read to you a quote, uh, which I tweeted about, uh, yesterday, which is from Russ, Russ Hahnemann from Silicon Valley Show, which is, revenue?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Why would you go after revenue? If you show people revenue, they'll ask how much, and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100xer or the 1000xer becomes the 2x dog. But if you have no revenue, you can go say you're pre-revenue and you're a potential pure play. That to me summarizes World Liberty and a lot of stuff in crypto, uh, and AI, which is you better off staying generalist. And this is a pure play on long stablecoins, long DeFi, and long tradfi adopting crypto rails, which is Ripple. To me, the comp here is Ripple. And you know, think how—

I wonder if the comp is just the Trump token, to be honest.

Right, okay, because I looked at— so I, ladies and gentlemen, the Trump token right now, I bought the Trump token, uh, and I was public about it and whatnot. I don't own it currently. When it traded all the way up to $70 or whatever, I, my immediate thought was let's go look at World Liberty because it was doing a presale or an, uh, um, and the terms were like very funky. It was locked and, and then they like since I think revised. We should have Mike Dudas on the show because I think he, he kind of was participating in that and has some good insights, I think. But I didn't end up investing in World Liberty. I probably should have in hindsight, but nonetheless, that was like my con.

I do think Dudas and the investors in World Liberty did make a lot of money.

So yeah, so, so what happened is, uh, so a lot of people had the same, I think, thought process that you had, Santi, which is they, they, they put out, you know, the announcement. Yeah, but you probably had it first, but other people had the thought process as well. But, but I'm sure you had it first, but Well, they put out the announcement of World Liberty. This was last summer, right? And they said they were going to go raise $300 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. That $300 million got like, over the first few months, basically got like 40% to 50% filled. There wasn't a lot of excitement around it. I think it was unclear how close it was to the Trump family. A lot of people were saying, oh, like this is what— Barron's doing it. You know, not necessarily Donald, the president, or Don Jr., or anyone else in the family. And then immediately what happened after the Trump token launched is everyone said, okay, this just traded at a $70 billion valuation, and there's still a bunch of capacity for WLFI at $1.5 billion. It immediately filled up in the next couple of days. They then opened a new tranche at a $5 billion valuation. And that filled up, uh, as well. We know that people like Justin Sun and others were, were a big part of that. Um, all of the people who put money in either of those rounds made more than their money back just on the first unlock. So if you put money in that $5 billion round, uh, when it like launched at, you know, $30 and they, they made it tradable on the first, you could have sold your initial unlock of 20% for, you know, call it like 1.25x your, um, your, your, your investment. And so like, people did make money, um, but it was, I think, a flyer for a lot of people because you did have to KYC AML up front, uh, and you had to pay for your own KYC AML up front. Yeah, you had to like put in your credit card and you had to send in documentation to, you know, some like lawyers I had never heard of, um, and then do this whole thing. And they were very unclear about—

family also own equity in the law firm that did all the KYC.

I don't know. Um, but, but they, but they also like, they didn't tell you up front what the vesting was going to be. They didn't tell you when it was— the TGE was going to happen.

It was very—

when did they define that? Because I looked at it when the TRUMP token launched and it was not defined, and that was a big question mark for me.

It's still undefined. Oh, well, okay. Yeah, they, they, they announced that they were going to have this first unlock, but it is still undefined when the other unlocks will be. Uh, and, you know, but they didn't— they announced the token but they, they have not announced like when all of the unlocks are going to be.

Hmm.

What, uh, how does that tie to Justin Sun and him being— his $100 million or so being frozen? Yana, do you know?

It was— I mean, he was just— I think he was the largest holder of World Liberty Fi. He bought the tokens and then I think he started selling them or transferring them, and then they just froze his funds. So I'm pivoting us. I'm— we got to get some— we got to get some positive news and conversation. We're 30 minutes in.

