Is 2025 Crypto's Dot-com Moment? | Weekly Roundup

I could not be more excited about the future of the industry. And yet here we are, just everybody looking at prices and feeling terrible. You know, in many ways, like the sentiment is a lagging indicator of price. We'll have to see what happens into next year.

It is very possible that we have 2 years of choppiness and underperformance of crypto relative to everything else while we have a lot of adoption. Now I'm spending a lot of time like going back and saying, okay, in the time of the internet, like, did you see a lot of adoption like coming out of 2001? And how did like the market react to that? We might be in a scenario where like we, we sit in this chair for 2 years having more and more announcements of corporates and the price just doesn't behave the way that you do. And that's entirely possible because a lot of these networks are just kind of widely overvalued.

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Rob, since he joined, he's always like the 5-second clip, like the— I think he always drops like rage bait. And so we always use him as like, coming up in Empire, and it's always Rob saying something. I now have anxiety to to like, I feel competitiveness of—

wait, you want to hear something crazy? Okay. So by the way, welcome to Empire, folks. Welcome to Empire. We missed you. We got the fam together today. We're very excited about this. Sorry, my mic is kind of crappy today. I'm in the office, which means you would think that my mic would be better, but alas, it is not. So what the, you know how, Santi, you know how basically we've talked about this on the show before, podcasts are basically becoming like super long form or just short clips. On Twitter. What a lot of the big podcasts are doing, like Barstool— Barstool's now experimenting with this. Other people are doing this. They just record short clips. They won't even do the podcast. So imagine we sit down and we just record like 20 short clips and then pump them out through social. That's the model. That's the model.

You know, that I do think about what the Banger Post, uh, Anyways, I'll try to drop some, some rage bait in this podcast. The good thing is we have a lot of the crypto timeline to give us a lot of really good content because everyone's so spicy and sour. Rob, you're now mild in comparison to the rest of the timeline in crypto. You know what's going on?

I got to, I got to step it up. Do you think we should go towards like 2-hour livecasts? You know, just like every day, TVP style?

Well, there's actually an idea that I think the—

I don't think you'd want that as my lead investor.

I have no idea what I would be doing.

It's an interesting idea for you guys to think think about as investors because the role of like, you know, okay, so as a CEO of a company and a founder, you've always had to be a good storyteller, but historically corporate, like executive comms was like, can you do the 30-second clip on CNBC? Like, can you get on? And actually now I think it's kind of changing where you have to be able to go on like Rogan, Lex Fridman, and do these like 3-hour podcasts and actually sound interesting. It's a very different skill set than like going on and, you know, saying some pithy things.

So who's the best person there?

Mark Benioff. Who's the best public, uh, public CEO? Is it like Alex Karp from Palantir, um, Mark Benioff, uh, Satya Nadella? Pick, pick your horse. Like, who's the best one to do it?

The best story— I don't think Benioff and Satya are amazing storytellers. I think they're really good operators, but yeah, Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like the Alex Karp of the world. It's like, I think if you want to think about the measure of storytelling, it's like how much— what is the market cap of the company relative to like the value of the company? And I don't know, Palantir seems— it's like, why is Palantir so hot? Because it was the moment Alex Karp went on CNBC, popped a Zinn in his mouth and started spinning his computer on one finger. I was like, this stock's going to rip. So that's— I don't know. Yeah, Alex Karp is good at it. I don't know. Let's talk about the timeline. Timeline is salty. Timeline is— it's interesting. It's like it feels like the industry has basically just started to like grapple with this idea that like, oh my God, I didn't sell the top again and we're in a bear market. Crap. Yeah, I would love to just hear— let's riff on that for a little bit.

It's bad, man. I tell you what, like, Twitter is, uh, maybe as toxic as I've ever seen it. I was having this discussion with, with somebody else recently, but it felt like even during '22, uh, when Luna went under, and then, you know, call it, you know, post-FTX, where I think a lot of people were wondering whether or not crypto would survive, whether or not crypto would continue to be here in the future, it It was still a collective, you know, I would say we were standing by each other. It was collectively hopeful, collectively an understanding that we were like building towards, you know, new financial infrastructure and a new future. And it wasn't really PvP in the same way that it feels like it is now. Now every single topic, every single thing that's happening, there's just tons and tons of people like swiping at each other. And frankly, the discourse is low. Like, the level of discourse is like very, very low. I see, you know, these, you know, uh, replies to, you know, whoever posts something that are always negative, that are getting elevated, and most of the time they're just actually not even particularly factual or like useful or, you know, uh, well documented or, or well argued. Um, and so it almost seems like there's just a a broad group of people who are starting to feel like, you know, they don't know what they're doing. They don't know why they're here. And I think we've talked about this 100 times, and I know Santi has a perspective on this, but the— I think it's part of the reason it is so bad this time around is because the adoption curve and the price curve are so decoupled today. Like, the, the things that we're seeing out of corporates in terms of like tokenization, in terms of, um, you know, stablecoin usage is actually extremely promising, right? Like, I just had a board meeting for one of my stablecoin companies this morning. Uh, we were talking about one of— another one, you know, before we got on this pod about some stuff that's going on that's on public. And the— I could not be more excited about the future of the industry. And yet here we are, just everybody looking at prices and feeling terrible. So, um, I don't know. I think, you know, in many ways, like, the sentiment is a lagging indicator of price. But, you know, we'll have to see what happens into next year.

That's going to be the banger clip of the pod, right? Isn't God damn it, Rob beat to it. I will overlay something, which is like, is it priced in? You know, like, are we going to— it is very possible that we have 2 years of choppiness and like underperformance of crypto relative to everything else. While we have a lot of adoption. I, I sort of— that's like my house view, and we'll talk about it next week in predictions. Um, now I'm spending a lot of time like going back and seeing, okay, in the time of the internet, like, did you see a lot of adoption like coming out of 2001, and how did like the market react to that? And, and I think like, so people have lost money this year. I think unrealized losses are the second highest they've ever been in crypto, second to the collapse of FTX. So you're going to continue to have funds and other folks capitulate. Putting aside if OpenAI is able to raise a round or not, which we're all begging that they can, I do think that we might be in a scenario where we sit in this chair for 2 years having more and more announcements of corporates and the price just doesn't behave the way that you do. And that's entirely possible because a lot of these networks are kind of wildly overvalued. And I mean, I don't know if you guys would agree or disagree with that. I, I think that's entirely possible.

