How To Fix Crypto's Token Problem | Weekly Roundup

The best businesses in my experience are dictatorships because they can move quickly. And the person at the top with the strategic mindset, they get the right people around them and they make decisions and they break, break things and they move fast. That's what Hyperliquid did. That's what, um, the best businesses off-chain have done. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that happening at these protocols.

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Ladies and gentlemen, you have here a rare Rob Hettig with a new haircut. Rob, tell us all about that, please.

Tell us about the new haircut. You know, I'm just— I'm trying to look good for you, so, and, and the, the 3 people who watch the podcast.

It, it looks— that's true, right? Right. Um, you know, in many ways it's great that like you assume that no one really cares, and so you're just more just spontaneous when it comes to these things. You know, I've— there, there was, to be fair, there is a pretty decent group chat on the Empire, some good discussions. Rob was in there just you know, we— Rob and I were fighting in there, just putting up a good fight on prediction markets and continuation.

I was firing away yesterday. I was in the Empire group chat. It's like 1,000 people in there.

I was like, Rob, you're on Telegram? Geez. I'm kidding. Rob has a fast response rate. Um, uh, but anyways, so you got a haircut, you're in Miami, you're in New York.

Miami's done. Miami was a failed experiment for me because I went down there and I was like, oh, I'll do, I'll be a little bit more like between two cities and, you know, maybe I'll get out of the, the bad weather in New York. Uh, and I realized that Miami is where people go when they're retired and I'm not ready to retire. So there's no business happening in Miami. Like people are lying to you on Twitter that business is happening in Miami. It's not true.

Really? Interesting.

Other than Palantir, I guess.

So, yeah. I mean, I think there's been a couple of firms that like moved offices. I think Citadel obviously made a big push and then. I've heard that it like wasn't working out as much and like they were looking to relocate because productivity just— people just didn't adjust well for whatever reason.

But anyways, it's actually hard to be productive down there. I mean, Andreesen stood up an office down there, 8 months later closed it down.

Really?

It, it's, it's one of those things where you go down there and you have the best intentions. You're like, okay, well, it's going to be great during my time off, but I'm going to still going to be as productive. I'm still going to, you know, just, I'm going to live a super healthy, healthy life, you know, et cetera. And I just find that even with the best intentions, that just does not seem to happen. And whether it's for, you know, that was true of me personally. And so maybe, you know, people will say, oh, that's a skill issue or something, but it was also true of like all the other people around, like the other people I knew.

Like you're just like chilling or whatever, or like you just are more inclined to do other things.

More inclined to go for a walk, you know, more inclined to spend a little bit of time outside, more inclined to, you know, all like, oh, you know, maybe it's really nice outside. I'll work on the balcony. You know, I'm definitely not getting as much done on the balcony as I am, you know, sitting in my office. Right. And so, um, you know, just had to, so I gave up the place in Miami, back in New York. It's 60 degrees and rainy today. I'm locked in. I have no idea I'm going to go outside. I'm going to shut the blinds. I'm going to have no idea what time it is later. I'm just going to be, you know, crunching cloud code all day.

There you go. There you go. Yeah. I go back and forth around like, what does it mean to be maximally productive? And I feel like as a team you need to have workers, you need to have thinkers, but I, I don't buy the idea that you have to be chain-o-desk to be productive, but some, sometimes you do need to like, like zoom out and then really intensely focus and just go to the cave and like focus. Um, I can appreciate why Miami doesn't really let you do that.

Well, and I think it makes it, I, I'm, um, I tend to, one, I, I'm a big I'm a big in-person meeting guy. I think, as you know, I like to meet people in person and there's just a lot less of that in Miami. It's much harder. You're on Zoom a lot more. And two, I find that I like to work sort of like differing hours, right? I like to, you know, maybe work really early in the morning. Maybe I work all day on a Sunday. You know, I like to, you know, be really flexible about that. And it's much harder on like a Saturday or Sunday, especially. When like everybody's outside, like people are at, you know, at the beach or whatever. And to be like, no, I'm actually— today is when I want to work because I'm more locked in today or whatever. So it's just, it's, it's, um, you know, I think the reality is, is like, it's— there is some business getting done down there. Obviously it works for some people, maybe it's a skill issue, but as a whole, like there's just a lot less going on. And so my team is here in New York, so I'm back for good. You know, obviously I'll go back to my normal, normal travel schedule, but you know, I'll reconsider Miami in 10 years.

Yeah, my— that was my biggest fear when I, when I left San Francisco, um, when I was still at ParaFi. I was like, am I gonna be totally disconnected investing in tech by being somewhere else? And I don't know, like, I think, uh, probably just— it's like hard to verify like what would happen in a parallel universe. Uh, obviously COVID happened and, you know, working from home became more of a thing. Um, but it's, I think it just comes down to your style of working, honestly. But, but in person is good.

Yeah. Well, I will tell you this too. I was in San Francisco last week and for the first time since COVID I finally feel like it's actually worthwhile for me to spend time in San Francisco. It wasn't really worthwhile for the last few years. Worthwhile if you were in AI. If you were an AI investor, you're really focused on AI, obviously that's the center of gravity, that's where everybody is. But in crypto, that was not true. In, you know, even in broader fintech, that was not true. And all of a sudden it feels like, you know, some of this fintech, neobank, stablecoin ecosystem stuff is starting to come back to SF. I, I still think New York is the center of gravity. And if you look at the, you know, by company and the fastest growing companies, uh, both for crypto and for call it broader fintech, New York is still the best place to be. But San Francisco is back to a close second and is accelerating quickly. And so I think San Francisco is back. Uh, I mean, real estate prices reflect that because, uh, everybody's getting so rich on— in AI. And I think that San Francisco is a place to be again. I really think if you want to do really, really deep work and you want to be, you know, around and surrounded by the people that are, you know, really building for the next generation or building for the future, the investors are investing for the future, just to learn things, you're better off being in one of those two cities. And those are probably the only two cities in the country right now, uh, where that can be true.

Yeah. This idea of learning, like positioning is something that I— it keeps coming up, which is you're never going to be— I think it was the guy who runs the sovereign wealth fund of Norway, which is one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world. Per capita, I think it's close to like a couple hundred thousand bucks, which is incredible. Like they've, and he said, look, every, every year he meets with like some of the largest, most sophisticated investors in like the middle of the woods and, and they write down their predictions. He's like, time and time, like every year we're so wrong. But for the most part, the smartest guys are just positioned really well, which is to your point, like if you want to be in tech, you want to be, you know, in, in finance, there's really a very few handful of cities where you're just going to be living and breathing it and through osmosis, because, you know, part of the journey for me, like, starting Version was like, I, I really discounted my ability to like start a company because I felt this imposter syndrome of like not having, not being technical. So I said, gosh, I really need to find like a co-founder or something like that. Now I think it's a bit different. Um, but, but you have to position yourself like to be in the right place to have these spontaneous things. Like Founders Podcast was so great for me because I kept hearing the same story of like Estée Lauder. Like she would've literally shut down her idea. She went to a party, was left in the elevator, met the person that was like the purchasing like department at, I think Neiman or Barney's. And had that not happened, probably wouldn't have created this massive empire. So anyways, you're back in New York. What are we talking about this week? I think there's a couple things that caught our eye thanks to Will, our producer here, but What's top of mind for you before we run through the list of things?