This is maybe just like before you pivot us, just super quickly. Um, so the— there was also, I think it was ZachXBT put out a tweet that was basically like, we're watching the USD1 minting and a bunch of, uh, holders of USD1 are buying WLFI, right? And so they, you know, I think the implication was is that the WLFI team itself was buying or trying to, you know, absorb the sell pressure of WFI. And the biggest seller was, of course, also the biggest investor, Justin Sun. And then it comes out super quickly that they, you know, for whatever reason, froze his funds. So just an interesting tidbit.

All right, pivot. Positive news. We've got Stripe finally came public. So Stripe and Paradigm have been building this thing called Tempo for a while. It leaked a couple of weeks ago. Now, Matt and both Matt Huang and Patrick Collison came out with their statements today. So this was kind of the announcement, the launch day for them. So let me just read a little bit from Matt and a little bit from Patrick's, and then I'd love to hear your take. This feels like the most, like, formidable quote unquote corporate chain. Google also had theirs last week that we didn't even talk about. GUCP, I think it's called, or GC. Google Cloud Universal Ledger, GCUL, I think it is. So there's all these corporate chains, right? This feels like the most formidable one. Let me read Matt and then I'll read Patrick's. Matt Huang from Paradigm introducing Tempo, a payments-first blockchain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm. As stablecoins go mainstream, there's a need for optimized infrastructure. Tempo is purpose-built for stablecoins and real-world payments. Skip, skip, skip. Tempo's payment-first design includes predictable low fees, payments gas in any stablecoin via enshrined AMM. Payments-first UX, opt-in privacy, scale, 100K+ TPS, sub-second finality, EVM compatible, embedded financial payments, global payouts, agentic payments, etc., etc. Patrick Collison added to that. He said, at Stripe, we care about high-throughput, low-latency payments. As the use of stablecoins grows across Stripe Bridge and Privy, we found that existing blockchains were not optimized for them. So we decided to incubate Tempo in partnership with Paradigm. They also partnered with all these big companies: Anthropic, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Visa, Standard Chartered, etc., etc. 15-person team. Matt Huang's leading it. Gents, give me the thoughts.

This feels like the Libra announcement of the cycle, given all the partnerships. It's very interesting. I think it— yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Look, I mean, I've said it time and time again. Distribution is incredibly important. Um, it is no surprise Stripe has incredible amount of distribution. Uh, they have all these clients and they've been super bullish on, you know, acquiring assets that position them nicely to, to transition into, um, you know, leveraging stablecoins. And so I think it's a natural evolution. Like, logically, if I were in their shoes, I would have done the same thing. Um, different perhaps than other corporate chains. Like, maybe you should juxtapose this relative to Circle, ARK, for instance. And there's, I think, like, that's— I'd like to just get your guys' thoughts. I think it's very different. In my mind, Circle, ARK is bearish Circle, uh, because it sort of puts them in a weird position with their clients. In this case, Stripe already owns a lot of clients, uh, and they're just rolling out this infrastructure. Like, why would you leak that value if you have all these customers on the fintech side and they're going to adopt stablecoins and use Bridge and use Privy, why would you settle to, I don't know, some other chain if you can use your chain and they have, you know, a ton of users and enterprise customers, right? So, I mean, not knowing much about it, but there's a couple of things that you mentioned there about features, which is, you know, high throughput and all that stuff, but privacy, open privacy, that's something that I would be really curious of how that's going to work. But Yeah, you know, it's something that is probably not surprising for, for anyone, which is that—

yeah. Rob, what's that, you sir?

