Our 2026 Predictions

I think Ripple has a higher probability than pretty much any other crypto network in the top 10 to reach that all-time high, whereas I'm very bearish Ethereum going back to its all-time high.

Wow. All right.

I think Santi just really wants to be on that first clip in the beginning. That's what's happening here.

Santi, like, wrote on a whiteboard the communities on Twitter. He's like, how can I troll each and every one of these? Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice, or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Can we get some like playing music maybe next time? You know, like we all kind of run into this new music.

Yeah, bring your ukulele.

Okay.

Rob does strike you as a ukulele guy.

I was a big ukulele guy.

Big ukulele guy. Actually, like, I was actually more like a banjo guy growing up. I don't know if you knew this, but, you know, from some time ago.

Dude, don't tell people that. Don't tell people that. Got it. Got it. Well, anyways, this is the episode we've been waiting for. We are going to spend the time doing, but maybe, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 minutes at the top talking about 2025. Review some of our predictions, and then spend the majority of the time talking about where we think things are going, our 2026 predictions. Um, but quickly before we do that, quick, uh, congratulations is in order. Rob, I saw you joined the, uh, Digital Assets Market Subcommittee of the CFTC. That's pretty cool. So congrats.

I appreciate that. Yeah, I'm excited to, um, you know, just be able to be a part of kind of shaping the new era of regulation for the space.

Yeah, I was laughing seeing that because I know how much you like to shill your portcos and how much you are a defender of the portcos. I'm picturing you in like some meeting and you're like, just every sentence is some Dragonfly portco.

Well, I am sure that prediction markets will be a topic of conversation going forward.

Unbiased takes only on who should win that.

Awesome. No, I mean, no, but in all seriousness, right, like this is about furthering the industry and furthering and bringing, you know, common sense regulation and rules to a space that is, you know, innovating, uh, very quickly and like reinventing financial rails. And so, uh, everybody wins when we do that. And so I'll definitely not be shilling any portcos or, you know, trying to be biased around who would actually win. I would just be biased around making sure that we, you know, continue to push forward innovation.

Yep. Nice, nice diplomatic way to put that. I like it. All right, let's get into 2025 review. Rob, you were not with us when you made these. You probably got wiser, smarter, better looking since creating these, obviously, as with your, you know, involved Empire episode. But let's look at some of your 2025 predictions. Do you want to walk us— so you had 15 of these. Do you want to walk us through maybe some of the highlights of these, what you got right and what you got wrong?

Yeah. All right. So I actually, I tweeted out that I gave myself like a B or B+ on this. Um, I probably got like, you know, call it like 10 of them at least like partially right. But the ones that I was really, really bad at— I'll start there actually, because I think you like started the bad ones— yeah, were, uh, one, that the total crypto market cap would hit $7.5 trillion. Uh, so that is, um, a big miss, uh, I think for all of us, honestly. That was, that was number 15. And, uh, also the one right before that, that, uh, the the dollar would actually continue to stay strong. So US stablecoins did proliferate, but, um, and they continue to be used even as part of, really as part of like national security and continuing to be part of the monetary policy. But that said, um, everything else that the Trump administration has done has been, uh, you know, weakening the dollar. And so it's been a, been a really, really bad year for, for the dollar. Um, that said, Probably the thing that was most right on was prediction markets. So I think in number 7, I said that we'd see significant growth from prediction markets this year. And I think there's a lot of people are still pretty dubious about that because they said, oh, like, you know, Polymarket grew into the election, but then, you know, it's only an election product. And, you know, we were obviously, you know, very, very bullish on prediction markets, having put a bunch of money into Polymarket. And that turned out to be right. Um, and you know, there's a lot of stuff on here specifically around, call it decentralized finance continuing to gain market share, which was— it did gain market share. It wasn't quite as, um, I think quite as big as I thought it was. Spot did hit about 20% of total, uh, spot volume in DEXs versus CEXs. Derivatives hit 20% as well, but they didn't stay there. And so, um, that's one where I think, you know, direction of travel has been right.

You had two, um, you had two interesting stablecoin ones. So number 8 was Coinbase buys Circle. Just before or within 12 months of the IPO. And M&A picks up otherwise, but mostly in smaller acquihire-type situations as TradFi acquirers remain cautious. Your other interesting stablecoin one was Tether market share drops to 50% or lower, fueled by continued USDC resurgence and explosive growth of optimized use case-specific stablecoins. Uh, you got both these wrong.

Well, you know, I'm gonna give myself a little bit on 8, right? So Coinbase obviously hasn't bought Circle yet. I still have— I like 6 months. So, you know, don't, don't count me out yet. I said within 12 months after IPO. Uh, the— that said, I mean, considering how well Circle's performed in the public markets, like, you know, I think that's less likely today. Um, however, on the M&A side, like, it— I'm pretty much right that it picked up, but it mostly only picked up with crypto-native acquirers, right? So all of the big acquisitions this year have been done by Coinbase, they've been done by Kraken. Um, there really hasn't been M&A yet by big, at least like splashy M&A by traditional buyers. There's been some rumored stuff, you know, obviously the Mastercard ZeroHash has been rumored, but you know, let's see what happens there. It's been a long time. So that doesn't imply anything good. And then there's been a lot of acquirers. So I think I was, I was relatively right to be more bearish on the M&A market than I think you were, for instance. And then I think a lot of other people were.

Yeah.

To start the year. Uh, the Tether thing, it's also the direction of travel. So the Tether has lost market share this year. They've gone down to about 60%, not 50%. It's been slower than expected. But also the thing I was probably most surprising to be— or was most surprising to me that I was wrong about this year was that like stablecoins continued to do well and it took more market share in terms of cross-border payments, but it didn't grow nearly as quick as I thought they would in terms of issuance in terms of like real volume. I think that is just a— I think I'm wrong based on timing, but not in terms of like the direction of travel. But, um, that has been, uh, one that I've been, been a little bit surprised on. And I do believe, as you know, stablecoin usage— and we'll talk about a little bit about that today in 2026 predictions— continues to pick up. I do think Tether will continue to lose market share. They'll still do an incredible job, obviously, and be the largest.

But yeah, you, uh, you nailed the regulatory predictions. You said stablecoin legislation and a strategic Bitcoin Reserve legislation. Oh, You, I mean, you didn't get the Bitcoin Reserve thing right, but no, no, I, I was, I was right about this.

Okay. So, um, you got something right. No, no, no. So, so yeah, so I got that right. Right. So what ended up happening, I, I would give myself right about this. So I said stablecoin legislation would get passed. The CRA-SAB-121 would, uh, be repealed. Both those things happened, um, first half of the year. And then, uh, I thought we would get a strategic Bitcoin Reserve legislation, but we basically did. Right? Because the, um, what ended up happening— while we didn't get its own bill, right, what we did end up getting was that we got a rider that said that we wouldn't sell Bitcoin in the Genius Act.

That's right. And you were right about this, but you said the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve would be mostly toothless and just for headlines. So, and then you also know this, you nailed that market structure would get pushed to 2026. And ultimately after the— oh, you think market structure Oh, I'm curious if you still believe this, that market structure gets pushed to after the next midterm elections, but we can hold that until the 2026 predictions. Um, oh yeah, I thought this, this was good. Anything else in your 15 predictions that you think, uh, you had a nice call with embedded wallets. You said embedded wallets, shout out Privy, start to take significant market share from general purpose browser wallets. Um, it's very tough to actually measure the market share of wallets I've found, but, um, you know, embedded wallets obviously, and Privy specifically, obviously had a massive year. So I think that was a nice prediction. And then you had a nice prediction on ICOs and launchpads.

Yeah, I mean, the ICO launchpads, I gave myself like kind of mostly right here, because what I said was that they would come back to relevance. But, you know, there would be a lot of like anti-VC conversation, but that we would become kind of a wash in a lot of scams and rugs. I don't think that actually happened. We didn't come a wash in scams and rugs, but that I expected that founders would continue to basically do this hybrid financing strategy where most of the financing actually comes from VCs, but they do this as, you know, maybe a way to align incentives and bring people, you know, uh, people around the table. And that has mostly been right. There's been a lot more people using launchpads, but it's not in any way replacing VCs or VC capital. And I think that was a lot of the conversation this time last year.

Yeah. Yeah. The last two, and then I want to move on to Santiago's, are, um, you said a TradFi institution will launch a purpose-built ETH L2. You also said, uh, a large US bank will launch its own stablecoin. I had very similar 2025 predictions on that front. Um, yeah, large bank didn't launch its own stablecoin. You did, however, get, you know, Brian Moynihan saying B of A was exploring it. You had JP Morgan, um, you know, rolled out USD deposit token, right? So it's—

I think deposit tokens, like, when they— like, I gave myself this, to be honest, like, deposit token stablecoins. I think it's close enough.

Oh, this tells a lot about the standard that we hold ourselves to. I didn't give myself this one. I should have given myself this.

You should have. Let me grade you. This is Harvard grading. Okay.

And it's not a TradFi institution did not launch an L2, but you know, people like Robinhood did.

So yeah.

Yeah.

So awesome.

Are you voting on a curve here, gents?