I, I think the ACROSS thing is probably, I mean, it's not the most mass market point, but I actually think it is, has the biggest ripple effects and the biggest implications for what is happening in our space. So I think we should probably start there. Yeah. You tell me if you disagree.

Oh, I agree. I saw it yesterday and I tweeted about it. So for context, ACROSS is like a bridge protocol, right? Bridging protocol.

$35 billion of lifetime volume. It's been one of the biggest. There's, um, you know, it's very core to a lot of, uh, a lot of protocols and a lot of crypto.

The team I've gotten to know because they were, I think, also the team behind, um, um, UMA, the oracle protocol.

I think that's right.

Heart, ex-Goldman guy, pretty sharp. Um, has always kind of like innovated. Every conversation I've had with him is like, you know, always thinking about like, really is the kind of person that will challenge like pretty much everything from first principles. And it's interesting here. So what they're doing, just to get some context here, uh, maybe I'll share my screen just for folks to see it, um, while we're at it. So this was, I think, was Yogita from The Block. So Across Protocol wants to become a private company. Um, they posted a temperature check proposal exploring the move from a DAO to the US— to a USC corp, where ACX holders, token holders, would exchange tokens for equity. If approved by the community, holders could either exchange token for equity at a 1:1 ratio or redeem tokens for a fixed price at a 25% premium to the 1-month average price. Interestingly, the token is up 33% since the proposal.

Um, well, so I mean, the pricing is interesting that, that because they, uh, you know, this, this, this premium to the trailing price was approximately, I think like 44 cents or so as what they told you they'd buy you out. And it traded up yesterday, like all the way to like 63 cents. I think it's back down now to about 50 cents. But what does that actually imply to you? And we should, we should talk more broadly about the implications here, but that probably implies to you that the market believes that ACROSS is more valuable as an equity business than the, uh, than the token is. And so you would rather, you would pay a premium here than what they, value the token at to get access to the equity in the future.

Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I was looking at this chart, but this is all time. Yeah. The token was up massively yesterday. It's down a lot from the all-time high. It's sitting at $50 million fully diluted, $35 circulating market cap. But yeah, that, that is, I think the, the, that is a soundbite here, which is the market very clearly tells you that it's, it'd much rather be an equity play. I wonder what the mechanics are. Like, you probably, in order to convert, need to satisfy some KYC criteria and just go through general, like, standards, right? Like, presumably there's a subset of people that may not want to do that, or may, you know, or whatever, but you probably need to comply with some KYC stuff, right? Or you most definitely need to do that.

Yeah. So, so what they agreed to do was that, um, I forget what the actual cutoff was. But for some version of the people holding the token, uh, they would get converted directly onto the cap table. And then for, um, you know, people below a certain parameter or a certain like dollar amount, they would get, uh, put into an SPV that would be on the cap table. That would have— so you'd have some sort of like equity. You'd have equity exposure, of course, but you don't— you probably don't have the same rights somebody has uh, kind of fulfilling those rights on your behalf. Uh, but yeah, either way you're going to KYC, of course, whether you're in the SPV or whether you're, uh, in the equity of the company.

Um, I'm reading the— go ahead.

They also have to go through a DAO vote, by the way. So, you know, the DAO vote hasn't happened yet. I think it happens in 2 weeks and it'll come up to like, like I think Heart posted publicly that if it passes by basically like 1 vote, They will, they will do this. Like, it's very clear that they want to do this. They, they talked a lot about, I think, you know, quite interestingly, what this meant for their ability to just like accrue value, right? Because they believe that there's just an ability for them to do more like, like actual deal-making and to go to businesses and to operate in a way that like allows them to accrue revenue. Even better than if they are, you know, a DAO. So it's literally not just that, okay, well, we think we can operate more efficiently, the token's not doing well, you know, we're not able to figure out how to access or give value back to the token holders, but also we think we will operate better, we will do more deals, we will create more revenue if we are— if we don't have that public token out there. The token is a hindrance on our business.

No, no, that's interesting. So, so I'll quote, as institutional demand for ACROSS infrastructure has grown, the current DAO structure has become a bottleneck, the team said. Enterprise partners need enforceable contracts. Revenue agreements need a legal counterparty. The kind of deals that would drive the next phase of growth require a structure that a DAO today simply cannot provide. Pretty interesting, right? I mean, I think they're, they're this in context of why there's like a Wyoming DAO, right? Structure that's pushing. Yeah, that's been pushing. I saw this firsthand, like Pleaser DAO, which is this like art collective and I could tell you, it's just, I think, a pretty sober reality of the state of DAOs. And the other element here, which is interesting, is the company itself will house all the IP to your point around this disconnect that we've talked at length about here, right? We just saw this with Aave. A lot of DePIN projects have this. There's different entities and there's the disconnect in value accrual, right? Um, and, and yeah, I think to my knowledge, this is the first crypto project that has done this, right? Um, they collapsed everything. And the idea what this would look like— and you buy people out that don't want to convert in equity at a premium. People that call, like, large holders like Paradigm, Multicoin, Bain, some of the investors— I think they raised $50 million in total— would presumably already have, uh, they're already equity holders, but their tokens would—

it depends. I think the Paradigm round happened after the token was already live. So the Paradigm round— so what typically happens in VC in these rounds, this isn't always true, but I think the most common thing has been that if you do it before the token's live, you buy both the equity and a warrant for a potential future token. If you do it after the token is already live, you might have just bought tokens from the treasury. Uh, and so it's unclear to me if those people who are in the public round that Paradigm led, uh, bought equity as well. But I, I'm sure that Hart discussed this with them and that they were supportive of this as well. Right. And I will tell you that I believe this is the first one of these happening in this way. There might be another, I'm vaguely recalling. But I, um, I talked to another protocol today, which is a brand name, uh, where the token hasn't performed, but the, you know, hasn't traded at the fundamental, or it hasn't traded as well fundamentally as you might think, uh, who's doing the same thing. And they've been working on it for a little bit as well. And I expect that we will see quite a few of these good protocols where the business of the, that they are actually effectuating is doing well and the token hasn't performed, that this will happen. I bet you we see a dozen of these.