Yeah, I mean, I, I've been publicly saying for, I mean, a few years now that I thought that a lot of these, um, you know, call it large companies and, and corporates, were going to want to own their own execution environment. Um, I think for a long period of time that was really out of the general mainstream thought process. I think we got attacked by a bunch of people from a bunch of the different general purpose chains saying that for a long period of time. It's clearly now all happening, and we're starting to see, right? So obviously, this is an L1. We're Circle building an L1. We're seeing Robinhood build an L2. OK, well, so it's a different way of which they thought about coming and building their infrastructure. But it's still that, hey, they want to own their own execution environment. They want to build their own product, like full stack, right? We're starting to see, you know, people announce things. We saw like, you know, Toyota talking about building an L1, right? There's like all of these corporates that are talking about doing it. You know, it does feel a little bit like, okay, the Libra days or 2021 where we saw all of these like announcements. We'll have to see what actually gets launched, But I think the time is now. And when you have regulatory clarity, well, if we get the Clarity Act or some version of that, we're going to see more and more of this continuing to happen. When you have the Genius Act, we're going to see more people wanting to issue stablecoins on public chain. And if you look at what Stripe has been doing for the last 9 months, 12 months, it was clear they were building a network, right? Like, they acquired a bridge that can do the orchestration. They already have the merchant endpoints. They already have the ability now to issue their own stablecoin. They're also issuing their own stablecoin-backed card. They launched accounts in emerging markets with stablecoins. They've acquired Privy to allow them to, people to launch B2B2C accounts as well, right? And you look at it and you're saying, okay, well, they own every part of the stablecoin stack from the issuing bank all the way through the PSP and the PayFac, and all the way to the end to the merchant. And the only thing they don't own is the settlement layer. So why wouldn't they own the settlement layer when they already are operating as a network itself? And it allows them to do things like opt-in privacy. I mean, there was a lot of things around the payment design that I think we've seen in a lot of these stablecoin chains, the low fees, the gas in stablecoins. Payments-first UX, whatever that looks like. But the opt-in privacy, that's the one people haven't really been able to solve yet. And so I am really interested in what that looks like specifically. But this is not the end of these types of corporate chains.

I want to just— the elephant in the room is for more of the crypto natives, the question is, how is this any different than a database? Because if it's— they talk about the validator set being all these big companies. It is owned by Stripe, but they have— it's a consortium. So of course, they're going to push that narrative, which is— aligned with the crypto ethos of open source and permissionless, so to speak. But how do you guys think about the argument that like a Codex or some— or like a more crypto-native project would say, listen, you need to— you need to be Switzerland. You need to be public infrastructure with a token which allows you to monetize relative to the internet. Okay, like, you get around that argument, but does that actually going to hold? Like, if you fast forward 5, 10 years from now, like, is that argument going to actually hold? Like, what does that mean for Ethereum? What does that mean for all the other chains out there? Um, and is there a version of this world where that doesn't matter and, and you just have a chain like Stripe that they use their distribution and their muscle? And because I could imagine the crypto native saying only Stripe customers are going to use this chain, and the reality is it might not be the case. So I'm curious to get your thoughts on, on how you guys think this is going to play out.

I think this is a line. I mean, 2025 is a line in the sand moment. And you're seeing, I think, in 10 years, it will be very obvious that there was crypto from 2009 to 2024. And then there was 2025. And then there was everything after. And there's a group of people that will be very upset about something like this, because they're saying, why wouldn't you build this on Solana or Ethereum or a because, you know, a chain that can't roll back your transactions or something like that. And then on the other hand, you know, I'll pull this up. I was just looking through. You've got, you know, the CTO of DoorDash, the co-founder of DoorDash. You've got the COO of Shopify. And the reality is they don't really care about that. They don't really care about someone, you know, maybe the ideology of someone who is building in crypto in 2013. They just kind of say what Andy said, the co-founder of DoorDash, which is the pace of crypto innovation is incredible. We're ready to learn. We're ready to build. And Andy is not going to go build on some L2, but he will go build on Tempo. And this just, I think, increases the pace of innovation. You'll have people who are really, really focused on kind of the existing original ideologies of crypto. You'll have a group that's focused on just like pure speed and innovation, and I think both sides will make both sides better. That's my take.