I, I think that's a good point, Santi. I mean, if you look at like the internet, okay, so end of 2000, right, the internet stocks had wiped out like 75% of the value from their peak, and it really took a couple years to recover. But if you look at the users of the internet, I think in 2000 it was roughly like 300 million. Fast forward 3 years, I think you were roughly at like almost a billion users. So you went from like 300, 350 million internet users to like, you know, I got, I got to actually look at the numbers, but somewhere between, I'd say 700, 800, 900 million users. So we grew the internet users 2 to 3x, but prices went down 75%. I really, I think, I think that's a, yeah, I, I, I wouldn't agree with that take there. I think that's a good one.

The irony of all this is that the single best performing IPO this year Was Circle. Single best performing IPO. Not just like, you know, where it IPO'd to peak, but where it IPO'd to today at, you know, $75 or $80. Uh, it's still by far and away the single best performing IPO.

That actually brings up like, uh, even actually just to further Santi's point even more, it's like, okay, after 2003, then you kind of go into this, like, I don't know what you call that period of the internet, but like the Web 2.0, the social media era, like Facebook gets started in 2004. It's like. Yeah, global internet adoption happens, time spent online starts compounding, but actually a lot of the value accrual was private. It wasn't in the broad public markets, right? Obviously you had a couple big network effect winners. You had like Google post-IPO, but like really you just started to, you started to see like, uh, you know, Facebook, uh, Facebook was still pre-IPO. Like a lot of the value was in these private things. And it wasn't until like 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 that you started to see the social networks start to, yeah, IPO and SaaS really started to come to the forefront as well.

So I, um, I use this analogy a lot during that period, but that's actually when AWS was started. It was 2002, right? Uh, and AWS really went broad around, you know, call it into the global financial crisis. And my perspective, and obviously it depends on who you talk to, but the going from on-prem to cloud compute. Was actually essentially the similar to like what we're seeing is the infrastructure layer maturing in crypto, which how we're now able to launch applications easily with the right wallet infrastructure, with the right, you know, call it on-ramp/off-ramps, with the right abstraction of crypto to build then net new novel applications and products that will then be used, uh, and say on top of the technology. And I think AWS was in many ways the change and what happened in the internet that allowed for that, you know, caused scalability, uh, in your application. So I, I use that analogy actually a lot when we talk to LPs and, and others.

I, I was terribly wrong this year because I would have told you that having the IPO of Circle and Figure would have done that, would have invited more traditional allocators to say Holy shit, it's not just ETFs. We can— here's a company called Circle that, to your point, best performing IPO of the year. Configured doing quite well, I think.

I think it's also top 5, yeah, in terms of performance of an IPO.

And still crypto asset prices are down only. Is that, is that, uh, is that perhaps the opportunity that, that I mean, we've talked about it, Lyn, like maybe it's equities that are going to outperform and now you're seeing companies acquire crypto companies and the token gets rugged. Like what is it? Or is it just institute, like, are we just better off buying—

I want to make a point on that too, which is that when you think about the traditional allocators, they are actually back in a real way in the private markets. So we're seeing it across our portfolio, but the amount of companies on the stablecoin side, tokenization side, the exchange side, the prediction market side, you know, a lot of the, you know, call it core use cases, the wallets that are getting inbounds from the best funds in the world, generalist funds in the world, the best fintech funds, growth equity funds. It's happening, and it's happening in a real way. But to your point, it's not happening in this token market, in the public token market, right? And so I think the right question is the question that you're asking, which is, you know, we've, we talked about this with Tensor, uh, and the Vector.fund acquisition a couple weeks ago. Now there's the Accelerar acquisition, uh, by Circle earlier this week. It's just, what do the tokens serve as a representative of exposure to economics? And, you know, how does the market view those token prices relative to, you know, where we're seeing a lot of traditional allocators, you know, want to put money into private equity? Right now.

Is that a bit of scar tissue from allocators that have said most of the value creation in V— in just in general has been created in the private markets? Like, now you have for the first time in history trillion-dollar companies that are private. SpaceX, Stripe, Ramp. Some of these companies historically would have gone public. Now they're not going. There's still liquidity in secondary markets. Is that just allocators would be like, hey, listen, we feel comfortable investing in the private market.

Scar tissue. I don't think it's scar tissue about that. I think it's— there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what a token is. There's even the industry, even us as crypto people. It's like you've got half the industry saying token should represent equity. You've got half the industry saying it shouldn't represent equity. I mean, like, I think we should talk about this Axelar acquisition because like, so Circle bought the team and the IP behind Axelar. But they wanted nothing to do with the underlying token. This happened with Coinbase and Vector. It happened with Kraken and Vertex. It's like, why would you want to own a token in this case? Actually, it's—

yeah, yeah. My point with that is, yeah, that's a huge issue. I think that's just residual of a challenging regulatory environment and And so the question is, are people just going to be incrementally more skeptical of buying tokens? Because why should you if you basically have no rights and there's a disconnect between the equity? Maybe that's what's happening in real time, right? Maybe that's why— I mean, the biggest divide here is you have Circle outperforming and then you have tokens drastically underperforming. How does this change?

Yeah, I mean, I, I think, I think two things, right? So Circle outperforming has something to be said around stablecoins and the appetite and desire and excitement around them. You know, today we got the SoFi USD announcement, we talked about the Klarna USD announcement a bunch of times. Um, the amount of announcements that are going to come out that look exactly like that are like probably you know, in the hundreds or 100, you know, over the next, uh, 9 months. Uh, and so there is just a general belief and excitement around this part of the market. I think they're, you know, when I talked earlier about a lot of the traditional investors, it's not just stablecoins, uh, but that is probably the area where we're seeing the most— call it traditional growth equity activity right now. They're in prediction markets, but even in prediction markets, there's just— there's only 2 players. There's— in stablecoins, there's a lot of different parts of the stack and different companies that are doing well. And so I think some of it is called that vertical or that niche, but, uh, the broader point I think is multifaceted, which is, okay, well, we have this regulatory overhang. We haven't had a Clarity Act or some sort of reconciliation yet, and whether or not and what exactly that looks like is still really up in the air. We've had a You know, I think the pricing of tokens, like the FDV, is still not really apples to apples across different tokens and across different networks. Like, you know, the amount and what that market cap looks like and who actually holds the tokens and how you actually think about like what the value is of this thing is, I think, still pretty hard to understand. Not just from an evaluation perspective, to the points you've been making the past few weeks, Santi, but also the value of like what is the actual public float right now. Is like there's a lot of games that get played there in some of these, uh, different tokens, right? And then I think there was an access issue and there's an infrastructure issue as well. So, you know, obviously you can believe in the future of high-throughput blockchains and you might believe that Monad is going to do extraordinarily well, but the vast majority of people don't know how to buy Monad and hold Monad and how to get exposure to Monad. So there's that. And I think all of that together, combined with the volatility of, you know, part of the feature of private markets is that you don't have to have realized volatility, right? And the token prices are just so volatile, it makes it really hard for the incentives for the LPs. Yeah. So I think it's multifaceted. Um, and but if we get to a world where there's like regulatory clarity and the tokens represent equity, that becomes a lot easier of a conversation for some subset of, of investors, but it does probably put a drag on some of the reflexivity as well. So it just changes the whole market structure.