Uh, you read my mind. That was my first reaction. I saw it yesterday and said tokens are now going to convert to equity, then go back to maybe tokenized equity.

Uh, well, and that was the conversation I had with this other protocol, was yeah, we want to convert the token back to equity, and then if something happens with market structure, or maybe we do, you know, something like, um, uh, like what Superstate is doing where it's a different, it's like a lighter regulatory regime. And, you know, it's in terms of how they do that public issuance, but natively on-chain. We want to, we want to be on-chain, but we want it to be equity. We don't want the drag of this governance token. We don't want the drag of a DAO. It doesn't allow us to run the business the way we want to. And it doesn't allow us to return capital or, you know, value to token holders or shareholders over time. And we just think it's more clean to be able to do this. And this is the best way to effectuate that. And so this is going to be— one of the things that we have learned over the last couple of years is, you know, this Aave conversation over the, over the last few, uh, the last few weeks or last few months. Um, Aave is the one— is probably the only DAO that's figured out how to make this work. And it's still very frankly, it's, it's, it's, it's very, um, What's the right word? It still doesn't work very well. They're probably the best ones that have made it work with very contentious, uh, you know, revenue, um, they go into the DAO with, with things that actually matter to the bottom line of the business. And they have the DAO really effectuating or really acting like an independent entity relative to the Labs, uh, Corp that most of these don't do that. And then you look at, and they're still trying to figure out, you know, how to run that. The business appropriately. And you look at like what Hyperliquid has done, which, you know, we've seen some feigning of like decentralization and independent decision-making happening there, but it's very clear that's not what's actually happening there. And they've been the most successful protocol in crypto. And that's not necessarily why they've been the most successful protocol in crypto, but it is part of the story, right? Because it is the best businesses in my experience are dictatorships because they can move quickly. And the person at the top with the strategic mindset, they get the right people around them and they make decisions and they break, break things and they move fast. That's what Hyperliquid did. That's what, um, the best businesses off-chain have done. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that happening at these protocols.

Yeah, I definitely agree. I mean, I think the, um, the market doesn't like this dual structure. Um, uh, you could look at like a protocol like Helium that, you know, I've been spending a lot of time there. And to me, it's always been a head-scratcher. But again, I don't think the market's dumb. Like, the community does not— like, it understands that there's a disconnect. And so what does this mean for, like— because in many ways, like, what does a future state of tokens look like? And so I've talked to a lot of founders that before, like, a couple of years ago, you would have said a token is great. Like, let's just get it out. We're going to do— like, it's a go-to-market strategy. Uniswap, in my mind, probably would have stayed without having a token for a really long time had Sushi not like tried to do a vampire attack. For people that are new, it's a classic like, you know, DeFi moment. And I think after that moment, a lot of protocols, you would have heard them say, we need to have a token to be competitive. We need to have a token to subsidize fees, to sustain our business model. Tokens, I think, not too dissimilar from stock. They help you— well, tokens probably better than stock is let's effectively give our customers skin in the game. And hopefully that helps with the retention. And I think there is some proof into that. Hyperliquid, for example, uses the token to subsidize the fees. And it has been a huge wealth creation for the active community. So it makes sense, like tokens serve as a way to acquire customers, distribution, capture mindshare. But for every Hyperliquid, there's 99% other examples that just tokens— and I've heard it from a lot of founders, it's like, dude, if I could go back, I would not have launched the token. It was distracting. I then had to, you know, constantly like respond to the community, manage a Discord. Um, you know, you look at the time, like, you look at traditional venture companies are staying private longer. There's a benefit of staying private, you know, and, uh, there's a lot of liquidity in the private markets too. Now, there's reasons why you want to go public, um, but I do think that this perhaps is a prediction here. I think we'll see less and less teams issue a token or rush out of the gate to issue a token, uh, and maybe wait for the regulatory environment to clear up, or just build a good product, accrue value in the equity, and then maybe either— I mean, we've seen a lot of acquisitions, right? Coinbase acquired Tenset Team, they acquired the equity, not the token, uh, and I've had a couple other portfolios, Circle and Axlar, same thing. Exactly. So Yeah, it's a very interesting sign of the times, no doubt, right? I think crypto founders are appreciating, hey, we actually built a nice product here. We could maybe go public or we could maybe get acquired. And a token just introduces a lot of brain damage right now because the reality is a regulatory environment as favorable as this administration is, it's still not clear for tokens. And, you know, you have to still dance around that, right?

Yeah. But I will say the other side of that, right, is that I mean, look at some of these things like Ondo, right? You know, Ondo would obviously not have ever been valued at the value that it was at if it was an equity business, because if you were looking at a fundamental investor, we're looking at the revenue that they make, right? That wouldn't have been given that valuation. And so a lot of people, investors, team members, and some of the, I'm sure, early, uh, you know, traders got, you know, made a lot of money on that because of that, right? You look at some of these other protocols To your point, you know, could you have bootstrapped, uh, an Athena in the way that you had without a token, right? And even Hyperliquid, right, which is making as much money as it is, without the success of that airdrop, would it have gained as much mindshare and as many users as it has? I don't think— I'm gonna get tweeted at here because everyone's gonna be like, oh, it's such a better product. And it is a very good product. And so I'm not, I'm not you know, trying to dispute that. Uh, and Jeff has done a tremendous job, but not clear to me that it would have done as well as quickly as it had without the success of that airdrop and without accumulating or allowing people to accumulate wealth, uh, on the back of using that. And I think we've seen that the exchange tokens are a little bit different because the exchanges have a reason, or there's a, there's a real utility for their tokens, but that's not true for all, all protocol.

Yeah, I mean, let's double-click on Ondo, or just Ondo-like product, like I'm just calling a spade a spade. A lot of the venture investing was, hey, I can have the venture-like asymmetry with short duration. Because if the team's going to launch a token within a year and I could unlock in a, you know, 6 months after that or a year, the market tends to value these things at X. And so I can probably take my principal out and then have like free optionality on the rest. And, you know, we've sort of assumed that the market doesn't treat these things on a fundamental basis. So we'll just kind of issue and play the help them with KOL rounds and go-to-market and exchange listings and focus on like certain geographies that, you know, you have to have a good mindshare. And if you do that well, we're likely not going to lose money on this deal. And I think a lot of the— I'm not saying you guys specifically, but I think there's a whole, a big part of the crypto venture universe that kind of operates like that or historically operated like that. I think the returns, like, there's so many protocols that are not only trading below their last round, they're trading below their first round valuation. And like, they're just going to close to zero. Like, I'm talking like sub-$10 million, sub-$5 million. Fully diluted market cap, and there's just no willingness to bid that protocol. Now, Ondo is interesting because it's still valued at like $2 billion circulating, $2.5 fully diluted. So it's— I'm actually pretty interested in— I don't know if you guys played in Ondo or not, but like, to your point, on a fundamental basis, like, how do you justify a $2.5 billion valuation for Ondo?