Well, I'll answer that after I see how your predictions did, Santi. Let's, uh, let's, let's get into yours, Santi. You, um, if I remember correctly, I mean, we, we, we had a great episode at the beginning of the year, but yours were a little more of just like thesis on what the year will look like. Maybe you wanna walk us through like some highlights and what you got right and what you got wrong here.

Yeah, and look, I, I published 2025 cheating a little bit, which was under the assumption that I'm never gonna— it's so hard to predict what would happen in a year, but it was more Trump had just gotten elected and you had a visibility into the regulatory environment changing. And so I was like thinking more about what are the big tectonic shifts over the next, come out, 2 to 3, 4 years. Um, however, I will grade myself on what happened this year versus what I thought would, you know, happen in 4 years. And I, I just published a piece around really more, you know, 2026, but it's very much focusing on what happened in '25. Um, so the first point was, look, return dispersion, um, is going to continue to be a thing in crypto. I, I just continue to believe that as the industry would mature, you would have big disparities, whereas before it was so tightly correlated. I would— I think that very much happened this year. You have clear outperformance of Bitcoin and hype and, and a few other protocols. And the vast majority of other protocols just kind of— it wasn't like other cycles where you could have just punted a thematic and you would have done super well. I think it, it shows up in the unrealized losses and a lot of the kind of the pain that you're seeing in crypto markets. So I, I would say that I was largely correct there.

Uh, I agree with that. I think that was it. I think that was a good take.

Yeah, I think before the episode, one of my biggest predictions I didn't post it here, but was that, you know, Nvidia would be more important than Jerome Powell. I think that was just a reflection of the AI trade and how it was so, you know, important.

And I think that was your take. Correct. I think I wouldn't underplay that. I think that was your take of the year because at the time, you know, it's funny looking back at these predictions because they feel the ones you get right feel obvious. It's like, oh, of course he said that stablecoins would be big. But at the time, you know, I think we, the three of us, pushed to make non-obvious predictions. And the one about, you know, everyone was talking about interest rates so much, interest rates, interest rates, interest rates. And I remember when you said, you know, the market would hinge on NVIDIA earnings more than it would hinge on Jerome Powell's interest rate talks. And that was not an obvious thing then, but it's so clearly obvious today.

Yeah. Here's one where, um, in investing, you can be right about the thesis, but wrong in the expression of it or the timing of it. And so, I was very, um, kind of bearish on— I was, I was— my point was there's going to be a very clear divide between the have and the have-nots, like chains that can incredibly scale. And that was at the time where like Solana was really having a lot of— kind of coming off of a lot of meme coin activity. Um, I, I would have thought that there would be again more disparity. It would have been like way— like the divide would have been much more apparent in the crypto asset prices. But I would say like now the prices have come down, everything just gets chopped pretty mercenarily. And so I think even the deployment of certain chains like Robinhood launching as an L2, but you have then Tempo launching as an L1 with the muscle of Paradigm. So I think I was— I would give myself like I was, I was wrong there. I think I was too optimistic around what I was seeing that like a network like Solana has been able to process so many different, so much more transaction in the value capture versus like Ethereum L1. But a big part of this is like, I probably over-intellectualize that where it's like, how do these things trade? And I think they just continue to trade based on, you know, good brand and memetics and Tom Lee going on TV. Telling retail that Ethereum is going to go to $62,000 or something like that. You know, it's very much not like price to revenue, you know, insert vest, Patagonia vest meme.

Yeah, I like, I like looking at these predictions for you because, you know, I think you and Hasib have had these great conversations around valuations and it became kind of like a, yeah, like you said, kind of a meme of you talking about these valuations. But you've been talking about this since January, right? Where you said most of the current valuations are rich and predicated on some future state. This isn't something that you just started talking about in the last 30 days.

Yeah, exactly. And that was— I'm glad you bring that up because a lot of people are saying, wait a minute, you've invested on the venture side a lot of these projects. Like, why are you so skeptical overnight about valuations? And I mean, I, I think there's a record here of, you know, I was coming into the year thinking we got to, we got to put numbers on the dashboard because, you know, we have a very clear regulatory 180. Once protocols— like, like, once you have a protocol, like, really showing you what mainstream adoption looks like, then I think it just exposes some of the others that have not been able to scale, have not been able to acquire customers. And I don't know how much of that, like, played out this year, candidly, because, you know, look, I mean, Ethereum has been kind of stuck in this range for the last 4 years. It hasn't— like, Ethereum, like, ETH, um, and Solana. But, you know, Solana also came down. A lot of transaction fees have come down. So I don't know, I think I could have been better at just inspecting, like, and when I went back and looked at it, it's like, what percentage of revenue of these chains is tied to, like, certain types of activities? And I would say that, like, I think the market is sufficiently smart in understanding that most of these— a large part of the revenue and generation is happening from, uh, just speculation and meme coin activity.

Yeah, yeah. Uh, anything else that was a highlight here? I mean, one that I might highlight Maybe that you got wrong was you said every major app that hits scale will launch their own chain. I had something similar. Um, the app chain thesis did not really play out this year. I think a lot of people went into the year, uh, probably overweight what hyper— the hyper liquid strategy of being an app that launched a chain. And this didn't really play out.

Yeah, I agree with you. Other than Robinhood launching their own L2 and Stripe launching their own L1, I would say I would've perhaps, maybe we're a bit too early on this. Maybe you're gonna see Polymarket, for instance, and I have no knowledge of this, launch their own. So that was, that was a miss.

I think some of these are, are probably though, like for something like that, like, I don't know, we should talk about this more in the going in the, in the future, but it does still seem like that's a topic of, that might just be a timing issue. More than— yeah, yeah.

Something that's interesting here is you said stablecoins are the kill— you said DePIN and stablecoins are the killer combo to scale and onboard the next mass wave of users on-chain and retain them. You got half of it right with stablecoins. Um, yeah, DePIN, I feel like, didn't have a good year. I'm, you know, it's actually part of my 2026 prediction, so we'll punt on talking about DePIN in too much detail, but I don't think DePIN had the massive year that some people thought it would have.

Certainly not on the token price. Yeah, I would say on the adoption front, yes. Like, you, you have Helium posting pretty impressive numbers in terms of number of users growth and the— on the MVNO side, Hive Mapper continues to make progress. But again, I don't think the market's dumb. The biggest problem that I think we're going to talk about into next year predictions is this equity-token disconnect. Value accrual disconnect. You're seeing it, Aave, you're seeing it with Helium, you're seeing it with a lot of these projects that had to design tokenomics in a very different regulatory environment. They have that overhang that needs to be cleaned up or they will really struggle, and it opens up an opportunity for a new player to attack the same opportunity with better tokenomics and value accrual. And, and so that was— yeah, I definitely was very hyped up and I still am on Deepin as a use case. But the— if you were— if you look at that and said none of this financial advice and you said, oh, I'm going to go buy a basket of Deepin, a basket of Deepin was probably one of the worst performers other than GameFi. It was— it got— I mean, it did not perform well at all. In fact, I can't think of a single Deepin project that did well.

Yeah, from a token price perspective, I agree. You know, one thing that not none of us had was anything around RWAs and tokenization, right? We had like the market cap of RWAs tripled, right? Hit like $17 billion or $18 or $19 billion. And you've got like BlackRock's BIDL is the reserve asset behind a lot of, you know, on-chain cash products. We— it's interesting that none, none of us mentioned that.

Mhm.

Yeah. Yeah.

But again, I mean, the thing with the RWAs though, right, and, and this is still true, is that the by far the largest product there is, continues to be Figure's HELOC product, right? And, you know, with Figure's HELOC product, that's, you know, it's, it's almost, yeah, it's a tokenized product, but like it's within their like closed-loop ecosystem. And like, you know, they're, um, it's not something that like necessarily has, call it like, I think like broad use cases in crypto and DeFi, right? And so I think like that's been part of it. I think this is also what's happening with like a lot of the conversation around like Canton, right? Which is that, you know, there's a lot of people talking about Canton and like, oh, it's really interesting. They do all of this repo volume and they're using all of these real world use cases. But, um, again, there's like, it doesn't have any kind of movement, uh, or interoperability with not, not even other Canton networks, let alone anybody outside of Canton. Right. And so I think there's a, a little bit of, um, uh, a wait and see about how tokenized assets go from like these, like, basically, you know, closed-loop distributed databases to like, you know, something that, you know, affects like the— that is more open source.

Yeah, I think that's a good point. Santi, anything else on your predictions before I want to get into my 2025 review and then we can get into '26?

I'll be quick here. Uh, I came into the year thinking that, um, crypto projects with big treasuries should be very strategic in using them to acquire and grow into the valuations. I think I was probably one of the first ones to really, really be very vocal about that. I think the only really project that did that was Ripple. And, and then I had another one which was wrong, which was I said, you know, narratives will matter less and it's going to be harder to sustain that. But then you had the company that has been probably the best in the space to paint the narrative also go out and use their treasury. And I think that's Coming into 2026, I think it will be interesting to re-underwrite a thesis on something like Ripple, which a lot of people, the crypto natives have been mocking them, but they've done some really interesting acquisitions that we've talked about here during the year that as I look to next year, I'm actually more optimistic about Ripple and their BD muscle than any other project in the space other than of course Merge.