You also saw, like, you know, we were talking about 25 years ago, after the dot-com bust, you saw this like very stark bifurcation. Once the dust settled, you had like a lot of the pure-play dot-coms basically just went to zero and they never reclaimed their highs. But there was this small subset of like either profitable or structurally advantaged internet and tech platforms that so massively outperformed over the following decade. And I think it will look very similar. Like, yeah, thousands of internet and telecom companies vanished, got delisted, got acquired at a fraction of the prices. But there's a small cohort of like, I don't know, who was it? Amazon, Microsoft, Apple. They, they compounded returns so drastically that they offset the entire graveyard of losers. And that will happen in crypto. Like Santi, before you jumped on, before we hit record, Rob was talking about a crypto company right now. They've like 80x their ARR. It's— there are, there are winners, like there are people doing— and I know what's happening with Inversion right now. And like things are good. There's, there are some companies that are where things are going extremely well. And I think those, those, those winners will compound even stronger coming out of this would be my take.

I can tell you I've been very surprised by the interest of people that 2 years ago would've told me like, no interest in crypto, like no interest in stablecoins. I mean, honestly, not surprising, but even in places like Mexico, man, we're like, they're just so risk-averse. They're last movers. We got boards of some Fortune 5000 companies say, hey, come in here because we want to learn about this stuff. And it's just like that disconnect that Rob's talking about. And so again, I think this idea of like, it's going to be quite interesting where value accrues, where the compounders are. That doesn't mean that like there's not going to be a whole graveyard of companies, but I mean, all the timeline right now is just entirely focused on like, hey, we've totally reset, we're down on the year quite a bit. And you're seeing some of the smarter traders say, you know what, whatever, man, I'm throwing the towel, I'm gonna go back to the traditional market, I'm gonna go, you know, punt AI. Um, I don't know, guys, I mean, like, should we talk a little bit about prices to some extent? Do you think— Rob's like, oh man, save me that headache.

Yeah, let's actually take us into prices without directly being like, what, what's gonna happen? Um, Who is the marginal buyer of crypto tokens right now? That's my question for both of you.

There is none.

Well, there's definitely a marginal buyer. I can't be as bearish as Santi.

Dude, I wish I was bearish, man. I'm feeling, as Hasib said, I'm down as much as everyone in this industry, man. I'm not, I've taken a lot of chips off the table. And I think people shouldn't be surprised by that. And, you know, I'm, I'm writing about it, but, you know, it's still down. You know, there's no hiding here.

Listen, I, I think a little bit of it depends on what part of the market you're in, right? Like, the marginal buyer for Bitcoin is, you know, still a US institution, right? And we, I think we saw net inflows yesterday on, on, uh, Bitcoin, uh, ETFs, obviously after, you know, a lot of outflows previously, right? Like, there's a lot of people still trading around this asset. I, I think I actually told— I don't know if I said this on the podcast, but I told somebody a month ago that I thought we were just going to be range-bound from $85,000 to $100,000 for a while, and it kind of looks like that's where we're at right now. Obviously, there's a lot of conversation around tax loss harvesting for the, uh, for the year, um, so we'll see, you know, kind of what happens there. But this is not surprising to me, this current price action. The, the question becomes Well, who is the marginal buyer for name, you know, your, your token, right? Like, like Amonad, which I'm extraordinarily bullish on, but who's the marginal buyer of that right now? Or, you know, what are the other big launches this year? Things like, um, like Plasma, which has been, you know, kind of, I think, I think suffering, uh, quite a bit. Or, um, you know, what are the other big launches this year? DoubleZero, which is one of ours, right? And, and these are all companies that are like trying to build really interesting, like, net new products and, you know, trying to, to build for, you know, the future of, of finance and, and scalable blockchains. Um, but it's unclear, obviously, who that buyer is until that story gets outside of crypto or more liquidity comes into crypto, right? And for that liquidity to come in, yes, we need a better macroeconomic environment. Yes, we need looser monetary policy. Yes, we need more, um, just think clarity around what's happening with like tariffs, right? They're, they're just like too much uncertainty in a lot of part of the markets. The markets are obviously very shaky right now. You see it in the equity markets got crushed yesterday, then they're up today, uh, on the PCE reading. So like there's a lot of, a lot of this happening where there's just a lot of nervousness, um, and but I do think like clearly like liquidity that in 2021 came into crypto is now going into AI, right? Like, you know, OpenAI is raising $750 billion now, right? You know, everybody is just, especially at the institutional level, putting as much money as possible in these private, you know, foundational model deals, um, as quickly as possible. SpaceX raising another private round before they want to go public at $1.5 trillion, right? Can you, like, can you imagine an IPO at $1.5 trillion? Like, that's mind-blowing. Um, and so I, it's clearly to me, I saw XAI is also raising at $240 billion, right? And like, I remember, you know, a couple years ago looking at an SPV at, you know, 18, right? Like, these things are compounding at such a rate that people almost see it as having the same reflexivity as they did when they invested in Tokens21. And so, um, I think that's honestly the biggest issue. It was just the, in terms of high-risk assets, They're just— there is more exposure and interest in these like AI private rounds that are raising, you know, massive, massive amounts of capital.