I put, um, my old firm, uh, that I— the hedge fund that I was at in '21, uh, GoldenTree— we put a check into Ondo when it was such a structured products business. And so people might remember the original Ondo was just basically about how do I tranche risk, uh, in DeFi. Um, and so had some exposure to it through that, but the Dragonfly did not play. And I think— listen, I think they've done They were obviously one of the first to, you know, um, some of the like RWA narrative, and they've done, you know, a good job in a lot of different ways. But, you know, very clearly this is a low revenue business, I'm sure, and, and it's not a thing that would be valued like this in, uh, like a public market, uh, in the equity. Um, and I think, you know, this also belies a little bit of the, you know, concerns that a lot of the, you know, retail buyers of tokens have, which is like, we don't actually know how much of this float is public and, you know, how many people are actually holding this, how much sell pressure there is. And so even though there's— it should be transparent because it should be on-chain and there should be this, you know, mechanism for, um, disclosure, it doesn't— in a lot of cases, I think on the application side, it seems like a bit of a facade. And that's what part of what people have been, been concerned about. I, I think it's also important to say that, you know, Everybody talks about crypto as, as like a monolith, or all of these tokens are a monolith. But you know, the L1s, the L2s, the infrastructure layer is very, very different than the application layer. For one, you know, what purpose does the token serve and how should they serve that purpose and why do you want to hold them? But two, in terms of like the games that people play or the ways to return value back to the holders of that. And so you know, I don't expect to see, you know, an L1 go private, right? I do expect to see a lot of DeFi applications do that over time.

Right. I was thinking about like Aave here, which is like, I get why Aave wouldn't want to go private like this. I think it was the episode with Tushar, he made up a good point, which is like, if you want to truly, like, there is a, small but interesting probability that AAVE becomes this money market layer for the world effectively. And if you're operating as a permissionless protocol, you're essentially— like, there is this regulatory arbitrage. You can basically operate across jurisdictions and it's just code. There's fees trickling into token holders and there's like, um, you know, from a monopoly, monopolistic standpoint, like you can become a monopoly and like it's harder to clamp down on that. Like it is effectively a protocol, right? And so you wouldn't want to privatize it that way. Um, so I, I thought that was an interesting take that he had, which, which I, we were discussing like, hey, would you rather own AAVE versus like a neobank? Because obviously AAVE is trying to push into that direction. Um, but I, I could see why you wouldn't want to privatize or you wouldn't want to like just not have a token for something like AAVE?

Well, the incentives are such in my mind that the things that have traded well— your Ondo, your AAVE, your Uniswap— like, you're, you know, hyper liquid. Uh, you know, obviously there's a wide range of valuation between all those, but for the people who have traded well and, you know, the founders, the investors, you know, some of the retail investors have all made a lot of money and the token continues to hold up with these billion, multi-billion dollar valuations. For those guys, the token is probably worth the annoyance, right? And there's the point that you just made, which is like, okay, well, it's like easier to expand my TAM and to go international and be permissionless kind of tech layer for, you know, finance globally. But there's also just like, you know, a lot— there are things you can do with tokens that are interesting. The group that is going to, I think, see the, you know, going private en masse are these protocols that, you know, you and I know are actually doing pretty well in terms of getting adoption and people using them, but the tokens are trading at sub-$300 million or sub-$400 million, and you just haven't seen the tokens trade at all with, you know, fundamental growth. And for all of those guys, I would bet that every single one of them is thinking about this right now, and that a lot of them end up doing this.

Yeah. Ondo, just to double-click, and it's— I'm looking at a DeFi Llama dashboard. Blockworks, sorry, you didn't have one. $50 million of annualized fees. They've had some growth, but at that level, you're like 50 times, you know, revenue or fees, I guess. So obviously, from a fundamental standpoint—

But also, what is that? You know, what are they actually— they're doing a lot of sharing, right? And so like the fees are then what you would actually see as like net revenue, right?

Yeah. The take rate. Yeah. I think this is aggregate fees, not like net, but yeah. Anyways, um, any, any suspects without leaking too much alpha, but like of which protocols do you think, like, where is this actually? Like name one protocol that this makes a lot of sense.

Yeah.

I mean, I can tell you one.

I'm not going to name protocols in my seat, but what I will say is like if you go on DeFi Llama and you, you know, look at CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap or any of these guys and you like, you know, go to the DeFi page and like, you know, you sort by market cap that, you know, a lot if you go and you start looking at people that have, you know, sub-$300, sub-$200 million market cap who are also protocols that you think are growing and doing well and like serving customers, uh, I would bet every single one of those guys are, are thinking through this right now.

Yeah.

I mean, how on earth— and I, I don't— I, I know nothing here, and I'm not saying this will happen or, or— and I, whatever— but like some of these things, like a Jito, right, is a, uh, a core piece of infrastructure in Solana. And it traded at a multi-billion dollar valuation for a long time. Uh, and you know, it's a 200 and I think it's got $123 million, uh, in, you know, market cap now. Right. And so I literally know nothing. I'm not trying to imply anything, but you know, some of these things, like there's the teams are still very clearly working very hard at building something very important for their ecosystems and for customers. And, um, you know, maybe that'll just be easier if they don't have a token.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, token's down 80, almost 90%. It's at $275 million.

I mean, Kamino, Kamino has been growing a lot, right? And it's, you know, $78 million.

Kamino is trading at like a fraction of the multiple of AAVE. Uh, obviously it has way less TVL, but it's a dominant player in the Solana ecosystem. So if, you know, I'm an investor there and again, discussed it with the 2Shar. They're also investors in Kamino, and there's a very different multiple there for Kamino. I think Kamino is trading like half, quite literally half the multiple of what Aave is. Yeah, I think I remember, like, whenever I meet founders, I ask them, like, why do you need a token? And sometimes I get very compelling answers to that. I think, I think The reasons why you want a token for an L1 make sense. But for everything else that doesn't require as much coordination, it starts to look contentious, to be honest. Like, okay, Pump, Pump.fund, it just crossed $1 billion in revenue. Huge, huge milestone. And again, I'm an investor there. They ended up raising a round. I know why sort of the rationale to raise another round is because they want to really invest in social and they want to just, they're competing against becoming like a hybrid of Binance and TikTok and they feel like they want go hard at that, and that takes capital. But, um, you know, the token's been— it's just at that point noise. Like, why have a token? Like, clearly you created a launchpad, people are going to use it. Um, in many ways you, you wonder, like, did the token do more harm than good? Um, I don't know. I don't know what the answer to that is, but I could tell you, like, the brain damage of having a token and and they're doing buybacks and whatnot. But it's like, is this the right structure? Because there's a whole other set of businesses in crypto that are widely profitable, like BirdEye. BirdEye doesn't have a token as far as I know, right?