They all— yeah, exactly. Second. Yeah, exactly.

Can you say that again? You're more bullish on Ripple's BD effort than any other project? 100%.

100%. Okay.

100%. Do you own XRP?

I do not, because it is hard for me to underwrite that. And I wrote about it in the blog piece. Like, it's just hard for what I'm doing. I just don't have the time. I'm not a trader. But I will say it's one of those things that the crypto natives have been wrong every year. Fight the momentum, they fight the narrative, they fight the memes. And Ripple is an interesting exercise where they actually might grow into their valuation given the acquisitions that they've made. Like, it's impressive. Like, they raised a really big round this year. They did how many acquisitions, Rob? 3 acquisitions? Hidden Road, a couple like 3 or 4.

G-Treasury.

Yeah, they did Rail. So those are the 3 that come to mind. There's probably more. There is a couple more, I think. But the 3 that are like, I think, really sizable.

The last thing I'll say holistically, I went into the year being quite, um, having a sense of urgency that we needed to put numbers on the dashboard to justify valuations. And I was very nervous about valuations across the board, uh, and, and as I look to now, of which project actually executed the most was Ripple. Because, because I will say Tom Lee is not a— I don't see that as BD. Even though Ethereum cleaned up its act on the margin, it is very disconnected. It's all— I think it actually does more harm to Ethereum having a figure like Tom Lee publicly say one thing and privately say another to his investors, and then ETH Sylla change its tune and sell ETH. Like, these dApps are not your BD muscle that you want. Contrary to— like, that, that's— no one really kind of predicted the dApp game here, I think. Maybe you did.

I mean, like, oh, who could have, right?

But what I'm saying is Ripple, I think, is a force not to be reckoned with.

Wow. All right. All right. Let's bring— let's get Brad on the pod in 2026. That's the— that's a prediction. Um, I'm not saying it's worth what it is today.

I'm just saying it is strategically used its token to—

I agree.

I want to ask you a question because I— and we're— this is— I think this conversation needs to come back up on the 26th side. But do you think that XRP or Ripple equity will be worth more in terminal value?

I mean, what is your terminal value? In 10 years?

Yeah, 10 years, let's call it.

What's it at now?

Uh, what is the token at? 200? 180?

Ripple is sitting at, ladies and gentlemen, $1.88 XRP, fully diluted valuation of $188 $100 billion. Do I think that that—

and what's Ripple, like $40 billion?

Yeah. Although the, there was like some, uh, reports that came out that was basically saying that the, there was like downside protection given to that investment, which means it's probably not, you know, call it—

yeah. So the foundation has roughly $90 billion of XRP, I believe, or give or take.

It's probably less than that at 180, but yeah, less than that.

Okay. Do I think that they can? I— this is— I wrote about in my blog piece. I think 2026 is going to be a really tough year across the board in crypto and across equity markets.

I'm moving us past this conversation because I want to get us into 2026 and then we'll come back to—

I'll answer this question. I think Ripple has a higher probability than pretty much any other crypto network in the top 10 to if everything goes down, they actually have a higher probability to reach that all-time high, whereas I'm very bearish Ethereum reaching it all— going back to its all-time high.

You're more bullish on Ripple hitting all-time high than Ethereum?

Than ETH, yes.

Wow. All right, all right.

I think Santi just really wants to be on that first clip in the beginning. That's what's happening here.

Santi like wrote on a whiteboard, the community is on Twitter, He's like, how can I troll each and every one of these?

Listen, I think the most important— it's sort of like distribution is king, but I also come around, product is super important. I think Ripple— this is the last point I made— is that decentralized product strategy and BD does not work. Decentralized security but centralized product decision-making is the way to win. Ethereum does not have that. You had Justin Drake, right, leave to Stripe. Across the board, like, ETH as an asset is not worth $300 and whatever billion, $350 billion. Dude, Ripple at least is $182 billion. Visa, $600 billion. Now we're using— we're valuing everything on a relative basis. I think Ripple has more breathing room to use its currency to buy real businesses, to build distribution and a product and has more time to figure this shit out, whereas some of the other projects do not because the market is losing its patience.

All right.

I'm moving us forward before people turn off this episode. I love you, Santi.

All right.

I'm going to cruise through mine and then we'll get into it. The ones that I got right, really right, were— okay, I'll start with the ones I got right and then I'll get into— I got many of these very wrong. Once I got right, I said stablecoins are going to become great for crypto's brand. Banks will issue— banks issuing their own stables increases consumer trust and accelerates global adoption of crypto. Normies and regulators understand crypto, understand stablecoins. Crypto finally has a use case. This leads to stablecoin legislation passing in the US. I got that right. ICOs— we'll see a $100 million ICO, but unlike 2017 ICOs, these are more buttoned up on actual platforms. This gets seen as crowdfunding's golden moment. Institutional investors participate in these ICOs, which drive significant capital could sign, which drives significant capital. Um, I got that right. PumpFun. How much did PumpFun raise? PumpFun did like a $600 million ICO. Monad, couple hundred.

Yeah, Monad was like $187 million and was oversubbed. Yeah. Um, and I think Pump, yeah, it was a little bit higher, right? It was like $800 million.

So, uh, another one I got right was M&A. I said, we'll see a crypto company acquire a non-crypto company for $100 million. Few examples of this. Biggest one was probably Kraken acquiring NinjaTrader. For like $1.5 billion. Um, what I didn't get right is I said this will be an L1 or L2 because they have the funds. This was kind of playing off Santiago's thesis that, you know, these companies, these protocols with huge treasuries had to make some acquisitions. I said, uh, we're going to get another $1 billion crypto acquisition. I think we saw that with Coinbase and Deribit. Um, uh, a couple that I got wrong. I said both memes and AI agents will win. I would say both of them definitively lost. Um, I said one of the biggest chains will be from a chain, will be a chain that an application builds. I definitely got that one wrong. Um, I thought that centralized crypto companies would start launching tokens. And the thought process here was, uh, overvalued valuations from 2021 and 2022 combined with an extreme mismatch in equity versus token valuations would drive this. I, I thought there were a lot of companies that had raised it, you know, $5, $6, $7, $8, $9 billion, didn't see any way to get out of that and get liquidity and exit, and so they'd start launching tokens. I think I got that wrong. Um, I thought a Bitcoin fork of sorts would become contentious. You're kind of seeing this. I don't know if you guys have been following Nick Carter and the quantum-resistant Bitcoin stuff. You're starting to see some contention there, but not to the point where there's a fork. Uh, and I got this extremely wrong. I said SocialFi would get hot again. People would build apps on top of existing platforms that pull in your social data. Something will happen with Instagram and TikTok to get this token, to get tokens. Creates a weird convergence with normies. Normies flood in, celebrities flood in, and that's the top. We saw the opposite. Farcaster's pivoting away from social. Maybe the closest thing to this was Zora in the middle of the year, but yeah, I got that wrong. So 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. Empire.node. You can also— a 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 from 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. Another drum roll, please. Santi, don't do it. Let's get into 2026. The way that we're going to do this is we all have a bunch of predictions. Instead of doing like Santi's predictions, Rob predictions, Rob's predictions, my predictions. Each of us are just going to throw out— one of us will throw out a prediction. And if someone else has similar predictions in that bucket, we're going to talk about that topic. We'll talk about it, then move on. Santi, kick us off with your first prediction for 2026.

I'll go straight to it. Ethereum, lower or higher at the end of the year, next year?

Well, this is your—

this basket of— I'll spare Rob the regulatory, uh, you know, the compliance headache. A basket of L1s, lower or higher?

Well, what's your prediction?

Lower.

I'm guessing lower. I did not have a prediction around this. Rob, did you?

No, and I, I don't agree that we'll have I mean, it depends on your basket, right? I think we'll just see more dispersion, right? And we'll— but I would guess that if you took like, you know, call it the ones that you think are doing well today, whatever, ETH, Solana, name whatever ones else you want to name, Santi, um, I would get they're higher next year.

All of them? No, like what Rob's saying is if you take a basket of like the top 5 to 7, those will go— will be down at the end of '26. Rob, you think they'll be up?

Yes.

All right, prediction number 1 in the books. Rob, give us a prediction.

Uh, stablecoin start card settlement. So the— there's been a lot of talk about these like, you know, stablecoin neobanks. They continue to just skyrocket next year. I think that right now Visa is saying that they're doing annualized $3.5 billion of stablecoin card settlement. They announced they're starting to open that up for banks in the US. That was $250 million, uh, back in May. It's been growing really quickly. I think that goes from $3.5 billion to over $100 billion. And I think Visa starts talking about it on every single earnings call and starts breaking it out in their, uh, in their earnings next year. Within the next year. Yeah.