We're not an AI or macro podcast, but does it feel— I was, I was thinking about this earlier and I was reading, I was listening to podcast by the chairman of like General Atlantic, and he talks about like why they've been a bit cautious to just invest in AI. And they're like, look, we'd rather see it how it— our portfolio companies start using AI before we make investments. And then I saw someone like out there, just so it was like one of those small insert meme of like small domino question and then like a huge cascade of how it collapses. And it was like, hey, haven't really met a lawyer that uses Harvey AI. They have crazy ARR numbers of like $100 million, but like most of my lawyer friends are not using it. Like people are not renewing these things. I am curious, like, yeah, like, I hear you, Rob. A lot of the flow, a lot of the interest, maybe especially on retail and the marginal side, is like going to AI. But I mean, think, think in a world where like AI just softens a bit on the CAPEX side, on the hype. I feel like in crypto you kind of learn this because after a couple of cycles you start noticing like patterns of like, okay, this shit feels toppy, it feels really hypey. Like, I'm curious, like your internal view, not Dragonfly's view, but like right now I'm particularly worried of like just what's happening in AI. Because if that, it's so priced to perfection that if there's any material deviation from the expectation into what companies can actually realize next year, man, I think it's just going to be really ugly. And it's not to say that like, oh, people are going to say AI was hype. Let's go transition out to crypto because that's where most of like this is where the real potential is. Like, no, there's going to be so much capital destruction that forget about getting a marginal bid on Bitcoin and everything else.

It— if we start to see like a real collapse of these AI companies, the foundational model companies, in terms of just, you know, missing expectations of a lot of the, you know, the hyperscalers as well, like you can see it at earnings every quarter. Like, the equity markets are going to trade off 20%, right? Like, it's going to be a really big, really big correction. Uh, I, I do wonder, and this is now going into macroeconomic territory, but like, what happens— Sam Altman came out and he kind of made this statement that, you know, he said was misinterpreted, but around how there might be like backing of CapEx by the US government for him. And the whole— everybody was like very interested in what that actually meant. And then the US government's going to come out, we're not actually doing any sort of guarantee. And I think it becomes very clear that like the US government, and I mean in this administration specifically, they see equity market performance as a scorecard. And so like, if like, what would happen to monetary policy if, you know, call it AI really softened and then equity markets came down a bunch? Unclear to me. It might actually be good for crypto prices if people came a little bit more disillusioned with AI and started to not, you know, just call it, you know, forced capital or, or congregate capital there in the same way. But, um, it would be bad in the near term. It would be hurtful, like no, no doubt about it.

Yeah, I would highly recommend listening to an episode of— I don't know if you guys listen to Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, but he had this guy Gavin Baker on, and, um, who knows, you know, 100 times more than I do about what's happening in the AI world right now. But his core view is that basically everything relies on these NVIDIA Blackwells that are coming out. It's kind of this inflection point where the economics of the AI companies and the competitive, competitive positioning of these companies is going to really start to shift. And he basically describes like the, the jump from Hopper to Blackwell as the most complex product transition we've ever gone through in technology. Higher power draw, liquid cooling, heavier racks, heat management issues, all that kind of good stuff. And basically if the industry can show receipts, so we're going to start transitioning to Blackwell in early 2026. I think XAI is the first one who can, who's going to be able to pull it off. He says if the applications built on top of Blackwell can demonstrate clear economic returns, then this like enormous CapEx cycle gets validated and the spend cycle continues. But if the ROI disappoints from Blackwell, it all crumbles. And so that's like, you know, just as someone who's like not as deep into the AI world, I don't know, I found it, found it very interesting to think about this one idea of like the transition and shift to Blackwell is the thing that a lot of this depends on. This episode of Empire is brought to you by VanEck's On-Chain Economy ETF, NODE. If you feel like you are constantly missing alpha, never have time to scroll through crypto Twitter, NODE is for you. Node is actively managed by an experienced team with years in both tradfi and crypto. That team at Node looks to capture the most powerful trends across all of crypto while actively managing volatility as markets evolve. Super important in today's environment. Check out Node's track record so far at vanek.com/empire/node. That's vanek.com/empire/node. You can also little easier, just click the link in the show notes. Thanks to VanEck and VanEck's On-Chain Economy ETF, NODE, for making today's episode of Empire possible. The Uniswap Trading API solves the problem of adding crypto to your products without the hassle of needing deep crypto expertise, ongoing maintenance, or liquidity aggregation. The Trading API provides access to the Uniswap protocol, which has processed $3.3 trillion in all-time volume. Handled over 465 million swaps for more than 25 million addresses, all with zero security breaches. Developed by Uniswap Labs, the US-based team behind one of the most used DeFi apps. Access some of the deepest liquidity in crypto, combining both on-chain and off-chain sources for optimal pricing. The same liquidity that powers billions in swaps now available via a Singular API. Thanks to Uniswap for making today's episode possible. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply.

All right, let's, let's— enough of this doomsday scenario situation. There's a lot of really good stuff to report on. Visa, uh, demonstrating developments. Coinbase, I think, had interesting developments. Should we just kind of run through some stuff?

Yeah, let's talk about—

Leo?

Yeah, I would love to. Um, okay, so Coinbase had this big announcement, uh, big rollout. Maybe, um, uh, they rolled out prediction markets, they rolled out stocks, they rolled out DEX trading, um, they rolled out, uh, what else did they roll out?

Equity perps and futures, not just— and also, uh, stock spot as well.

Futures. Coinbase Tokenize, which is an end-to-end platform for institutions to bring assets on chain. The base app is now live for, I think, everyone, everywhere, every country. They rolled out custom stablecoins, so you can basically create a branded stablecoin for your business. It's backed 1-to-1 by collateral custody, obviously at Coinbase token sales. Yeah.

What is— is there— to me it was like, are we going to see like it? If you're an end consumer, are you going to see like dollar Or are you going to see, like, say that you have like 10 different relationships with banks or whatever and they all have their own stablecoin. Is the regulation going to allow you to kind of collapse it into like dollars, or is it going to have like 10 different versions of a dollar? And if it's the latter, it's going to be like, um, is— I don't think it works for the consumer, to be honest. It looks like a loyalty, like Starbucks points.

So that— but that is what it's— what they're mostly being used for right now, right? So I mean, they announced their first customers as Soulflare and, um, like one or two other— which is a wallet— and like one or two others. Good. Sorry.

No, no, go for it.