I don't think so, no.

I could tell you they're printing.

DexScreener, same thing.

DexScreener I've heard is like, like just printing.

They print. Make a lot of money. Yeah.

And I've looked at some of these to like, I know it's not sort of, it's not our mandate, but I could probably see someone like Arthur Hayes that has that buyout fund for crypto businesses. Like, uh, you know, a CoinGecko doesn't have a token, right? Uh, so I, I would really push back on this idea that, uh, I think I'm glad to see the market finally realize like, hey, there's only very specific reasons why you want to have a token. Think twice before you launch it. Really, maybe go talk to other founders. And this conversation's kind of irrelevant, like in a state where prices were at all-time high, guarantee you we wouldn't be having this conversation, right? It's like irrelevant. 6 months, be like, God, yeah, yeah, we were just, we were just—

the math wouldn't work, right? Like you wouldn't, you wouldn't have the capital to go buy out these people if they wanted to. Yeah.

Yeah. I do. There were some investments that, uh, I've made where there's a pretty especially like infrastructure as a service, um, where a big part of like, there was the cap table was sort of mixed of like traditional VCs and a lot of them were like, hey, don't launch a token. Like just continue to capture value. Like you can run this as like a software as a service, like an infrastructure as a service business. Forget it. And in many ways, I think it's the right answer.

Yeah. We always tell everyone who comes to us, we tell them like, listen, like Um, you know, if you're gonna launch a token, there needs to be a reason for it and you need to be able to clearly articulate what it's gonna do and why. Right. I think that's the world we're in right now. I, I do think there's a risk of us getting or reading too much into this and swinging too far one the other way. Like there are a lot of reasons for tokens to exist and for tokens to play a role in, you know, the future. value accrual and for these businesses. Uh, and I think there will continue to see innovation at the token economic level. So I don't want to, this to be taken as if, okay, well, like nobody should launch a token and tokens are, are stupid and it should all just be equity. But I do think it just underpins how challenged the token market is right now, how the investors are viewing the token market and how much change we need to see and how much thought people need to put into launching a token if they're going to, to be honest. Yeah.

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All right. At risk of overthinking it, let's talk about Mastercard. They launched this, uh, recently. This Mastercard crypto partner program, global initiative that brings together more than 85 crypto-native companies, payment providers, financial institutions. A lot of familiar names here. What's— I haven't looked too much into this, but what's the deal here?

Yeah, I mean, it's— there's a lot of excitement about it yesterday. I think really what they're doing here is they're just saying, hey, listen, we're going to try to make coordination across companies that want to build on the Mastercard network easier. So it was a little bit light on details in some sense, because there wasn't, hey, like, you know, we're launching this product or that product. It was really, I think the quote said something like, hey, we're creating a forum for meaningful dialogue and collaboration. They really want to just help create and provide access to their team to help create, you know, new interesting products and services that are on the Mastercard network. That's great, and I'm very excited for that. They've— there's been a— I know the head of crypto there, the head of digital assets there, uh, pretty well. He's been there for a number of different years. They've been focused on launching different types of products in this space for a while, so it's not necessarily new. They've also been investing in— but they have this thing called Crypto Start Path where they invest in kind of early-stage companies. So it's not new that they're focused on the space, but it does seem that they're trying to maybe coordinate more with a broad set of, you know, innovators and service providers and companies to, to build on them. And it makes sense because Visa is very far out in front of where they are in terms of the, just the interactivity of the space. You know, Visa is doing over $6 billion of annualized direct stablecoin settlement on the network now. And if you look at basically all the stablecoin card ecosystem or market, you know, almost all of it is in Visa today. And Visa has been, I think, further along in thinking through what future products look like. And so they need to catch up. So I'm interested to see what comes out of this, but at its core, this in itself wasn't particularly helpful.

You know, I'm going to go there, but would you rather own Visa or Mastercard? And to lay the context, Visa $650 billion business. Mastercard, $500 billion. Visa trades kind of 24 to 33 times forward earnings. Mastercard, bit of a discount. Visa has better margins marginally. Like, I think like Visa has like 67, 68% operating margins. Mastercard is a bit lower. I've actually only have one Mastercard and that's tied to the business because that's like, you know, our banking provider has that. But, um, I think from a, from certainly from a crypto standpoint, the team of Visa has been, to your point, like way, way far ahead here. Um, but, uh, what does this mean for like Mastercard? Like, is this, is this just a nice announcement, or what does this actually mean for their business model? What could this look like in like a year, or a year might be too early, but like 3 to 5 years from now? What is it? Does this even show up in the P&L?

Well, I, I think, I think it has to, right? So, you know, the end of the year Visa was doing about $3 billion of annualized stablecoin settlement. I think in the first 2 months that's doubled. I expect there to be— I, I, and I've said this a bunch, I don't think traditional, like, networks, tradition— a lot of the traditional rails are going to get like, competed away or get brought out of the value ecosystem from stablecoins or AI or agentic commerce or anything like that. I think a lot of that— this obsession around, like, P2P stablecoin transactions doesn't really make a lot of sense within the realm of, like, the way that merchants and businesses and banks interact with the payment system. But what I do think is going to happen is that we're going to see a significant amount, if not someday all of the settlement layer, exist on stablecoins and tokenized asset rails, right? And so what does that mean? That means Visa is growing very quickly. The fastest part of Visa grow— the fast part that's growing in Visa right now is two things. It's their services business, but then on the transaction side, uh, it's what they call Visa Direct, which is its non-bank transaction business, right? So you're outside of the traditional banking network, outside of the traditional Visa network. They're, um, the fastest growing transaction business is Visa Direct. Mastercard has Send, which is the same product. And I actually think Mastercard Send is a little bit bigger than Visa Direct today. And I think when you look at that, you look at the continued, uh, I think emergence away, or the continued just, um, excitement about these alternative payment methods, these alternative rails. Even outside of stablecoins, the future will probably look like a thing, or probably look like a place where unless you do business with like a G-SIB, everyone else is transacting off a traditional bank network and on something net new. And that net new thing in my mind will be stablecoins, right? But that doesn't mean that Visa or Mastercard, who say play significant roles and auth and, uh, settlement and fraud and detection, uh, are going to go away. I think they're going to be— continue to grow, uh, tremendously. I just think that they're going to start putting a lot of their infrastructure on stablecoins, and the banks, the issuer banks and the acquiring banks, are actually at the most at risk of getting cut out of that payment flow.