Yeah, I think, listen, Shopify and Stripe basically made each other, or Shopify basically made Stripe, right? They were the first customer, they grew with them. It's clear that one of the things that they've done a very good job of today is they've gotten these CEOs all that tweet about tempo. Do I actually think DoorDash is going to build an application on top of Tempo? Like, absolutely not, to be honest. Um, you know, maybe, maybe I'm wrong, but I, I would be shocked. But do I think they're going to continue to be a big Stripe customer? And does that mean that they will put Flow on this chain if it makes sense for their merchants? Absolutely.

Yeah.

And I think this gets to Santi's point, which is distribution matters, that these Stripe— Stripe already has these relationships with these customers, and if this is a better product for them, they will use it. I think it's the same point that maybe Santi, you were saying earlier, which is there's two things. You mentioned Codex, which we're an investor in, who is— and there's like Plasma, and there's a couple of these other stablecoin chains who are saying, okay, well, we're Switzerland in some way. I don't think those guys, that's really what they're saying. What they are saying is we're building a better product. If we build a better product, a payments product that utilizes a blockchain, that since we own the full stack, we're able to build a product that does meet those needs in the same way that you saw Matt talk about here and things like opt-in privacy and programmable transactions with, you know, gas paid in stablecoins, et cetera, then people will use it. And so like Codex, obviously it's not linked to, you know, like somebody who has a distribution like Stripe, but they're also basically thinking about the world in the same way. But then to your point, then we get to Solana and to, Ethereum, and to Sui, and to Aptos, and to all of these guys. That's different, because they've really been pitching that you will— that you need a general-purpose chain with liquidity and users already to make it worthwhile for other people to do transactions on this chain. And that is clearly being disproven by the day. Or at least it's basically being disproven that the CEOs of these companies don't believe that. Maybe they will be— later be proven wrong, but they don't believe it today, right? And so when you look at that, that's, I think, has to be the concern, especially for people who don't have a robust ecosystem already. And I actually had a founder of a general-purpose chain that people love and has a robust ecosystem already tell me this week that they're worried about the future of blockchains, for general-purpose blockchains, because they They wonder if they need to be more opinionated about product. Do they need to build product? And that's where everybody is trying to figure out right now is, do you need to own the end customer? And I think we're at least seeing that probably that's true, or at least people think that's true in the near term.

User aggregation theory is not going to change anytime soon. Now, I know we got to go to ads soon, but I got to drop in one question that I have for you guys. Particularly you, Rob, is around this. So like, say that Tempo works really well and Stripe accrues— you could be in a world where Tempo is worth more than Stripe equity today. Like, could be a $200 billion chain and Stripe is right at $100. Solana— not to pick on Solana— now it's like on the blockchain, tokenized stocks. I know you want to talk about that, and I'm just going to set you guys up and then I'm going to rage quit because I got to drop. What does that mean? Does NASDAQ then wake up and say, whoa, hold on, wait a minute, I'm not going to use Solana, I'm just going to go the Stripe route and launch my own purpose-built blockchain for tokenized stocks and maybe partner with Superstate? Your point around product, Rob, we thought about it on the emergent side, which is how much do we build and how much do we partner? Maybe you own the execution layer, you own the user aggregation layer, and then the middle layer, you're open to partnering. But I'm curious, like, um, yeah, if, if you guys have an opinion on like what does that mean for NASDAQ on the blockchain? Is that going to be done by NASDAQ or one by Solana who's been at it for a while?