No, but I mean, they announced their first customers, which is like, you know, kind of like similar to Phantom Cash, right? Which is like, it's mostly used for— okay, well, how do we do like, you know, cashback, loyalty, for our customers, right? Our loyalty. I mean, we talked about this a little bit with Karna on KarnaUSD, right? It's really about how we serve cross-border, how we serve our customers, right? Like, there's not an expectation, I think, for most of these people that we're going to go and, you know, proliferate KarnaUSD or SoulflareUSD or Cash by Fantom in a bunch of other applications. There's just an expectation that this is better for Treasury management, money movement, loyalty, you know, cash back, etc., within like my application, right? And so, go ahead.

I was just going to say, do you think that's going to be a little bit like tokenized stocks that we talked about last week, where there's like not that much demand? Because the other model is like what Visa is doing, which is like totally, totally like abstracted, like the consumer doesn't really see that.

Um, I, I mean, I, I think over time, right, the problem with— so the interesting thing about Coinbase's product is that they said it'll all be backed by USDC, right? So there's two interesting points there to think about, which is that, you know, Coinbase has this agreement with Circle right now that for all of the USDC that originates and sits on Coinbase Coinbase gets 100% of the revenue. So for every single USDC that is issued and originated on Coinbase, Circle gets no, uh, no economics whatsoever, no, no revenue. And so all of a sudden Coinbase launches this new product, a white-labeled stablecoin issuer, which is— we're seeing more and more of this happening, like, you know, Klarna, etc. And they get— they don't have to manage the collateral whatsoever themselves, uh, they just have to manage the USDC. Which they are then getting 100% of the economics from Circle, and Circle is bearing all of those costs with the money markets and the infrastructure, etc. And so, um, so there's something to be said about just also like Coinbase masterclass here, uh, relative to their agreement with Circle. But then I think that the next thing here is that because it's all backed by USDC, they're probably building out, or they're on top of their already their existing infrastructure that allows them to more easily use liquidity from a bunch of different stablecoins, a bunch of different sources, um, within the state— within the Circle ecosystem, using CCTP, using, you know, the, uh, all the, the cross-chain work that they've already done, using the APIs, the mint/redeem functionality that already exists with Circle, right? And so, um, it's— I think it's actually quite interesting to say, okay, well, like, anybody can go and they can get, you know, some share of the economics, and they can have, you know, some sort of marketing and loyalty. Through a stablecoin, and then, uh, Coinbase just has to handle, you know, USDC mint/redeem relative to that stablecoin that they're doing, which should be, you know, pretty easy for them. The problem becomes, uh, when you have a bunch of different white-label stablecoins that don't share similar liquidity, because then you just have like a lot of breakage when you have to go from one to the other, or you have to get usability, right? But if it's, it's USDC underneath, like, there's obviously a lot That's right. You have a lot less fees that will go into that.

One thing that caught my attention, by the way, I'm looking here at, um, some of Guy Sheffield's posts. So Visa stablecoin settlement pilot just hit $3.5 billion annualized run rate. I assume that's like notional transactional volume. Like, that's not a test anymore. That's a market signal. Um, a lot of what they're doing it now, so they launched like their new global stablecoin advisory practice. It's pretty interesting. I think they're just gonna, you know, really be advocating for that. And for context, I mean, Visa, for as long as I can remember, they've been a part of the space for many, many years. People might not appreciate that. Um, a big part of what I kind of in the timeline was able to appreciate is the key unlock here is like commerce like runs 7 days a week. Moving money is 9 to 5, like Monday to Friday. And that's where Visa is really kind of pushing for merchants and stuff. It's like, hey, you know, I think it's only US issuer and acquirer partners can now settle Visa in Circle's USDC 7 days a week. As simple as it sounds, it's like just 2 more days and that's super, super valuable. Yeah, uh, Cross River is involved, Leap Bank is involved, and I think they, they sort of said more banks are going to be announced next year. So it's pretty interesting stuff.

Yeah, that is—

that, that, um, that, that was an interesting announcement. So not to shill another podcast while we're on this podcast, but, um, I, I did, um, I, I chatted with Kai from Visa, uh, and Simon Taylor about this, uh, earlier this week, and I think it's going to be launched it, and then we talked about—

you're shilling another crypto podcast. You can shill—

go see Rob on Tokenized Podcast and report back in the comments.

The nerve! Rob's shilling— not even a Blockworks branded podcast. Unbelievable.

No, no, but I, I— it was specifically— it's a, a stablecoin podcast about this specific point. And so I, um— so we talked really deeply about this, so there's, there's more than I'm going to say here, but The— this like stablecoin settlement with Visa has existed internationally for a little bit. Um, this portfolio company of ours, Rain, which is the largest that's doing it, they, uh, replace the issuer bank. They, you know, have all their own wallet infrastructure and they settle 365 days, 7 days a week, um, with Visa, right? Um, they— Visa actually still has constraints that they can actually still only take— they actually can't take stablecoins like, you know, atomically. They still have to batch. But you can see how as Visa fixes this problem, that like you can start to do like atomic settlement, significantly better from a capital efficiencies perspective, significantly better from a fraud and risk management perspective. And so they announced it domestically in the US, first time that that's going to be domestically. But what I actually found was funny about it is they announced it with Lead Bank and Cross River Bank, who are two banks have no card program. They actually do no volume with cards whatsoever. And so it's, um, it's a little bit interesting because Lead is— Lead is obviously trying to be the backer of Bridge's card, which doesn't really exist yet today, but they announced they're gonna have some new first customers and starting to, to roll that out. Um, and but there's still a bank involved What I find really interesting here is as there are these card issuers that are out, that are principal members that are not bank depository institutions, so like a Rain, which is a principal member but not a Lead, which is a bank depository institution, um, they start settling without the bank involved in the fund flow, right? That is what I think actually think the real unlock is, because now you've gotten rid of, um, a kind of an intermediary that takes, takes a lot of the fees. So I thought the announcement was really, really interesting from Kai. I think it tells you where this market is going. I said this, I think a few weeks back, but there's that, you know, direct settlement with Visa has gone from $250 million annualized in May to $3.5 billion of annualized today. It is the fastest growing part, obviously of a very small denominator of Visa right now. And I think that that becomes a huge, huge piece of their business. The same way Visa Direct has, which is their like, you know, um, outside of their network push payments business, which is, I think, is the fastest growing transaction business they have right now as well.