Yeah. Is it fair to say Visa's been— like, Visa captured— I mean, you guys are investing in Rain. They capture most of the on-chain, like, crypto card volume. That's an area where like they've just dominated, uh, like the vast majority.

Yeah.

About like 90% of it is from what I'm seeing. Uh, whereas MasterCard, they've sort of focused on more in the infrastructure layer, like programmable money, agentic commerce. I don't know what that actually means in practice and like why Visa couldn't just do the same.

But, um, I mean, Visa has a, like an agentic, um, like tokenized identity thing as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh, going back to that couple months ago, uh, some of these acquisitions didn't go through, right? I think Mastercard was in the running to acquire— was it BVNK?

They, they, they made a run about BVNK and ZeroHash, uh, but neither BVNK or ZeroHash have actually transacted, uh, as far as I know at this point.

Is that like on their behalf, or are they just, uh, are buyers just not really buying the valuation?

I, I think there's been A, and you know, I'm not in these conversations, so I don't— this is me speculating, I don't know anything. But the— I understand, because if you remember then, then never— then, I mean, it's part of the job, uh, but if you remember then, the, the news that came out was that, you know, BNBK and, and Coinbase were likely to come together, and then that didn't seem to have happened either, uh, and I think there's some discussion around valuation of these things. I think there's some discussion around, you know, the actual customers that are doing most of the revenue at these companies today, which are like all history. Like, if you look at the history of payments, companies that have built big businesses and payments usually started with higher risk customers. And that's either, okay, well, I started with like long tail startups, and then I grew with the startups. That's the Stripe story. Right. Stripe is, uh, the company that, that Shopify made, right? And now, of course, now Stripe is a behemoth and does everything else well. Um, or, you know, it's people who have done or served, you know, gambling or, you know, uh, really like far-tail emerging markets or porn or, or things like that. And, you know, eventually grown into and be able to shut off, you know, some of these you know, call it more high-risk industries. And so I think when people get under the hood of some of these companies, we're seeing the market shift. We're seeing, you know, the biggest tech companies and, you know, the biggest Fortune 500s come and say, hey, I want to do stablecoins. And like, this market— and I still strongly believe that a lot of our payment systems are going on to stablecoin rails. But I think when you look at the current set of where most of the revenue is coming from, for the service providers, it is more high risk for a lot of people. Not everyone, but for a lot of people. And because of that, it makes it hard for, I think, some of these, you know, public companies especially, to acquire that revenue and see cross-sell opportunities, to see synergy opportunities, versus decide to maybe just build in-house for specifically for their current set of customers who are maybe not as high risk, uh, and they don't have to pay, you know, the same type of multiple for that.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So I think we can move on from this. It's just an interesting announcement. Um, um, and I guess the, the other element that I want to touch on is Ripple doing the tender offer, I guess, for a share buyback at a $50 billion valuation. This comes after doing— I believe they sold equity last year at a similar valuation, and it was, uh, I guess they, they have like a bunch of tokens on the balance It was like 40, right? 45 or something. And, and, and the math there is, I think, roughly like they have a ton of XRP tokens in the balance sheet at the current valuation. Then it was like a pretty steep discount. Uh, yeah, it's interesting. I guess they're buying out former employees, investors. Um, why not use that capital to go buy something else?

Well, so they've had a, a buyback program for a while. for the equity holders. The— I think they run it twice a year, and they've been doing this for years. And there's some limitation on how much you can sell of your holdings. It's only up to like a certain amount, so it would take you a while to sell all of your, all of your holdings. Uh, they, you know, to your point, that $50 billion evaluation, I think by my math— and it's impossible to know exactly how much XRP they still have But by my math, they have something like 75, 80 million, uh, a billion, sorry, of XRP on, on balance sheet. And so, you know, it's a discount to that. And I think if you look at all the acquisitions they've made, so they have RLUSD, obviously RLUSD probably does 50-ish million of revenue right now. It's like $1.3, $1.4 billion outstanding. They do a lot of incentivizing the RLUSD pools. I'm sure net or gross profit is, is below that. But then they acquired Hidden Road, which I was, I was into a million for the million worth of investors in, uh, and G-Treasury, which was a big, you know, 40-year-old treasury management business. And they acquired a few other things, Rail and a few others. I think they probably do call it $400 million of revenue, right? And so if the whole business is $400 million of consolidated revenue, you know, what do you think that's worth? It's a, you know, a prime broker, uh, Treasury management, you know, platform, SaaS platform, you know, payments orchestrator, and, you know, a custodian, you know, what do you think that's worth on a blended multiple basis? And then the rest is, you know, XRP value, right, on, on balance sheet. And they've been using that XRP, I think, you know, for, you know, they sell it occasionally. They have a, they have a program where they can go sell it into the market. So they've been using it for operating. I'm sure some of that cash has been used for for acquisitions. And so they're clearly growing the business with, with, you know, some of that XRP. But, um, you know, if they were to know a need to like liquidate Ripple today, what would they actually be able to liquidate that $80 billion of XRP worth? Uh, it's definitely much below.

Yeah, yeah, that's always tricky. I mean, obviously for every Ripple there's another failed experiment, like, like Axie Infinity for instance. Obviously did like a treasury diversification deal and Same story, right? They had a bunch of AXS in the balance sheet, like token on the balance sheet, and that clearly just didn't— now Ripple's kind of defied gravity for— but, um, and it's interesting, like, to your point, if they're actually making $500 million of revenue, what's like their operating margin here? Like 30%, 40%, maybe higher?

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I know they're reinvesting, right? So obviously the stablecoin business, if that's $50 million, that's, um, typically a high-margin business, but they're giving away a lot of incentives. Hidden Road, you know, they should be, you know, at least when I was still, you know, going to board meetings there and whatnot, like, I would have expected them to have last year been profitable. So EBITDA positive. And, you know, it's a, that was a very good business. And I'm sure that's doing incredibly well still. G Treasury, I don't know if G Treasury was profitable or not. Old Business, I think they were profitable. And so, you know, how much, you know, net profit or EBITDA is that $400 million of revenue doing? I don't know. It's not— I'm sure the margins aren't super high, but, you know, maybe $200 million. Like, yeah, probably less, to be honest.

Yeah, less. But like, assume $200 million of profit, like, up operating. Like, this thing is now trading at— yeah.