Yeah, I mean, I think if I just said everything I just said, you know, in the previous response and, you know, changed it for NASDAQ, it would still be true, right? Which is that, yes, I, I think it is a really interesting point in time and line in the sand, I think as Janos said earlier, for general-purpose blockchains and how they think about serving corporate customers who potentially already own a distribution channel that they don't want to necessarily give up to somebody else. I do think for NASDAQ— well, what is NASDAQ? It's an exchange that has a bunch of member institutions. That makes perfect sense for their own blockchain, actually, right? Because you could think about a blockchain as somebody who has a bunch of member institutions or member applications that serve their end customers. And we were seeing— maybe not NASDAQ specifically, but the DTCC, for instance, has been talking about a tokenization standard that other people could potentially use to plug into them for tokenized equities. Well, will they maybe allow somebody like a Denari who announced their own L1 on Avalanche or you know, Robinhood is talking about doing it, settle to their standard? Maybe they will. But does it also make sense someday for them to say, well, we want our own blockchain as well? Maybe, right? And I think we're going to learn a lot more. What I will say is not— the vast, vast majority of corporates will have no interest and are unable to roll their own L1. That's just not going to happen. So they're going to either do some sort of fork or they're going to do kind of an out-of-the-box, like, you know, maybe a roll-up-as-a-service type provider or an Avalanche L1 or, you know, one of these guys because they're, they don't have Paradigm essentially doing all of the engineering for them. And so we won't see, I don't think we'll see a lot of L1s from these corporates.

Last question I'll leave. Does that then mean invest in middleware? Sorry, invest in connective tissue, like something like LayerZero or Bridges or cross-chain communication standards.

I— not financial advice, uh, but it seems clear that we're in the unbundling phase or the fragmentation phase. And when the unbundling happens, eventually some sort of rebundling happens. And how that rebundling does end up happening, who knows?

Yeah, Santi, you know you gotta jump. Let's do one more ad break and then we'll be back.

Have a good weekend.

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All right, back, back.

We lost one man down though.

Yeah, we lost one.

It's all right, got the better crew here. Don't— we don't need Santi anyways. No, I'm just kidding. Um, All right, let's talk, let's talk GALAX. So I want to talk stocks on-chain. So there are 3 things that happened this week. One is Coinbase announced a product that gives you exposure to— I'm not sharing my screen, am I? Here we go. Coinbase announced— I'll just read Brian's thing. We're launching the first US futures that give exposure to the top US stocks and crypto at the same time. We'll launch more products like this as part of the Everything Exchange. I would expect that we start seeing this marketing tagline show up everywhere, which is the everything exchange. I would guess Coinbase starts using it. I would guess Kraken starts using it. I would guess everybody starts using this. So that's interesting. Mag7+ crypto equity index futures coming September 22nd. All right. So there's that. Then we also had an announcement that I can't find, which said something along the lines of NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange are reviewing whether or not you can trade tokens on the exchange. Can't tell if that was real news, fake news, or like what the, what the second-order impact of that actually was. But the real thing I want to talk about was this, Rob, which is Galaxy announced that Galaxy's Class A common stock is now on Solana. I think Alex Thorn, who's a stud and also their head of firm-wide research, shared their take on it. He said, these are real Galaxy shares. These aren't wrappers. These aren't synthetics. These aren't shares in a foreign SPV. We're the first ever publicly traded company to tokenize our SEC-registered shares on a public blockchain. I think Exodus did it first, but Galaxy is second. So they partnered with Superstate Funds. This is how it works, which we can— I can just pull up it. Intangible— Intangible Coins is Twitter and you can see the thread. It's Alex Thorn basically said some DeFi companies and exchanges have tokenized US listed equities without knowledge of or permission from the issuers themselves. Thus, all they can offer are wrapped equity structures, basically tokens that are shares in a foreign fund structure. Wrapped equity structures obviate the relationship between the issuer and the investor to the detriment of both, etc., etc. On-chain Galaxy is real Galaxy Class A common stock. If you hold the token, you own common equity in Galaxy, the same as if you bought our stock through— in your traditional brokerage account. No publicly traded company has ever done this before in the US. Future of equity tokenization is native on-chain. It's in the US, etc., etc. You have to KYC with Superstate to add your Solana address to an, uh, to an allow list. We haven't yet allowed for AMMs, though bilateral trades through allow-listed addresses is possible today. We expect to allow on-chain Galaxy and AMM pools on Solana in the near future. The SEC is grappling with how to account for the existence of AMMs and other forms of DEXs. And it goes on. It's a really good piece. You guys should read it. It's a long piece. I won't read the whole thing, obviously, but good piece on Galaxy and why they did this, how they did this, why they chose Solana, big picture for on-chain securities. Um, Rob, I would love to just get your take on— yeah, probably, probably this news specifically before going on to the Coinbase thing.