So, Rob, who do you, who do you think wins the stablecoin issuer space? Like, on a— because I saw you tweet about SoFi. SoFi did their, uh, they launched— SoFi launched, um, SoFi USD. Yeah, to offer settlement infra to banks and fintechs and stuff like that. Coinbase just launched custom stablecoins. So now we've got Paxos, Bridge, Agora, Bastion, Anchorage. Athena's doing this too. I think BitGo, MoonPay, Coinbase, M0 obviously does this as well. SoFi. Like, you can't have 15 different stablecoin issuers. Like, there's probably going to be, you know, 2 or 3 that do really, really well here. How do you— how do you say that out loud? Yeah, don't say it out loud.

Uh, for the sake of our bags and the state of the industry.

Yeah. How do you differentiate if you're one of these people? I mean, like, yeah, how do you, how do you win that?

Well, I mean, what we're seeing from all of them, right, is that they're trying to expand beyond like stablecoin issuance, right? Like they want to figure out like, you know, okay, what is my wedge? Okay, well maybe that's stablecoin issuance. Maybe it's some other part, like Bridge started with orchestration obviously, and now is doing stablecoin issuance. And then how do I offer You know, if I offer stablecoin issuance, how do I offer ramps and orchestration? How do I offer really clean APIs that can do both B2B and B2B2C? How can I do virtual accounts? How can I do a, um, you know, maybe kind of consumer wallets? Like, how can I think through a card product, right? And at the end of the day, like, I think about these are really becoming like end-to-end solutions. I think, you know, SoFi has a thing called Galileo, uh, that they're close to, um, on their like card product, and they're Um, I think, I think Sofi actually owns Galileo, uh, and it's kind of like an end-to-end solution for like everything you want to do and kind of like digital, um, digital finance. I think that's what all of these stablecoin issuers are doing right now as well, right? And so that's why you're seeing, um, uh, you know, I think Paxos announced an acquisition of Fortify, right? We've seen a few other people look at the, the wallet space. Obviously Bridge bought Privy. Um, and, you know, then we're going to see, you know, kind of a long tail of other types of M&A capability— M&A happening for other types of capabilities because it's now becoming, call it like full-stack, like fintech solution companies, of which like stablecoin issuance is part of it. The people who are, I guess, above that is, you know, you're like Tether, obviously, and Circle is, is obviously trying to figure out a way to be a payments company, but they're, you know, they're, they're still kind of big enough that it's that's fine. But then everyone else that you just talked about is pitching holistic solutions to technology companies and banks. They're not pitching just stablecoin issuance.

Yeah, I'll give you just to round out the Visa stuff, it's still very early. I was, I was, uh, just querying here the, the quant, uh, if Visa broke out stablecoin activity in their financials. Because you remember when, when Coinbase started disclosing that interest income, I think, in their partnership with Circle. I think it was just interesting for investors to keep track of that, and it became like a more important piece of their P&L. Every quarter, Brian, like, you know, started talking about this. It was just a big awakening moment. Visa is still not disclosing it, and not surprisingly, you know, they take this $3.5 billion annualized stablecoin settlement volume figure at face value, to put it in perspective, I mean, that's less than, it's 0.09% of all the volume that they do. So it doesn't compute, it's a rounding error. Maybe a teaser for next week, and I would like to see a prediction market. Does Visa break out stablecoin activity in their P&L in 2026 or 2027? And at what point do they do that? Is it because as a percentage of their total flow, stablecoins are like greater than 5%, greater than 1%, greater than 10%. I feel like that is like the talking about that chart of like price lagging and adoption growing. I think the moment Visa discloses that and starts reporting it, it's when the market really says, holy fuck, that AWS moment Yana was talking about.

Yeah. So I think, uh, so for Visa Direct, What they do today is they announce the number of transactions but not the volume, right? So what does that imply to you? It implies you— they're very low-value transactions, right? But I think it's, um, $12.6 trillion transactions a year that Visa Direct is doing, uh, right now. I think that's a number of transactions. Yeah, that they're doing.

Yeah, they're doing $3.9 trillion of of settlement volume.

Yeah. And but they— but the thing they announce every quarter is this like transaction number, right? Um, and that's the thing that they're bringing out. And because they want to make it clear that like, hey, this is what we're— this is really fast growing and it's— and it matters a lot, but it's probably low value to them, right? It's not contributing to the top line in the same way. Um, they— my expectation is that that type of disclosure ends up becoming pretty common here for Visa with stablecoins as well for two reasons. One is I think that $3.5 billion goes to $100 billion next year, and I think it grows tremendously.

But you're just— he's gunning for that clip at the start, man. That's bait stuff.

I know. I think it goes—

Goddamn, Rob, you're getting me all fired up.

Bye-bye-bye. Buy, buy every stablecoin company. Um, all the ones I'm invested in for, you know, 100 times ARR multiples.

No, but also, hold on, hold on. Do you buy stable, your new stablecoin startup at a $100, $200, $1 billion valuation or Circle, or do you buy Visa?

Well, so this is, this is actually where I was going before you, before you talked, um, uh, jumped in, which is that what we've also seen is I've seen a lot of the sell-side analysts talk about, is Visa in a bad spot because of stablecoins? Like, is there— should that be, um, an issue with their stock going forward? Are they going to lose market share, etc.? I've actually had a lot of the sell-side analysts call me and say, hey, listen, how do you think Visa plays in this market? And so I think part— and Visa, I think when there's a couple of big announcements this year on the stablecoin side Um, and, and it actually right around Genius Visa traded down quite a bit. And I think they'll start talking about it because it'll go to $100 billion, but $100 billion is still not that big relative, or so really not big at all relative to their overall transaction volume. But it'll allow them to continue to tell the market, hey, we're playing here. We don't need to sell us. We're not, we're not like the CFI Infra. We are leading around adopting this new technology. We're beating, you know, our competitors Mastercard. And so they'll, they'll, they'll be incentivized to do it for that reason as well.

I have a different topic. I was at a holiday party last night and, um, vaults, vaults, it was a bunch of like TradFi, basically asset managers, TradFi folks. And, uh, the whole, everybody, the only thing people wanted to talk about, it's not stablecoins, it was actually vaults. And, uh, the, a lot of the conversation was basically like, if you look at the vault space, like here, I'll just look at data from, from Blockworks. On the vault balances on Morpho, you know, Gauntlet has a, you know, the market share right now is roughly like Stakehouse, 38% market share, Gauntlet, 30% market share. Spark, then it's like kind of sub-10% is like Spark, Felix, Yearn, MEV Capital, RE7 Labs. So really it's a game between like Stakehouse and Gauntlet. And, you know, the folks in the room last night were like, look, we're all— we're gunning for that business. And these are the largest asset managers in the world. These are— I mean, one of these, one of the folks last night was C-suite at the third largest asset manager in the world. He's like, we're, we're moving on-chain, we're moving into Morpho, and we're going to spin up these vaults. I don't know if you guys have thoughts on the vaults market at all. I mean, this has been a, a 10-year game, basically, these vaults, and now it feels like it's kind of just taken off. But I don't know. Yeah, Santi, I'd love to hear your, your take on these.