I had very— I had two very— I had two predictions around stablecoins. So my predictions are on stablecoins where I said stablecoin-backed USD bank accounts will become a very mainstream product in at least a few emerging markets. There's going to be very visible, um, like, yeah, capital flow effects of this. I think you'll see central banks start talking about stablecoins because of the geopolitical, uh, impact that it'll have in those places. These are essentially USD bank accounts in the front, stablecoins in the back. You'll see fintechs and banks in emerging markets launch these USD accounts, but you also see upstart competitors. Um, you're already starting to see a couple of those. and I think you'll just see, yeah, Rob, I agree with you. You'll see a lot more. I also said, uh, the stablecoin conversation will expand beyond just payments to, uh, international payments, uh, cross-border payments, AI agents, and treasury management. Stablecoins will become the default settlement asset for at least 3 categories: AI agents, corporate treasury cash management, and cross-border B2B payments. Um, so I agree. Yeah, same page as you, Rob.

I, I've got a lot of stablecoin 2026 predictions, if that surprises anybody out there. Uh, but the Cardano is one of them. I agree with a bunch of what you said. So I think, um, I also had that I think they will— over 25% of cross-border payments will be done in stablecoin rails by the end of, uh, '26.

I said 30%, actually, which is an aggressive, aggressive—

I mean, both of us are aggressive.

International payments, let's give some context, that's less than 1% today.

Probably, yeah. I mean, it's $200 trillion market, right? Like, we can verify that there's probably a few hundred billion dollars done. I mean, I— maybe it depends. I mean, how— but JP Morgan connects us, so it depends on how you think about connections, right, and these types of products. But if JP Morgan connects us, is always doing it, already doing a trillion dollars of volume, then maybe it's, um, 1 to 2%.

There was a McKinsey estimate that said 3%. My gut says that's a little high.

Wrong. I actually, I was going to send it to a large corporate because we were pitching to them and I was like, this feels wrong. We inspected that McKinsey one.

Yeah, yeah, that exact.

It's wrong.

It's wrong.

Uh, it's a B team in McKinsey that is putting these reports up. Uh, I don't think it goes to 30%. I think it grows a lot, but it's like sub 10%.

Yeah. No, I mean, nothing like, it's very tough to grow something 30x in a year.

Um, dude, that, that just will not happen.

Well, here, here's why. Here's why I would say it's possible. right? Because, uh, right now most of cross-border payments happens, you know, correspondent banking system, right? Uh, JP Morgan connects us and JP Morgan, and they're launching the tokenized deposit platform. They're, you know, continuing to do more of these pilots. If we see more of the banks start to try to do, you know, tokenized deposits and tokenized, um, you know, assets and use, call it stablecoin rails or tokenized, uh, blockchain rails. To do these types of products, then you could see it just blow up really quickly. It's definitely not true that like all of these, like, you know, Air Wallets and Wises and, you know, alternate APMs of the world can grow it that quickly. The banks have to be a big part of that. Otherwise it'll just be, you know, here's the counter though.

These banks move so slowly, Rob, that even if the end— I actually think we are going to be right directionally on a 3 to 5 year time horizon. I think I will. When I publish these, I'm going to adjust my 30% number down because hearing you saying it out loud, I don't think the banks will move fast enough. I was—

every time I'm already doing it, right? So like they could just start to push that forward, right? Like, you know, I don't know, it feels like people have been working on this for a while, so this could be the year.

Here's like a— as an aside, I feel like every time I interview someone like on the— and they show me a pro forma of what a business does with crypto, it's like What— where I think we're missing in a lot of these assumptions is what's the incentive and who's the gatekeeper there? And do they have the incentive to actually implement that? And I'm not sure that when you say 30%, like, I hear you, JP Morgan could turn it on, PayPal could, you know, all these guys could always— I just don't think so.

Something I have a prediction— I have a pretty— I think you're spot on. I have a prediction around this actually. It's my first prediction. I said people are going to start talking about on-chain businesses. As more efficient. On-chain businesses will start to become a framing for public company CEOs to talk about driving efficiencies in the same way that AI became a thing that got mentioned on every earnings call. There was the opportunity of it, and then there was the cost reduction of it. I think you'll see— start seeing earnings calls and investor letters, um, and quarterly reports that mention stablecoins and on-chain rails as a cost or a margin lever. And then boom, that's, that's your incentive to do it.

Here's a prediction. I would— I think a basket of crypto-enabled businesses outperforms a basket of crypto infrastructure providers by a country mile. And so let's put a finer point to that. Western Union outperforms Solana. Klarna outperforms Circle. And for context, Klarna implemented its own stablecoin.

And Klarna has been relative to Circle since they both IPO'd has been awful. It's been a dog.

Klarna has.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Circle, second best performing IPO or the best performing IPO of the year.

Circle was. Yeah.

Circle was. Yeah, exactly. I think going forward in 2026, if I were to buy today Solana or Western Union, I buy Western Union. If I were to buy Klarna or Circle, I buy Klarna by a country fucking mile because it's mean reversion. You just had Klarna trades like a BMPL. And then they implement a stablecoin. And that, that the interesting, I said, the second-order effects of that, maybe, maybe Circle catches a bid because, you know, or Paxos goes public. But I still think that, to your point, you know, businesses that start talking publicly about using, not piloting, just real usage, and it shows up in the margin, those businesses will, will re-rate.

Yeah, I, you know, I Probably my best investment in the last 2 years was just buying Robinhood somewhere around $20. And the only— my thesis— this is, you know, peak retail trader here. I saw them buy, I think it was Bitstamp. It's like June of 2024, maybe, or like May of 2024. I was like, boom, they're pushing into crypto, load up. And it actually wasn't the worst thesis. And I think some— you need 2 things for it. You need companies that are in my— why I like your Klarna thing but don't like Western Union. Is I think there's actually two criteria. One is pushing into crypto. The second is founder-led businesses. I think there's too much risk for, uh, boards and CEOs to push into crypto right now. And, uh, I'm very bullish on founder-led public companies and less bullish on like, you know, decision by committee to push on-chain.

And I want to put even a finer point on that too, which is that like these businesses still have to be able to go and build product, right? Western Union has not shown that they can build a usable digital product ever, basically, right? And this is, you know, they can maybe talk about stablecoins that they can, you know, use Rain and use Privy and, or I think maybe they're using Turnkey, not Privy, I don't know which one. And they can use all of these service providers. But if you just pull together a bunch of service providers, if you don't know how to manage and build product internally, like it's not going to be able to be something that they can actually distribute, right?

And so I think there's There's a reason why it trades at the level it does. The CEO is crony capitalism. The board is terrible. Ackman, if you're listening, you know, I'd like to have a chat. But I still, I still think it's just like a— it's, it's a rerating that happens. It's like you can buy a terrible asset and it doesn't take much to rerate. And again, if the market— I'm thinking a little bit more now left curve— if the market is just going to go long stablecoins, like why is Circle the most— the best performing IPO of the year? Goddamn, if you just know rates go down, that business gets crushed. But retail doesn't think like that, right? And so I'm just saying, it trades at such a low multiple, and it has historically been so forgotten. This is one of my core themes, which is I'm bearish techno optimism. I'm long the forgotten companies because they were deemed dead and you can revamp them. And I think, I think it doesn't take much. I don't disagree with the founder is not it's not a founder-led org, but it doesn't take much to, to light a fire and then the market wake up to it.

I have another prediction semi-related to this, which is the DeFi mullet comes back, but it comes back 10 times stronger, full steam ahead for the DeFi mullet. I think you'll basically see most fintechs and brokerages adopt DeFi rails under the hood. Not all, we've been talking a lot about stablecoins, but I think it's lending, it's yield, it's settlement, it's trading. Um, the UX will remain very mainstream, right? What, you know, the, the, the UX of Robinhood and Klarna and Revolut and, uh, people like that. But behind the scenes, you'll get DeFi. And the reason for this is it's just way easier to, you know, Revolut's like, I want to like offer like lending and borrowing. Okay. I could go spin up a lend borrow team, or I could just integrate with Aave, um, or Morpho or someone like that.

So can I ask, yeah. Can we, can I push you into that question a little bit, which is like, do you expect it to be actually like Aave and Morpho and it'll be like kind of public permissionless pools? Uh, or do you expect it to be, you know, okay, well we use blockchain rails because it's simpler to, you know, call it execute atomically across different types of transactions, but it's, you know, call it permission pools, right? Or something that's like specific to each different, uh, organization.

I think you have to segment the pools. I don't know the, the final form factor. Um, like I don't know if like Morpho gives like Revolut their own vault or something like that. Like, I don't, I actually don't know how that works out, or, um, I don't think it's permissioning in the sense of like, hey, you have to KYC necessarily, but it's permissioning in like, we have, you have to segment accounts. Um, you have to do some sort of like, you know, SMA, like separately managed accounts here. Uh, that, that would be my take. But I do think it'll happen on public blockchains and it'll happen on platforms like Aave and Morpho, but the Aaves and Morphos and Caminos of the world will figure out how to do that.

Who—

so what do you— what do you— I mean, let's make it practical for the folks listening to this stuff. Should they buy AAVE token? Should they call Stani to buy AAVE Labs equity? Or should they buy Stripe equity in the secondary, or Circle? Or who's the greatest benefactor? Because like, I don't think any of us are disagreeing, like DeFi, like, like more liquidity is going to come on-chain. How do you express that thesis?