Yeah, on this specifically, so I'll, um, just put a disclaimer out there that I'm, um, uh, personally an angel investor or shareholder in Superstate. Um, the Dragonfly funds aren't, but I am personally. I think I've, I've long been a believer that this sort of like wrapped secondary tokenized equity conversation that we've had with like X stocks and even a little bit of what like Robinhood has announced that they're doing, I don't think that really works. I don't think you get sophisticated market participants who can operate in the way they need to, to do appropriate hedging, to allow for appropriate levels of liquidity to take risk in 24/7-type markets that we're talking about here. There's a lot of just inelegance in those structures where you're potentially minting and redeeming from something that is maybe an SPV that exists in some lightly regulated jurisdiction that is then also have a relationship with a broker-dealer in another jurisdiction, and you can only mint and redeem during certain periods of time. And then potentially, there's this— potentially, maybe it's in some ways fully tradable on-chain, but not on— call it centralized exchanges, et cetera. And there becomes a lot of dislocation and just friction in those markets. So I just don't think sophisticated market participants will participate in them. And we've seen that with xDox, for instance. They do a really good job marketing. But if you go and look at their DEX volume right now, it's less than $3 million. right? Um, so then you get to the Superstate and Galaxy announcement, which is, hey, like, we understand that these wrapped versions— which, by the way, they being a wrapped version of an equity, that exists in a lot of markets, right? So things like ADRs or like ETFs are really just themselves wrappers. So wrappers by themselves aren't necessarily bad, but the way you do them, the amount of friction, the way that the market participants can interact with them relative to other assets or the underlying That matters. When you have a natively issued primary issuance on-chain, it opens up a new world, because you no longer have all of this friction to go from tracking the underlying or keeping the underlying and having the legal exposure to that underlying and what you have happen on-chain. That, I think, is the unlock for equities on-chain, because when you talk to the large, sophisticated market makers, you talk to the large, sophisticated takers who want to interact, that's what they are looking for. They want to be on-chain. They believe if you want 24/7 trading, that you need to have an ability to manage collateral programmatically and in a way that can happen over the weekend, and it can do margin calls quickly when banks are closed, et cetera. And so if that is allowed on-chain, then they want to be able to trade the equities on-chain. That will open up new novel products. It will open up better securities lending. It will open up longer trading hours. But you need the primary issuance, in my mind, and that's what this is. And so I think it's really—

Yeah, yeah, it's something that I've thought about a lot as we think about, like, what the future of Blockworks— I mean, we're a few years away from an IPO, obviously. But it's like, if we went public, what does that actually mean in this future, in this world where you have two markets now, right? You have the on-chain markets, and you have the off-chain markets. Off-chain markets would be NASDAQ and NYSE, on-chain would be on a blockchain. It's like our, our buyers of Blockworks equity, there's probably more of them on-chain, right, on Solana, on Ethereum, than on NYSE and NASDAQ. I'd have to go do a big road show. So it's like, could we just list our shares, you know, you list on NASDAQ, but at the same time you list on, you list on Solana, you list on Ethereum?

Yeah, uh, listen, I think Listen, if you went on a roadshow, you're going to get a bunch of traditional people to buy your equity. Don't play down your ability to go sell some equity. But listen, I think that's right. I also think the interesting thing for Galaxy— and you're going to see this with, I think, a lot more companies— is that they might start by saying, OK, well, we're going to do a traditional listing. But we'll put 5% or 10% or 1% of our float on blockchains. and that actually allows for really interesting, like, arb to exist between the two, right? And so I think we're going to see a lot more of that, and that's what's happening here in Galaxy.