I'm old enough to be one of the urine farmers back in the day and doing some honest work. I think a lot of people are just starting to, I think it was Ribbon or so that got rugged or something. And I think it just sparked this debate of what vaults truly are. Omar from Chaos Labs put out a pretty good article. He's pretty good at doing some postmortems. I mean, vaults are just like a credit fund or a fund of sorts. There's not all, all vaults are created equal, but I am on the margin, like I understand why, I guess I don't want to give my opinion. Maybe sounds like you talked to this asset manager. Do they, this whole tokenization kind of hype, is that like they just want to capture crypto wealth and like just sell their products to these unsuspecting, like, you know, less sophisticated people? Or is the demand really there? I mean, because of all— like, you don't really need a vault, man. You have credit funds like that's what he said. Follow KKR. They're not equity, they're just credit.

Yeah, I think he said, look, you guys have done the silly game of rebranding asset management as vaults. This is just asset management with a different LP base. And yeah, we want to take advantage. We want to capture the LP base basically.

Okay, well, I would say it's, it's what's the biggest vault right now. Morpho has what, $3.5 billion? Aave has a couple, was it $35 billion, $50 billion, $30 billion?

Something like that.

That's not necessarily a vault.

I don't think Aave really counts for what we're talking about. I mean, they do obviously, and people are using them, but I think a lot of this conversation has been more around like, um, not just like borrow, lend, money market stuff, but also a lot of like, is there other things that I can do, other types of products that I can have? Um, other types of strategies, right? So a lot of this— yeah, so it's Morpho, and Morpho trying to play in this space, but then it's like the, the Upshifts and the Midases and the Betas of the world, a lot, because they, they allow the curators to do like different types of things, right? Not just like borrow a lend. And so it feels like a lot of the market's going towards that right now.

What percentage of the market is, um, automated strategies like indexes versus actively managed, passive versus active? Because I Man, again, I'm old enough to have invested in Set Protocol, which, you know, was like this idea of like creating like indices, like Bitwise of the world. And then you have like more active strategies. And then Yearn was like robo-advising. Uh, where, where do you rob— like, where do you see most of the growth in vaults, if there is one, over the next coming years?

I, I mean, most of it has definitely been borrow/lend today, right? Like, that's the— I mean, Aave is by far the biggest, right? And, and they're, they're basically just money market, right? Um, Morpho, you know, the biggest TVL products there are also, you know, money markets, right? Um, but what we're starting to see is we're starting to see a lot of growth on what is these like actively managed strategies, right? Essentially, right? And so there's a, you know, there's an interesting thing happening here because, um, and by the way, Coinbase also launched, I think, uh, a like a Coinbase AI-powered Coinbase Advisor, which is like— I, I'd have to go back and look exactly what it looks like, but you know, maybe some sort of like, you know, well, Betterfront, Betterment, or like Wealthfront or something, um, type of robo-advisor using like on-chain activity. And we're seeing, we're seeing a lot of pitches, uh, here at Dragonfly for like, you know, automated like yield farming essentially, right? And so it does look to me like the early days of fintech where it's like, okay, well, we had Borrow, Lend, and now we're trying to figure out, okay, well, how do we you know, do other things that are maybe, you know, deploying to the best DeFi protocols on a specific chain. I think, um, uh, like Upshift has a, an earn aUSD, uh, um, but it has the biggest vault on Monad, and it's like, you know, an aUSD and what they call earn aUSD. And they basically, what they do is they, they go and they like farm all of the other— the curator goes and farms all of the other DeFi products on, on Monad. We're seeing like a growth in that. We're seeing a growth in these like you know, call it basis trade type funds, etc. And it does seem there's a, like, there's a really big, um, just interest in, you know, doing these things, which simplifies basically a single yield type product or a single structured product, essentially, right? Um, I think one of the things I've started to hear a lot about too is, and we're hearing this around, uh, I think, you know, Morpho might be involved, some others, but it's also around, um, quote unquote like payment financing specifically. So if you have stablecoins, you need credit to come on-chain, and then you can use this Volt infrastructure to then, you know, provide, you know, fill the gap of like where a bank credit line would be, um, otherwise. And so I say all of that, uh, to say that like right now it seems like we're in this moment in time where it's about, okay, well, I want to sell some products to you know, whatever, a new LP base. I want to do borrow-lend. But it's a lot of the excitement, at least as we talk about people, is how do we take that next step to use these for like net new structured products that actually might bring in outside capital because they can't do this thing on non-blockchain rails.

Yeah. Hey, I want to ask you one question, Rob. You know I'm always going to ask this question of like, what would you rather own? Uh, would you rather own Visa stock or Circle stock, and you have to hold it for 3 years?

Oh, uh, what are they trading?

Your partner received— they don't want to take my money, so maybe you'd grace me with taking it, but you can only invest in one.

Yeah, I, I think, uh, my guess is— I have to look where Circle multiple is right now. I think it's like 11 times gross revenue, which means it's whatever, it's, you know, whatever, 35, 40 times net revenue probably, right? And so at that price, I would almost certainly take Visa. Visa's probably trading at single digit, you know, like high single digit, uh, revenue multiple. And I am actually like quite bullish on, on Visa's ability to at least outcompete their competitors, right? And so, um, I don't know, I haven't thought about it for more than, you know, these 30 seconds, but probably, probably. But that's it. Like, I, I love stablecoins, so maybe you just take the stablecoin play.

So, you know, I think in a year's time, like, look, Circle is a $20 billion business, uh, Visa is $600. So like, from a flows perspective, in the near term, yeah, you basically, you could see a world where Circle kind of like, you know, really gets behind this memetic stablecoin trade. But this is why I think the 3-year, 5-year time frame is more instructive for this analysis, because I, it will be interesting just to— if, again, just going back to your observation that you think Visa can go from $3.5 billion of volume to $100 billion. It would be, it'd be interesting to see what margins for that business do, because, you know, Circle right now is sharing, has a pretty terrible contract with Coinbase. Uh, you got to believe a lot of stuff.