It's interesting. I think So if you look at Aave, their liquidity and their brand and their, like, their liquidity and their brand remains probably one of the most underappreciated moats in crypto. It just, it just sticks around. It just stays and it just grows. Um, and it's still so much larger than everybody's else, uh, everybody else. Uh, the, but Morpho has, I think, grown the most this year from a product and integrations and partnerships perspective. And I think Morpho is pretty well positioned to gain market share. I don't own any of them. I don't own Kamino or Morpho or Aave or any of them, Spark or anything like that. But, um, I think Kamino might be the most held asset by Blockworks research analysts outside of like Bitcoin, ETH, SOL, and HYPE. Um, I know, yeah, a lot of funds that are very long Morpho. And then, I mean, Aave's token, we're recording this on December 23rd, 2025. Aave's token has obviously gotten whacked. Somewhere around these prices is probably a good buy.

Yeah, I would say, um, is that— it's actually kind of funny, right? So I think we chatted about this last week. There's been so much discussion at the traditional asset managers about like vaults and, you know, tokenized assets. I actually— I, I had a call yesterday with one of the largest asset managers in the world who reached out and they said, hey, can you come speak at our leadership summit specifically about what is happening on Volts and these like kind of like tokenized curated, you know, investment strategies and what that means for our asset management business and like what we should be thinking about doing. I'm actually going, I'm going to do that next month. Right. And this is one of the largest asset managers in the world. I did the same thing with another asset manager back in October, more about stablecoins, but it's like become a very large and very important topic, even at the biggest wirehouses, even at the biggest asset managers, about how to think about this. Um, The question becomes, I think, is does— and we are having a lot of discussion around this with the different corporates. I think Morpho gets brought up more than Aave in terms of infrastructure today, at least in the conversations I have. But then there's also a lot of conversation around these like more, I think, specialized vault products that have a little bit more bells and whistles for potential institutions, things like Upshift, or I think there's Midas, things like that, right? And so it'll be interesting to see, because I think this will be a really, really competitive space, but we're going to definitely see a lot of asset managers, wirehouses, brokerages kind of enter this space this year.

Can, can you double-click on that, Rob? Like, because, um, if it becomes more competitive, uh, crypto protocols, the deal-making— like, is Morpho cutting deals with Coinbase? And, and who—

like, Morpho's already integrated into the What, uh, two things: Coinbase, Revolut. And I actually think, uh, like if you pull up the— I was playing with the Worldcoin app. You go on Worldcoin, there's like 4 apps, like 4 things you can do. One of them is like interact with Morpho. So I think as this DeFi mullet becomes a bigger and bigger thing, Morpho is pretty well positioned there.

Yeah, but BTC, uh, through the Coinbase app is now over a billion dollars lent, I believe.

Well, what is the economic share of that? Like, because Circle and Coinbase have that agreement and Coinbase disproportionately benefits from that. All I'm saying is, who has more bargaining negotiating power on the table when you're a DeFi protocol competing for business of Robinhood or insert financial institution? Do they have— what are kind of those terms, and are they going to be able to defend? Because my thesis for 2026 is you continue to see adoption, but the value accrual might not happen at that layer. It might just be captured by the large financial institutions that just has better lawyers and negotiates out of that contract?

Well, I will, I will tell you one of the things that I've been talking a lot about on Twitter, and I have a general thesis about, and this is one of the things I'm going to talk about to this asset manager's leadership next month, is that you have to be closer to the customer. Value accrual for intermediaries today is going down. And so if you're just a tech layer, right, we continue to see those things underperform. You know, the embedded finance era of just general fintech, you know, has done— that was probably the hottest era, one of the hottest things that people were investing in fintech in 2020 and 2021. And it's— most of those companies are not around, or they haven't done particularly well, right? And I— my belief today, and I— we've talked about this with the prediction markets, we've talked about this with a bunch of other, you know, types of products. My belief today is you— the thesis for everybody in financial services should be get closer to the customer. If you are not closer to the customer, you're more and more likely to get— not have a good share of economics, right? And so that includes these protocols.

So what do you think of this? So one of my predictions, Rob, is about vaults. I said on-chain vaults are going to at least 2.5x their AUM. Right now on-chain vaults, um, AUM is roughly $6 billion. I think it hits at least $15 billion. Um, Bitwise had a nice way of putting it. Bitwise said vaults become ETFs 2.0. Um, yeah, I really think vaults will become one of the biggest like DeFi narratives of 2026. Agree or disagree?

No brainer. Yeah, I agree. Yeah.

And what this will actually kick off is a whole wave of like risk management infrastructure providers, like basically service providers for the vaults, curators, obviously. So yeah, very— I took— it's a prediction I feel pretty confident on. Okay, Santi, give us a prediction, sir. Um, Give us something spicy. I feel like we've been like a little bland. Stablecoin.

I'll give you this one. A basket of L1s grossly underperforms a basket of DeFi applications.

Okay. Okay.

Like, like I like, I like that. The reason that because like L1s, this is like 1KX report. Shout out to Lawson, those boys, they create a really good revenue report and it's basically this is the generational pair trade. Of the year. This is the bear trade of the year, I will say. And I may be very wrong on the timing, by the way. So here's a setup. Blockchains like Layer 1s, Layer 2s are 90% of the aggregate market cap today, though they capture less than 12% of the total fees. And that trend line has come down quite a lot. Meanwhile, DeFi protocols capture 70% of the fees and account for less than 10% of the market cap. But man, you could have heard me back in the ParaFi days say like there's going to be more and more DeFi protocols, like DeFi as a percentage of crypto market cap is going to grow orders of magnitude. And we're not there yet. But 4 or 5, 6 years later, maybe this time is different. Don't believe me, ladies and gentlemen. But I do think that, again, my holistic view is that we have a rough time in markets next year in macro and then also certainly in crypto. And so, and so you hide in things that have defensibility and revenue because investors just become— the revenue meta all of a sudden pops up when prices go down. So I think I actually do like certain DeFi protocols where, where you just have continued fee generation against the backdrop that you guys are talking about that I disagree with. And the market cap is just not, not there. And that includes a basket of, you know, Aave, Hyperliquid, Morpho. Some other stuff in there, right? Because I get excited about that. I've been a DeFi bull. I still believe in your DeFi mullet. So I think like layer 1s are just going to re-rate down and apps should re-rate up because the incremental flow from Klarna of the world and banks comes to the apps. And I think it's— they're going to just spit out cash flow. But look, my partner Ben loves Sky and the Framework boys love Sky, Maker. You could have been in the making for the last 6 years and, and, and you're in pain, man. So I don't know, market's just irrational.

This pod is, is Santi's bearish 2026 pod. Like, that is—

yeah, yes, I, I am, I am very— like, historically I shied away from— I am extremely bearish next year, for sure, for sure.

So what do you do? Let me take us in a slightly, uh, go away from the conversation for a second here. Santi, what do you do if you're this bearish with your portfolio? I go to cash.

I'm No, I'm holding 60% cash.

Wow.

Yeah, I, I've been selling consistently, partially because for better or for worse, I just don't have time, but also because it's just really priced to perfection. I'm quite worried. So and look, it's, it's if I, if I forgo a year of gains, I just think at some point it's going to get really ugly. May not be 2026, but it likely is 2027. And there's like reasons why I would re-underwrite. Like I have in my blog post, like, look, the, the argument here would be like, dude, the affordability crisis is real. So people are always going to want to long, like go long the casino thesis because like casinos actually do well during a bear market, like downturns. But like you just don't see that in the revenues of these base layers. So like I am willing to be like long, like structurally crypto and flows, but I am quite bearish.

Like that pair trade, the apps versus the, you know, chains.

Yeah.

And you go long some of the apps?

Not right now.

No, no, because—

no, no, no, because, dude, AI takes a mouse fart from Powell or Jerome to derail the entire shit. And crypto— crypto, by the way, is not going to behave like an uncorrelated asset class in your portfolio, ladies and gentlemen. It never has. Anyone that tells you is a scammer. Just don't believe it. It is triple levered QQQ in your book. Treat it as such. Size it accordingly. And so I just think since, since October, just in the wrong way. Okay, the original thing, like, like heavy metals, like you should have longed the actual metal, silver.

Yeah, copper hit an all-time high.

And maybe someone's like, look, maybe you're an idiot, man. Like, mean— you talk about mean reversion. So like the S&P is at 30 times and growth is going to come from AI, and like crypto's gone so down, and it's going to go up, like mean revert, but on the other side. I'm like, no, man, we haven't, we haven't seen pain, you know what I mean? Like, people are just— secondary market of watches is still attractive. People are still buying Birkins on the secondary market. Like, I track a lot of these stuffs, and people are not feeling the pain, man. I, I remember talking to—

I don't actually, I don't actually think that's true at the— and we don't need to make this a Macro Pod, but if you— well, I think what we're actually seeing, or we're just seeing the gap widening and the wealth disparity, right? So yes, the Birkin market's still okay. Yes, the Rolex market is still okay. I mean, it's not what it was in '21, but it's still okay, right? Like, yes, you know, equities are continuing to hit all-time highs, uh, but like, if you look at auto defaults right now, like, they're picking up way higher, right? If you look at, you know, general consumer sentiment, it's really bad. If you looked at, you know, the, um, uh, the Black Friday sales, right, that was a lot lower than expected, and growth has been—

yes, but the—

and the market is still up this year.