Yeah. Well, uh, say more about the arb.

Yeah. So right now what you see is there's like a lot of dislocation, like, so for— I'll keep using xDox— there's a lot of dislocation between the, the off-chain and on-chain asset. That's fine, right? Because, you know, that's, that's kind of meant to exist, but that has more to do with the friction than anything else. Because it shouldn't actually be happening in that case, because your legal right in the XTX case is to get the equity back at the price the equity trades off-chain. So if it's on-chain, there's like this location. But if you do primary issuance on-chain and off-chain, then what you have is you have actually two different securities that can trade at a different price and don't have like a legal right to each other to track each other's price. Right? And so there's actually times in which, like— and you see it already, right? So on a weekend, when there's, like, macroeconomic data, Bitcoin trades up or down. And then the markets open, and the futures open, and, like, the markets go trade up or down, right? You'll start to see that happening between these two different products in a much more interesting way that doesn't have to track each other in the same way, because they're not legally linked.

Yeah, that's a good take. Yeah, I think what you'll end up— you know how right now you— so, like, if you IPO, right, you have to give— you allot a certain number of shares. To each person and to each— to different platforms. Right. So like Robinhood has been an interesting one to watch. I was looking at, um, Bullish, who just— the crypto exchange who IPO'd. They gave an outsized number of their shares to Robinhood. Now, there's probably a couple of strategic reasons that they did that.

But you—

when you IPO, you allocate to different groups and existing investors get some and new platforms get some and things like that. Your banker at JPMorgan gets some. this will probably be just part of the mix, is you'll say, I'm giving 2% to Robinhood, 5% to the head of listings at JP Morgan, and 6% to Superstate to go put it on Solana.

Yeah, I mean, I think this will be— for all of the crypto companies, my opinion is they should be doing some small portion, probably at first, but some portion of their shares to on-chain. And some portion off-chain.

Yeah, that's a good take. I like that. So Coinbase rolled out this thing. I'm guessing right now they're essentially operating as a brokerage for a broker, right? They're operating in the exact same way that Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade are operating. Could those— could that—

will that ever—

will they— is that— do you think that model exists in perpetuity where they're basically just a broker on these stocks, or do you think the stocks ever come full— I'm trying to use the right words here, but like move full-time onto Coinbase? Or on-chain?

Well, Coinbase is never going to be an equity exchange, uh, just because that is the— yeah, they're not going to replace NASDAQ and IC, right?

Uh, could you get another license? Like, there's been new licenses that have been issued for—

I think they—

what, Eric Schmidt tried to create one, like the American Exchange or something?

Yeah, so when I say never, it's not that they couldn't try to go get regulated, it's that then you have to do things like compete for listings, right? And it's just like a whole brand new business that I actually don't think benefits them.

Why get into that? Just be a broker.

Correct. Just be a broker-dealer, be a member, like, that is fine, right? I think in the announcement that they actually said they're doing derivatives though and not spot, right? And I think that's because they don't have the— yeah, they don't have the, the right regulatory licenses to do spot. But regardless, and typically derivatives are easier and it's easier to go through the regulatory process there. I'm sure they'll try to get, uh, spot eventually. But regardless, I think your point that you made in, uh, in the beginning around Okay, well, everyone's going to be the everything exchange or the everything app. Like, you're completely spot on, 100% correct. Every single crypto exchange or broker is saying, how do I offer all different types of products, all different types of assets, how do I do it in one place?

Yeah, yeah. Hmm. Anything else on this?

No, I don't think there's anything else to talk about here.