I mean, the fastest growing part of Visa's business today is the, the value-added services, right? And so it's actually not any of their transaction flows. I mean, uh, we talked about Visa Direct earlier, but the That's the fastest growing transaction business that they have, but their value-added services is what's growing the quickest. Um, they obviously launched the stablecoin advisory business. Like, it's very clear that all of these, you know, call it, you know, payments businesses are needing to figure out ways at some point in time, you know, uh, to— they need to monetize like non-flows, right? And we're seeing this with Circle, who's like trying to monetize flows because the first thing they need to monetize flows. Then they are going to go and try to monetize, you know, something other than flows, right? Value-added services. Um, but I say that to mean that, like, I do think that companies like Visa become more opinionated. They become less, call it, like, open, um, you know, like Switzerland-type infrastructure. And they spend more time directly with end customers. Uh, and if they're good at that, distribution will win. Distribution will be king. And they should have a reacceleration. Um, because I, I do think we're in this world going forward, and stablecoins are part of this story, and tokenization is part of the story, where intermediaries are just going to get crushed. You have to get closer and closer and closer to your end customer. And like, this is a problem with the stablecoin issuers, and it's a problem for the networks. And so that's why people— you're seeing this type of this stuff happen.

Agreed, agreed. All right, I think that's a good place to start to wrap. We've got 2026 predictions next week. Stoked. Content of the week, what do we got?

Um, there's two podcasts that I listen to. This first one I referenced earlier, which is, um, I think Invest Like the Best. This guy who is the chairman of General Atlantic Very, very good pod. He's from, he's from, I think Bolivia, worked at 3G Capital. If, which is also probably a great book. Dethroning the King is a fantastic read, which is the story of Paulo Lehmann and these Brazilians that like eventually like bought Anheuser-Busch. Really, really good story. But that podcast is very good. Touches on AI, touches on investing, entrepreneurship, and General Atlantic is a fantastic firm, I think. Chuck Feeney. And the third book, I'll cheat, is The Forgotten Billionaire, or I think The Billionaire That Wasn't. I think the story of Chuck Feeney building General Atlantic, and he basically gave away his entire fortune. And so yeah, I cheated. There's three contents, but the podcast is very good. Go listen to it.

I will give a nonfiction and fiction. I've got David Senra's other podcast, which is just called David Senra, where he interviews founders. I don't know if you guys have listened to it, but he did an episode with, I forget the guy's first name, Todd Graves, the founder of Raising Cane's. And it is—

Oh, dude, that was so good.

It is just an amazing— I've heard this guy on like, you know, I think it was like How I Built This, or I haven't listened to a podcast with him in years, but he's great. He's a great storyteller. The guy, you know, when he's trying to get money for Raising Cane's, like he went to like, you know, work on a fishing boat in Alaska, worked like work the oil rigs and, you know, Louisiana, like just to, just to see about it.

And the Southern twang, the accent's so good.

Yeah.

So good.

And he's loaded up that business with debt, but that means he owns, like, he still owns like 92% of it. He's worth like $20 billion. I don't know. Great, great episode. I've got a fiction one, which is, uh, I watched a Tom Hanks movie, Green Mile, which, uh, I had never seen. It's a classic. I was on IMDb top 100 list, realized this is number 25. I'd never even heard of Green Mile. So is it about death row? Yes, exactly.

It's a Stephen King book, correct?

Uh, yes, it is Stephen King book.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a perfect segue for Rob because he's going to try I will give you death row.

Um, so I'm actually gonna give— I'm gonna give kind of 3, but maybe 2. So since we're talking a lot about cards here, uh, and I've been— and, and I— something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, uh, over the last year, um, uh, Odd Lots, uh, on Bloomberg had 2 interesting, call it card-related pods, uh, in November. One was with a guy called, uh, Itamar Dreschler. There's like a Wharton professor, um, just about like what are the costs that goes into running a card program and issuing a card, and like why are, you know, card interest rates sort of as high as they are. And it kind of breaks down a lot of the business of cards. I thought it was like super interesting, and I think it was like really relevant to what we've been talking about. And then 2 weeks later, um, they had Max Levchin on from, um, from the founder of Affirm. And obviously was, you know, call it, you know, PayPal Mafia, uh, before that. And he talks about how he, you know, came up with BNPL because of, um, his misunderstanding about how cards worked when he first got it, came to the US and got a credit card. Uh, and he like knows more about, about, um, you know, payments than the vast majority of founders even in that space. And so I thought, uh, I thought that was great. So that's my, my nonfiction answer, but I gotta get a fiction answer. So Actually, no, it's also nonfiction, but it's entertainment. Um, which is, uh, I've been watching the Puff Daddy, uh, documentary on Netflix. It is wild. Absolutely wild.

Yeah. I've also heard you have to couple that one with the 50 Cent documentary, which touches on P. Diddy and gotta, I don't know. I'm, I've, I've, I'm, I started watching that too. I couldn't get through it. I was just like, I don't want to keep watching this.

This is depressing. By the way, speaking of thrillers, I saw this documentary late last night called Murder in Monaco. It's about the, the murder of, uh, this banker Safra. And there's a whole— it's like, uh, uh, pretty awesome. Um, it was close to home, I guess, so it was good.

Don't you just feel something?

It's like, is that like the only crime that has ever happened in Monaco? Is that like the one They made a documentary about it.

No, there's a few others, but, um, but that was probably definitely the most recognizable. And there's all these— they still kind of don't know who it was, but, um, it's, it's a, it's a pretty awesome documentary. I'll leave it at that. Um, I would, I would, you know, as a teaser to next week, because we're going to talk about predictions and how terribly they're going to age, I will just say since October 30th When Rob and I made a bet of what would outperform, $100 invested in Western Union, which I believe would outperform, would now be worth $102, ladies and gentlemen. Meanwhile, $100 invested in Solana would be roughly $66 today. I'm just going to leave it at that. Rob, I will buy— I'll buy you dinner in New York.

No, no, we bet it was a year, right? Was our bet.

You got a year. You're still going. You're 2 months in. All right, folks, thanks for listening. Santi, Rob, appreciate you guys. That's the pod. We'll see you guys next week.

All right. Thanks, guys.