Again, but this is the point, right, is that the— if you have assets and you're rich, like, that will— the market will continue doing well for you. And we're— this is— I mean, this is a much broader conversation, but explain that point though.

Why would the market continue to do well? Like, if you have exposure, like, shouldn't you— like, if you're very exposed to markets and they go down because of this issue, you're not right?

Because the people buying the equities today are the ones who are saying, okay, well, you know, AI is going to continue to you know, do incredibly well and the AI CapEx will have a good ROI. And it's, it's people like you and me and, and Yano, right? Um, or, you know, all these institutional investors, right? But the, what we're starting to see is breaking of the normal economy, right? We're starting to see people look like they, I mean, we had the, uh, the GDP this morning and annualized 4.3%, right? And yet at the same time, your average buyer is saying that I can spend less than I could last year. I can buy less than I could last year. I'm defaulting on more loans than I was before. And as that starts to— I mean, that's a warning sign, right? If that permeates through the economy, like, everybody who's in those risk assets now, they're gonna, they're gonna risk off, right? And so, like, maybe now I'm, I'm, I'm, you know, on your side, right, about being more bearish here. But I don't— I did— I think what we're seeing is we're just seeing a huge dispersion of you know, outcomes, right? And that will affect the asset markets in a very weird way because of the fact that like they may still do well even when the real economy is doing awful.

Rob, give us a prediction.

All right, so I'm not, I'm not going to give you another stablecoin one because I had one more that I want to talk about, but we— I want to move off that. I, I actually— this one's related to what Santi was just saying about, you know, the L1s and value accrual.

I—

and maybe this is a little bit spicy— I think we'll see an Ethereum proposal or upgrade this year that has Ethereum charging much higher rents to L2s.

I like that prediction. I don't hate it.

I think Ethereum is going to come out and say, listen, we, we need to start figuring out a way to increase our, you know, value accrual and not have, you know, continued Um, just, you know, all of the, the continued value seem to, you know, move towards, you know, equity businesses that sit on, on top of us and are using our security. So I think that's what we're going to see this year.

Yeah, I like that one. Um, all right, I will give you one. Do you guys have anything around privacy? I don't. All right, I have a privacy one. I think most of the major chains and wallets start including some sort of opt-in private transactions, and they charge for that. So I don't think privacy will be limited to the privacy chains. I think everybody will try to offer privacy. Uh, let's use Base as an ex— as an example. I think on Base, you'll be able to send transactions for essentially free, public. Um, but if you want a private transaction, you have to pay a small fee. Um, I think the privacy network effects end up being the moat and, and lock-in on privacy networks ends up being stronger because bridging and interop is extremely hard with privacy. It's very tough to bridge privacy. So you end up like, if you end up just kind of basically being locked into the chain once you start using it, um, if it's, if you're, you know, if privacy is the thing you care about, I don't think privacy will be limited to the StarkWare and Canton and Aztec, uh, you know, uh, and Zcash of the world. I think everybody will push into privacy, including Solana, including Base, including BNB. All the chains will try to do it.

Yeah, I mean, important topic. So I think we're going to see that, that continue to be, um, something people are focused on.

So at the same time, I've got another prediction. At the same time, I think on-chain identity is finally going to have a year in 2026. Um, I think you'll see things like, uh, you know, Worldcoin just integrated with Tinder. I don't know if you guys saw this, but you'll see like these integrations with mainstream applications. And I think There's some group that cares about privacy. There's another group that just says, take all my data, put it on chain so that you'll allow me to do things like take better, bigger, uh, undercollateralized loans out on chain, for example. So, uh, on-chain identity breaks out, has a big year in 2026. You see mainstream applications start to adopt some of these technologies, and you also see new things built on top of on-chain, uh, identities such as credit and stuff like that.

Yeah. Can we, can we talk about that a little bit? Because. One of the big topics about fintech more broadly right now is, um, called like, you know, alternative credit scoring, right? That continues to be a major, major focus for, uh, next year, a major, major focus for what's happening at these, you know, all these individual, uh, fintechs. I think Block is trying to do it, and they're starting— this is the way that they, I think, they think they can compete more with the traditional banks in terms of lending. So I kind of— but there's like this like garbage in, garbage out problem. So do you use off-chain, uh, data? Is it just on-chain data? And then the Worldpoint, I think, is like kind of an entirely different point because like that's more around like deepfakes for, you know, uh, Tinders and, and things like that. And then there's the even the different point, which I think most of the time people have talked about on-chain identity has been like these like identity backpacks, which is like, okay, well now I can take my identity across different chains, across different applications, and I get paid for that data. Right. So I guess, do you have a specific area there that you think is most likely to succeed or one versus the others? Like maybe just dig in a little bit more?

Um, no, I have no specific, I have no specific on what will get built on top of like the, the identity, but yeah, no.

Yeah.

You would take the other side though, it sounds like.

Uh, I, I'm very bearish on this like identity backpack things, right? Uh, which has been, I mean, we, we've, we funded a company doing that. You know, in 2021, a lot of people did. I just don't think that consumers care, to be honest, right? Regulators care more than consumers do. I—

Don't consumers want to be able to do more things on-chain? And for that to happen, you need some, you need some sort of identity on-chain.

I think that, but I think this will probably just happen at the wallet layer, right? Like Privy is like most well-connected to be able to do that, right? It's like, okay, now that Privy knows who I am, based on my email, and now everybody uses Privy or Turnkey or like one of these guys.

Right.

I think that's like, that's probably how, you know, quote unquote identity works at the application layer is that whoever actually owns the customer, which gets back to the earlier conversation, is the one who knows who I am. And the company that's using Privy will, you know, have to probably KYC me in a lot of these cases. Right. Or maybe they won't, but then we'll see what happens with the regulation. But I don't think that like, you know, protocol level identity is, is, is going to matter, to be honest. Right. And so, um, I do agree that alternative lending is going to continue to have its moment. I don't know how you do it on-chain in a way that's like particularly fruitful at the moment, to be honest.

We are officially 1 hour in. Nobody has mentioned perps. We've had zero mentions of perps. Let's hear a perps prediction.

Uh, well, you know, I'm, I'm going to say something before, before perps actually. So, cause I want to talk about prediction markets, which are a different derivative. Prediction markets 10x next year in terms of volume, and volume or real volume 10x next year in terms of volume. And the open interest is also up 10x. Does that answer your question, Santi?

The open interest does, for sure. I think I'm happy to see that you included both. Um, uh, yeah, who, um what category within prediction— like, the World Cup's coming up, that could be a catalyst. There's insurance companies kind of percolating. Kashi's doing an event next year. What— across volume and open interest, where is the incremental volume and open interest coming from, and which categories? Like, what— said differently, what is the fastest growing category, and what is the category that loses market share?

So, I mean, sports probably has to lose market share just because it's like 90% of Calsci's volume, uh, and it's like 40-ish percent of, of PolyMarkets. That said, I actually think sports continues to grow on a volume basis tremendously quickly. On an open interest basis, sports gets crushed in terms of market share, right? Because like most of— sorry, go ahead.

Go ahead.

Well, I was just gonna say most of the volume on, on the call sheet, you can look at right now, it's like Sunday, like it is actually Sunday morning, right? And they— people are, you know, betting on the NFL. And so, uh, that obviously doesn't have like sustainable open interest over time necessarily, right? Because these are short-term bets and people kind of come in and come out during, you know, when there's more games on. Um, but I do think we'll see open interest grow significantly on everything business related. I just think like everything that a hedge fund cares about is going to grow, you know, more than 10x.

Yeah, uh, I think I agree with you. I think prediction markets are going to continue to have its moment. It's probably the fastest growing category of crypto, um, across however you want to slice it. Um, where I, I'll just add a layer of, I think you'll see more, more competition. So right now it's just a duopoly. I think That does not hold. I think you invite— you're going to see a whole number of other financial institutions do their own, and legacy players like DraftKings and others try to get into the game. And that is going to be just an interesting battle this year. If I were to put a headline, you know, back in 2017 or 2018, we had the L1 wars, uh, the scalability wars. 2026 is the prediction market wars. You're going to see a whole bloodbath, and you're already kind of seeing it within, within Kalshi and Polymarket. I think that will just intensify because you've invited a lot of traditional players who want to get into the mix, and it will be very revealing. It will be interesting to see. Maybe the new— the question there is, what is the market share of Polymarket versus Kalshi today? How does that end up in December of next year? I think both go down. I think Kalshi a bit more, just given what happened with Robinhood, which is a bit of like a cheating of a prediction. And the investor base of Polymarket likely allows it to be kind of have more defensibility. But I still think that both, both like cap market share goes down quite significantly.

Yeah, total volume up. Market share down.

Total volume up, market share down. And then other categories, not enough to make a huge dent, like insurance and some of these others, but interesting into 2020.