Well, how do you think about it, right? It's like, it's, it's, you can do the same math on MicroStrategy, right? It's a pot of Bitcoin and then it's a, got an operating business that does, I think, like $300 million of revenue, right? And so, you know, what is, what is the operating business worth relative to the Bitcoin? I think it's pretty clear that, you know, the value of the way people are thinking about it more is more like a holding co.

So would you buy it?

Would I rip it?

Would you buy? Well, Would you rather own XRP or get this wrapper, uh, does the operating business that has now subsidiaries that you're familiar with at, uh, 40, say you got the deal of Brevin, uh, and Fortress, like $40 billion at the time. I think like the tokens were worth $90 billion on the balance sheet. So, you know, that was a pretty interesting discount with optionality that they're going to continue to grow the prime broker and a couple other businesses, but like Would you have taken that deal at $40 billion?

Um, it's not our mandate. It's a little too late. Yeah, yeah, I, um, listen, we don't invest in stuff like that. I think, I think there's also something to be said here, right, which is like Fortress and Brevin Howard did that deal. How do they invest? They're probably not investing at naked long in some equity, right? And so there's probably—

these are the same guys that are doing that.

So there's probably some structure around that that makes sense for them that, uh, was, you know, not, uh, not, not what we do, which is that we are long-term, you know, long-only investors, right? And so I think, um, I think it's tough today to to buy. I mean, you see how, like, if Ripple went public today, do you think it would trade like an operating company? I think it would trade like a DAT. Yeah, because the DATs are trading on average at like a 20 to 30% discount to NAV right now.

Yeah, some worse, but yeah. Yeah. Is there now maybe transitioning a little bit into that, is there a, a bright light into that universe?

I, I think the DATs will do fine if the market does well, right? So, you know, if we get into a bull market and Bitcoin goes from $70K to $150K over the next 9 months, like, the dApps will do well again because they'll be able to do this financial engineering, and some of them will be able to, you know, find interesting ways to create some value. Um, not all of them will do well, but, you know, kind of the key ones, the larger ones, will do okay. Yeah, and we'll figure out how to, how to maximize value.

So yeah, I think it's important to make sure that a lot of the topics that we cover in a bear market are not buried in a bull market, uh, because you're about to make those same mistakes if you don't actually like go listen to some of the things that you were scrutinizing in a bear market. Um, that's why keeping a journal, uh, like a trade journal or just ideas, right? Because, you know, this idea of converting tokens to equity like should not be lost. There are some businesses that regardless of the, you know, I appreciate that if the token's at an all-time high, this is not necessarily viable, but before you go and launch a token, just think critically, right? Um, but, um, yeah, a lot of— I think like there's other stuff on the margin that I don't think in the interest of time, like I gotta drop in a minute and I do want to go to Content of the Week. Uh, but I don't know if there's anything else you want to cover before we kind of round it out.

No, I mean, maybe we can spend 2 minutes just on the Kraken Fedwire stuff, which I think is interesting. I don't know if we talked about that much last week. Uh, but, but I do think we're in a very interesting time right now for what is happening to banks and what is happening to the banking sector in the US. We've talked about this a bunch over time around, you know, Genius Act essentially allows for narrow banks and, you know, Kraken getting their Federal Reserve master account, which gives it, you know, the ability to settle payments directly with the Fed and to avoid using intermediary banks and to, to, um, basically, you know, be able to do, to really innovate at the payment layer of, you know, what they're trying to do with a few of their products, um, outside of, you know, the traditional sponsored banking system, I think is actually quite, quite interesting. And I think we're going to see a lot, a lot more of that. And so especially now that with the OCC charter and application seems a lot more open for a lot of companies, um, you know, Erebor and being one of them. But we've even seen like non-crypto companies, Nubank and Revolut and others start to look at this. I think we'll see a lot of innovation at the payment layer, uh, in, well, why our banks have typically been played, that, you know, just like what we talked about earlier today with Visa and Mastercard, will take a lot of the correspondent banking system out of the settlement flow. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that move on to these more digitally native, like, stablecoin rails. So I think that's important. And congratulations to, to Dave and Arjun and, and team. And, um, I think that's the first of a few, but it's going to be super interesting to see what happens there.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Kept thinking about that $20 billion round that they did last year, um, but Yeah, pretty interesting. I think it's, uh, who else do you think can, uh, how, like, thinking about like Kraken versus Coinbase, um, does, how do you think about what Kraken can offer versus Coinbase historically had been able to offer given this new access that they've gained?

Yeah, listen, Coinbase has been, I, I think it's very clear that since Arjun came on to Kraken, their product velocity and their, their, I think, just, I think, intuition about where the market is going, what customers want, has been better than Coinbase's. There, for before Arjun, for many years, Coinbase was operating at a higher level, and I think that flipped post-margin, uh, post-Arjun coming on. He's done a tremendous job. I think they have been, you know, they announced their deal with, um, I think it was NASDAQ earlier this week as well, to allow for NASDAQ to be kind of the registry, uh, for their tokenized stock business. They bought XDOX, and then for that to then, you, you know, go and offer, you know, XDOX permission, which they already do, um, but to work more directly with NASDAQ to to, um, on the registry side and to try to get, you know, do more distribution to, um, some of the, the NASDAQ customers. So I think it's really interesting what's going to happen there. That honestly has to scare Coinbase shitless, to be honest, because between that and what happened with OKX and, and NYSE, um, Coinbase is kind of left out of these, you know, big partnerships because they've already said that, hey, listen, we're going to go compete with those guys directly. And so I think when you take all that into account You know, Coinbase has tried to do a lot of things. Base has been very successful, but a lot of the other things have not been. And so that, in that payments business, you know, they're still trying to figure it out. Coinbase Commerce is a good product, but they kind of seem to stop focusing on it as much and they started focusing on other things. And so I think they're in for, um, I think they need to take a big swing, if I'm being honest. Like, I really think that Coinbase needs to They did a bunch of, you know, call it small or midsize acquisitions last year. It's really hard to integrate all of those. It's really hard to do that transition. Uh, and I'm not quite sure that any of them have done particularly well to this point based on the data that I'm looking at. Some of that might just be the market. And so they need to figure out what is the biggest swing that they're going to take for the future.

Yeah. Yeah. I agree with you. I mean, I think like if you would rather own Robinhood or Coinbase, I'd take Robinhood. If you'd rather own, um, 'Coinbase or Kraken?' I would take Kraken. Uh, 'Would you rather own Robinhood or Kraken?' I'd still probably take Robinhood just because it behaves better, um, and it just has a more interesting customer acquisition funnel and product offering. Uh, but you know, a lot of it is just price dependent. I mean, Robinhood, $65 billion, it's come, you know, 50% off its high. Uh, but they're doing some— they, they again, product like founder-led, um, and they just move to your point around product development, it's just really interesting what they're doing around just capturing more of like their, their Titanium card, their, you know, their IPO fund to get access to, you know, private companies. They just really understand their customer very well. I, for better or for worse, don't think that Coinbase has like really leveled up their product experience. Uh, they still have like mindshare and brand and goodwill, because they're synonymous with crypto in the US. But, you know, again, I, in a world where the regulatory barrier degrades, it's probably more beneficial for the Backpacks, the Krakens, the Asian exchanges that, you know, Coin— I think Binance just hired a new CEO in the US. So, you know, you're going to see a much more competitive landscape.