Yeah. You know, one thing I was thinking about, just following up on that corporate chain, the Stripe thing, is I think as these corporate chains start emerging and come— I mean, basically, it's incumbent. What's the— there's a battle between startups and incumbents. Startups need to get distribution before incumbents can get— can figure out innovation. As the corporates are now 15 years into crypto, they're finally figuring out the innovation. Took them 15 years. That's about kind of maybe what you'd actually expect. They're coming in, they'll actually, I think, do pretty well. Unlike when they tried to get in in 2017 and '21, I actually do think they'll start to do decently well. I think what it'll do is push the risk. The way to compete in crypto is you need to keep pushing the risk spectrum. So I know people don't like the meme coin mania and all that kind of stuff, but like, if you are crypto native and coming up, the way to beat the incumbents is to push, push the risk spectrum further and further. More trading, more degeneracy, more perps, more threading the line between what is legal and what is not, candidly, because that's the way you compete with something like Tempo. That's my quick— I need to think about Tempo. It just came out this afternoon. I need to spend more time thinking about it, but that's my quick take from our conversation.

The history of startups is littered with startups that took reg risk or took legal risk or took some sort of risk. To go and compete, right? I mean, even like Revolut, which is now a regulated bank, they took— they basically went and took a really novel reading of the, you know, the banking regulations at the time using like a Lithuania license that probably didn't allow them to do what they were doing. And they went and grew into, you know, the behemoth they are today. And then they went and did it the right way, right? Like, that's, that's not a new story. And I'm sure it'll be a story on blockchain as well.

Yeah. Yeah. Rob, anything else, man?

You tired, sir?

I am tired.

It's lock-in fall, baby.

I know. I've got to sleep better. I've got to look as refreshed as you do. Like, you look great.

Trying, dude. Content Rex?

You go first.

I'm second— my second pass at reading House of Morgan. Which is a beast of a book. I did not— I made it about 3 chapters last time because I just got too intimidated. I'm a slow reader, so taking my second pass. I'll, I'll update you guys in like 4 months when I get through it, but House of Morgan. Okay, you know what it was? I listened to Jamie Dimon on, um, I went to the Acquired podcast. It was like a live podcast. Jamie Dimon did it, and, uh, he just talked about kind of the history of JPMorgan. And I was like, wow, that's a— I mean, I just got— I spent a bunch of time reading about the Gilded Age and did a bunch of Gilded Age books. And yeah, and everything from reading about like Grant to Lincoln, kind of like really early, kind of kicking off Gilded Age post-Civil War stuff into like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt. And then the last big one is Morgan. So that's my— that's my project for the fall.

All right. I'm excited for it. Um, I'm going to say two things. First is, did you, did you watch my Ohio State Buckeyes on Saturday?

I was thinking about you.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's go.

Yeah.

Let's go. Um, the also US Open week. Like I think my, my TV is on the US Open.

Djokovic, Djokovic, Alcaraz coming up tomorrow, 3:00 PM tomorrow.

I'm going to the, to the Open tomorrow night. And I was looking and I was like, I can't make it at 3:00. No, no, I'm gonna miss it. I'm gonna see the— I'm gonna see Sinner run through the 25th ranked guy instead.

Yeah, so yeah, tough. Um, you buy the tickets or you get the invite?

I got the invite from somebody else. So let's go.

Tickets are insane right now.

Yeah, I have— I, I'm— I think the tickets that I— we have probably cost like, you know, thousands of dollars a piece. So, uh, thank you for my benefactors. Yeah. Um, And so, so that's, that's the big one. And then I haven't seen it yet, but I'm going to give you a movie that I'm excited about as the, the fiction guy on the podcast. But House of Dynamite, it's like a political thriller. Uh, Kathryn Bigelow, it's her newest movie. Um, really it's kind of about the how the US government responds to a nuclear missile attack. Um, not a lot out there about it, but I see everything Kathryn Bigelow does, so Excited about it.

All right, let's go. Thanks for listening, folks. Good to see you. Enjoy the US Open. We'll see you Monday.

Thanks, Yana. Cheers.