New things. Yeah, I don't hate that. Yeah, go ahead.

I just want to say one thing though, like you mentioned DraftKings. So they launched their product, uh, like last week, right? And it was awful. Like, I mean, they acquired a company, you know, in October, they, you know, kind of rushed out this new product. Like you couldn't see the order book. They have no idea, like you couldn't see, um, what was happening on the two different sides in terms of, uh, the pricing. Like, their— the fill and liquidity was worse than any other, uh, any of the other products that are out there right now. Um, so I—

yeah, but others will do this well, Rob. Like, Robinhood will do— Coinbase just acquired the clearing co. Like, others will do this well.

Well, yeah, but I mean, the, the Coinbase Listen, they've done an incredible job of, of being early to this space. I think you can argue that Coinbase has not had a single successful product launch in 5 years.

Oh, I— oh, okay. I, I don't know if I want to do that live. Let me think about that.

I, I, I mean, actually, are we all, are we all too sensitive to be de-banned from Coinbase because you make a bad comment? Or like No, no, no, no. Jeff Doran certainly didn't shy away from that. I think he still, I think ARCA still has an account on Coinbase.

Oh yeah. Why are they so upset? I wonder why. Um, yeah, BASE, dude, BASE is a huge success.

BASE has been from a user perspective, a huge success. Um, at least today from an economic perspective has not been right. Their credit card feature. What's that?

Their credit card.

Don't think anybody's using it. Like the, the, um, NFT marketplace was bad. Like the wallet hasn't really picked up particularly well. Like, uh, you know, we'll see. Right. Um, there's actually like a viral Twitter post that went around, uh, a day or two ago, a little bit about this.

Yeah. But it was from Beanie Maxi. I don't know who that is, but like, not who we're taking our takes from these days.

So yeah, no, but I'm, but I, but I actually like, I think a decent amount of that resonates, which is that they, from a product perspective, like You know, they've done the core thing really well, but like, I guess I'm at risk of doing too many things.

I get what you're saying. It's what happened.

Yeah. We talked about this a bunch about how they've, I think they've, they've done too many M&A transactions. Like I've said that like probably 4 or 5 times, uh, cause it's just hard to integrate. Right. And it's hard to launch new things.

And so is Deribit not going well?

I, I, uh, it has, Deribit has lost market share since they acquired it.

I will say, like Echo integration, I'm seeing it live. Product support is just not where you want it to.

I have a prediction around this. I— one of my predictions, number 11, is that U.S. crypto exchanges will face major competition from two different sides. One is the brokerages. So both the new brokerages and the old, like the Charles Schwabs and the Robinhoods. But also from the Asian exchanges. I think you will see Binance push into US, Bybit will push into the US, OKX push into the US. This is probably the second half of 2026 that the Asian exchanges come. But yeah, I think you will see a lot of competition from the US to the US crypto exchanges. Now, I think they're operating well. Like, I take the other side of your Coinbase thing. I'm— I actually think Coinbase is operating very well right now. I think Kraken is operating very well right now.

Yeah, Kraken's Done great, had a great year.

But you're gonna— and Kraken will go public, which will be great for their brand. But yeah, I think you'll see more— they'll, they'll have more competition than they've ever had.

Yeah. I mean, and I, and I think, uh, I don't want to sound too harsh because I know how that came across was very harsh. Clearly, like, with the event that they had— what was that, earlier this week, or was it— was last, late last week? Uh, you know, they came out and they announced all of these things that they're working on. And it's, you know, we've, we've talked about, or we've known that they were probably going to launch like white-labeled stables for a while. They're obviously been pushing into payments, like they're, you know, they're trying to do prediction markets, obviously they're trying to do, um, you know, stocks, etc. And so they're— the ambition is, I think, to be commended, and they're clearly trying to, like, you know, capture a large part of the market. But it's really, really hard to do that, and I think they've, they've struggled in the past around doing too much and just not having enough focus to really nail something. Right. And so that's what I really worry about with them.

Can I ask you guys— it wouldn't be a 2026 thing. You know, I'm going to ask the question, what would you rather own and hold it for the rest of the year? And I'm going to give you some data points. Hyperliquid at $24 billion. Coinbase at $65 billion. Polymarket at $15 billion or $12 billion, whatever it's worth on the secondary market, or AAVE Uh, $2.4 billion.

And they're all—

and oh yeah, Rob said Polymarket. Um, or, or, or actually, because are they all liquid? Is, are they, is, is, uh, is Polymarket equity liquid?

Yeah, yeah, I assume you can. I mean, I get pinged every other day. Um, Athena, and add Athena to the bag, uh, $3 billion, because that has a couple bags of Rob.

Who's your favorite child, Rob?

No, no, but I, but you, you guys are acting like this is like bag bias. Uh, and, and it's not, it's not untrue that like I invest in things that I think are going to do well, right? Like the correlation goes the other direction though, right? Or the causation goes the other direction, right? The, I think the reality is, is Coinbase is a big mature company. I think they'll, you know, they'll do, I think there, there's a lot of pressure from like new people coming into the US market. I think, you know, obviously they're trying to do a lot. Right. And so do I think like Coinbase is going to double in value next year? I don't. Right. Um, do I think that— does I— do I think that Polymarket will 10x its volume next year? I do. Right. And so that's not bag bias. It's just like what I actually believe. Um, I think Athena is going to do really well next year as well. So, uh, but Athena is very much a pro-cyclical, you know, asset. Right. And so you have to believe that Ethereum is going to do well and Solana is going to do well. And that, you know, there's going to be a lot of, of, of people who want to trade tokens. And, you know, we're having that discussion on this pod right now that, you know, maybe, uh, 2026 will be a tough year for that, right? And so then if that's a tough year for that, then Athena obviously is not gonna— is gonna struggle on a relative basis. But I, I, listen, I think Athena will do really well next year as well, and I'm much more bullish on '26, I think, uh, than Santi is.

Santi, what are you holding?

Oh no, you gotta answer that question.

I don't think on a 1-year time horizon because I think I'm too busy as a founder to be like actively investing in trading. And I think that I'm going to say the same thing. Yeah, I know. And so I'm like, I don't actually invest on a 1-year time. Like, I'm like, let me close, let me own some assets where the market went down 50%, I'd be happy. And let me just have a 5 to 10 year time horizon. Are you gun to my head right now? Gun to your head. Gun to my head.

Polymarket, Athena, Aave, or Hyperliquid?

Probably Coinbase.

Why?

Because I think, yeah, I agree with Rob that Polymarket has done phenomenally well and they will do well, but their valuation went from like— is already up like 15x in a year. I don't know what it was at the beginning of the year, you know, 30x in a year. And yeah, I just don't— you know, you got a mean reversion and things calm down and I'm bullish Polymarket long term, but Yeah, it just went up 15x in a year. So if a stock went up 15x in a year, you know, I probably wouldn't be buying it.

That's why everyone missed NVIDIA.

I'd look and that's why people— I mean, like the counter— many counters like look at RAMP, like RAMP's valuation just, I mean, just triples every 6 months. So there's many, there's many counterarguments. Athena, I used to— it used to be one of my biggest positions this year. I just, I don't know enough about the unlocks and all that kind of stuff to it's just that, that part scares me, but I'm like extremely bullish on Athena's business and Guy as a person long term. Yeah, Aave, Aave is probably a buy at some point too. And I forget, I forget your own Hyperliquid. I think Hyperliquid is at risk of— I just remember breakpoint 2021 Solana, how exciting Solana was. It had just hit $250 or $260. And it had to— for Solana to become Solana, it had to fall to $8 and it had to go through the trials and tribulations that come with that. And I think at some point, I don't know if it's '26 or '27, like every startup goes through this. Hyperliquid hasn't had their trials and tribulations moment yet.

Yeah, yeah. Not, not too dissimilar. I would— I skew towards Aave. I think the market probably punished it a little too much given this vote and snapshot. I think deposits are stickier. And they have been for a while. And I'm, I think it's an interesting optionality that can deliver on the neobank thesis and actually kind of vertically integrating up and acquiring users. I think it bodes well with increased regulatory clarity and adoption. I think they have an interesting brand and staying power. And Lindy, and it's, uh, Flo's perspective, I think the, the, I think it might be the shining light of the, the, the app trade that I talk about of capturing more fees and, and just evaluation being a bit more sensible. It's the lowest valuation across the board, so I think from that standpoint it's also interesting paired with, uh, you know, really high TVLs. I think the the, the pretty interesting perhaps narrative that you might catch on to is it just gets comped to a traditional financial institution or a neobank. And if that happens, I think that— I, I think the team is positioned well to execute on that. But all this, like, I'm not necessarily thinking what triples or doubles from here. I'm thinking what actually— if the market goes down 20%, like, where do these things trade? I think Coinbase can go very easily down to $20 billion. Polymarket, I think, can very much re-rate down. Hyperliquid too, if like, if like people stop trading because they don't have any money to punt. So I think like the biggest moat, like which protocol has the biggest moat? I think it's AAVE because deposits are sticky and they have been sticky for a while and they just continue to dominate. And I think it could be an interesting entry point given this vote that's happening. But Athena is second there. Like Athena would have been my second choice. Because to Rob, I think made an interesting point. I got— I think Circle actually does in a rate environment, like, they're just— Athena actually benefits from— if it's a hedge against my bearishness, because if, if I am— if I'm very wrong and markets rip, I think Athena benefits from— in that environment where rates go down and funding rate persists, I think that business does quite well.