By the way, as a compliance guy.

No, you know, but, uh, but yeah, like, I think it's, uh, product always wins, I think. And so I, I think, uh, from that basis, Robinhood and Kraken, I think, are doing more interesting things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, man, content of the week. What do you got for us?

Oscars on Sunday.

Are you hosting a party? Which ladies—

I'm not hosting this year. I'm not hosting this year. What?

Yeah, you said you did it every year. What's going on? Is this—

yeah, I, I, this will be the first year in like 5 years that we haven't, we haven't hosted something. So, um, or 6 years maybe, but it's been—

I'm sure prediction markets are going to be all the rage. I talked to a guy that is building like a prediction market. He's a number one, uh, like a parlay prediction, like parlay prediction markets. He's, I think, the number one on the leaderboard of the culture category in PolyMarket. And I asked him like, what, how do you become, like, what's the edge? And he was just like, that is really complicated but, uh, interesting way he sourced like just alpha for that. It was pretty, pretty fascinating.

I, I'm gonna tell you the, uh, if I was a, a user of PolyMark International, um, I might have put, you know, I might have seen that Timothée Chalamet was trading at 80% to win best actor like a month or two ago. And I, That movie was not very good, and maybe some people aren't tweeting me about that. And I did not think that he was going to win. And now the favorite is, um, it's Michael B. Jordan. And so it would have, you know, more than doubled my money had I taken the no on Timothée Chalamet.

So Rob, looking— I, I, I know you guys just raised a fund, but why not just— I also heard about these guys that are launching a fund to do prediction market ARV and stuff like that. Um, why not just, you know insource, run your own prop capital, and just do— become the number one leaderboard, like, trader in culture category.

No, I should— I should have done that. Like, you know, venture capital and then new side gig. I'm gonna— I'm gonna trade just like Oscar season's my, my Super Bowl. I'm telling you what, like, if I was trading Oscar season, I would be, you know, maybe I'd be making more money than just investing in Polymarket has made us, so.

I'm just going to say it, Rob. The fact pattern remains. Rob moves back from Miami to New York, is not hosting an Oscar party, and has now 4 monitors in his, in his home setup. You best believe what he's going to be doing this weekend.

Telling you what, you know, the, the voting, uh, it ended last Thursday. Okay, like, I'm starting to see some leaks come out. You gotta, you gotta get into like deep into the forums. Right, there's— and pick up the phone, call the people you know in LA.

Actually, on this point, I asked him, like, when they were doing parlays, I'm like, how do you, how do you, like, mitigate, like, toxic flow and stuff like that? And he had a pretty compelling answer. He was like, look, there's something that we can do on our end, which if it's a trader that is putting similar size bets across different markets, you're, you're going to absorb that. Like, it's reasonably assessed, like, low risk. But if it's a fresh wallet that just put a massive amount on like a certain directional bet on a particular event, like in case in the Oscars, right, if you see like fresh wallets just bet on like a number of things, it's like that's definitely an insider, right? And so you could decide not to, you know, you could like not take that, right? And so it was, it was just a pretty interesting discussion.

I mean, on this point, by the way, the, the CFTC put out a Basically this, this morning, and so Chairman Selig was on CNBC and he put out a, a letter that was proposing new prediction market rulemaking process. Um, so we're starting to see, you know, the CFTC think through how they want to provide kind of new and updated rules that are specifically be made for prediction markets. And so that was kind of the first step. in the, you know, this process to do that. And then they'll put out, you know, an issuance of, uh, you know, kind of a proposed rulemaking issuance and take some feedback on that. And so we should see more and more, um, come out of the CFTC in the near term about how to think through, uh, regulating prediction markets. They very clearly want prediction markets to be able to fit under the CFTC guidance. They believe that is the mandate. And they want to make sure that they flourish and they thrive, uh, but they obviously want to make sure that people's concerns are addressed and that there's, there's real rulemaking out there. And so, oh, that'd be something that we'll, we'll see evolve over time, which I think will be quite interesting for both, both, uh, Polymarket and Kalshi, who are very supportive of this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. So the Oscars for you this week. Um, for me, not much, to be honest. Like I've just, uh, I do, I've just been playing around with Claude, like primary research there. My, my, my consumption for content these days is very much like how Mark Andreessen like tweeted about a couple days ago, which is like, um, a lot of it is just like good blog posts. I do subscribe to Michael Burry's one, Cassandra Unchained. It's phenomenal. Um, and it's pretty pricey. Um, but I think he's making more money off of those subscriptions on Substack than what he was making as management fees. If you're running a large fund. Uh, but really good content. I mean, he has one on Palantir, which is fascinating. I think I might have mentioned it before, but really, really good archive. It's well worth— and, and I'll drop my ref link below. No, I'm kidding. Um, it's, it's just a very good, uh, I mean, he has just really good perspectives on, on markets and companies and stuff like that. So, um, one thing I was reading up, uh, yesterday was, uh, there's this massive acquisition. I think Google bought Wix, uh, for $32 billion. And I was just reading up on, on like the evolution of that business. Um, like just cracked 4-person team from the Israeli like IDF, uh, second-time founders. Um, just really, really interesting story. Like I always want to understand like what is the evolution of that business. And I think the guys were like based in Israel, so they were coding most of the day and then throughout the night they were just hitting the phones and selling in US like hours. Uh, just absolute just built different. So anyways, that was a really interesting story that I was poking around last night. Cool. Yeah. All right, guys. Rob, is it going to be a category in prediction markets around which tokens are going to be transitioned into equity? If there's not, probably should be one.

Should be. Yeah, there definitely should be.

And parlay there. would be nice.

No, no, no, no. As Kashi would call them, combos.

Combos, combos. That's right. All right, gents. Well, and ladies and gentlemen, thanks for tuning in. Um, Rob, welcome back to New York, I guess. So, um, well, uh, not next week, but week after, we're live at DAS. Well, that's right, that's right. I guess we're— this is a time where Janno would have said, go get your tickets, we're sold out, we're about to get sold out. But we're We're all be— gonna be there live, and so it should be a great time.

Yeah.

Okay. All right, guys, thanks for listening.