Yep.

And and I think the market, the stablecoin narrative continues to be really strong from an adoption standpoint. I think the team is— we've interacted with them on the inversion side of like plugging them in. And I think in those conversations, like, I think I've appreciated the BD muscle that Guy and the rest of the team have. And I think across all the other different stablecoin issuers, Athena is more like a credit fund. And the yield from my standpoint as a builder, I think that they offer a compelling product that some of the other stablecoin issuers do not. And from that standpoint, I sort of like it too.

Yeah, I'm going to keep us moving forward. I've got two more predictions that are in a similar bucket. One is I think in 2026, most teams disband their governance teams and start to merge the labs and the foundation. Actually, I think you'll see mergers of labs and foundation or just people disband the foundation. You'll see people with that disbanding governance teams. and I think a new function will get created. This is a little self-serving because we have a product in this market now, which is investor relations. But I think, uh, teams with tokens, especially teams where, let's say you're like, uh, you know, let's put a number on it, like above a $300 million FDV, teams will realize they really need some sort of investor relations function. In that same light, I think, uh, equity versus token starts to merge. I think we're still multiple years away from You know, it fully merging. I think eventually, many years out, it merges, but I think the best founders will start to drive returns and employee alignment to one mechanism, not two. So investor relations, one mechanism, not two, is my prediction for 2024.

I had a, um, a related but not same prediction, which is that I think a major company, a major like listed, you know, call it, you know, Fortune 500 acquires an L1 devco and labsco.

Hmm.

Aptos?

A major one. I'm not gonna—

Wait, you think a major company or you think a major—

Yes, a company acquired a big L1 or L2.

I actually could see this happening, but not a major L1 or L2 because it's too expensive. I think they would acquire like a kind of second or third tier.

We'll see.

Rob, do you have knowledge of this happening? Because you can't cheat on your predictions, man.

I'm cheating with all these. Wow, Aptos is sub a billion. Is that right? Oh no, no, 2 billion FDV.

But remember, by the way, if you're a, if you're an acquirer and you want to buy, so what we've seen obviously, and we can talk about this, we don't need to talk about this again, but we've obviously seen this thing where you like acquire the, you know, Labs entity and like nothing goes to the token holders.

Yeah.

And the thing I'm talking about, of course, you want to be able to operate the chain itself. So you need to be able to buy the Labs entity as well, or the DevCo as well. Sorry. And, but for all of these guys that have like, you know, a lot of the tokens sitting on the quote unquote balance sheet, right. And that's what, you know, is driving this FDV really high. Like if the, if the actual like public float is a lot lower. Yeah. Like you don't actually need to pay out that many people.

You're not paying $2 billion for Aptos if Aptos is sitting on $1.5B themselves, then you're paying them, you know, and you'll pay out some token holders. And so, all right. Interesting prediction. Um, Rob, do you have any regulatory or political ones related to the midterms or related to just anything with policy and regulation?

So I don't, um, I will say this is somewhat maybe, uh, related. Uh, because this is a big topic at the CFTC right now and something that, um, the, the thing that I'm joining, the Digital Asset Market Subcommittee, has been talking about. But it's about putting, uh, tokenized collateral into traditional, like, trading markets, right? Uh, either through the DTCC or through, um, uh, you know, maybe at the, from, um, uh, like directly out of a broker-dealer. um, or, or an FCM or something like that. And I do believe that there will be a major either FCM or, you know, directly at the DTCC or, uh, or a clearing organization that will take tokenized collateral as a major part of their business by the end of the year.

Hmm. I like that prediction.

Can we, can we, uh, can we ask just a question? Like, what do you think, uh, maybe not in your predictions, but what's the biggest risk to derailing your predictions?

The biggest risk is that you're right and that like AI blows up and, uh, I don't, uh, here's, here's the risk. The Blackwell, here, I'll get concrete. The Blackwell chips from NVIDIA do not produce the same gains essentially, um, like an output that people think they will. So then it turns out the whole CapEx cycle in AI is not right. And then it turns out, yeah, Santi, you're right. The whole market's levered to AI. So if the, if we, if the Blackwell chips suck and it's like, oh damn, we're actually not improving the AIs anymore. Um, and these LLMs are not getting better outcomes. Then, um, yeah, we got to pull back a bunch of spending and that's going to impact crypto. And I mean, it's just tough to do well when the whole market's pulling back. Um, and that's, that's the biggest risk.

Before you go, Rob, like specific to crypto though. like, let's put, let's put like macro aside, be like, okay, you know, time and time again in this industry we do some shit that's self-inflicted pain. And so that's sort of like what I'm focused on. Is there something specific to the industry that would like— you'd be like, this doesn't pan out, I'd really kind of restructure my book?

I mean, I think the biggest risk is just that because of the fact that token prices haven't done well if we can't get people really excited about an on-chain economy where token prices do well, then things will just continue to bleed out, right? And, you know, we've seen, I think, you know, continued liquidity kind of moving out in the space. And the, you know, the bear in me, if I were to, you know, really try to bring out my inner Santi, you know, would be that while there continues to be new users, but not a single person wants to buy a token. And if nobody buys the tokens, maybe the users don't come. Come either, right? And that is the question.

Yeah, actually, would— I don't disagree with you guys, obviously, but I think it's gonna be— for me, what I would make me flip bullish, I guess, is— would be the way I would answer this question is, um, if putting aside AI and all that stuff continuously— because I, you know, don't really I would say maybe like a highlight of an app, like a DeFi protocol really hitting a lot of volume. And maybe it's Visa really breaking out earnings and then the trick, like, you know, Aave of the world or, you know, some of the apps that deserve a little bit more bid actually start catching it. I don't know if that's a good answer, but that is something that I'm sort of paying attention to that would invalidate my bearishness. But obviously, yeah, I'm, as I said last year, I think I'm gonna— I'm paying a lot of attention in AI and what's happening in that development. So like, if I were to do expert calls, I would want to figure out how good those chips are coming in. And I listened to one of the podcasts, a GA guy, the chairman of GA, and said, hey, listen, we're not actually jumping out of our seats to make investments in AI We want to see how AI runs through our book first, our portfolio companies, and they have hundreds to inform everything else. So better for worse, we just have to pay attention to that. So I don't know if that persists and companies really said differently. EPS growth is like off the charts in Q1. You're like, oh, okay. I could see, I could see, I could see, uh, you know, I probably dialed back down the, the cash as a percentage of my portfolio.

Let's, um, I know we're coming up on time here. Any predictions that you guys have that we didn't get to cover that you guys want to bring up?

I had a bunch of stablecoin ones, but I will, uh, we'll talk about those another time.

So how about you?

Yeah, I, um, I have two hotter ones. One is I think the decentralized storage narrative is going to return, and this is probably my take that is prediction that is most likely to be wrong, I will say, but I'm going to give it anyways. I think the decentralized storage, this idea reenters the narrative as like, and I think like Filecoin was just too early becomes the line here. I think if you look at what some of the smartest, some of the smartest people that I know in this world, right, like some of the best people at Jump and Aptos, some of the best people at Sui, say what you will about Aptos and Sui and their tokens are down. I know we were talking about that, but like, you know, some of the smartest engineers I know are actually working on this project. this problem. Um, and I just saw the thing that kind of pushed me over. So I was already thinking about it a lot. And then the thing that pushed me over was, uh, the Telegram founder, Pavel, Pavel Durov. Um, uh, he, they, they just announced that they're working on this exact, like, you know, the biggest product they've ever built outside of the Telegram messaging app. I watched his launch presentation and it's the exact same idea that Aptos has with, um, it's like, I think called Walrus or something like that, or maybe Sui's thing is called Walrus. Um, yeah, Aptos has another one that they launched with Jump that I'm forgetting the name right now. Um, but yeah, Telegram's launching some— something is happening in this space. I don't know what it is yet, but do you—

would you, would you, would you go along projects that embed it? Or, or like, like Filecoin is, is, is at a $2.6 billion val.

I'm not, I'm not buying Filecoin, nor am I buying Aptos, nor am I buying Sui, but I think that there's something here and I think other companies will get funded. I, I'm not smart enough to know what's a problem.

Like, what's the demand case for it?

I think the demand is that a lot of like decentralized crypto stuff is still built on, um, is here's the, as I understand it, decentralized crypto stuff is still built on very, very, very centralized AWS. And yeah, if like Cloudflare and AWS go down, we shouldn't have Ethereum go down. Um, not that that necessarily happened. So I'm not sure of that. I think you need some sort of AI thing. To show up with decentralized storage. Again, not smart enough to actually have a concrete idea here, but I'm just seeing people way smarter than me start to work on this as a, as a problem. That was one of my predictions. I have another prediction around DePIN. I think we finally get DePIN summer or DePIN 2.0 right now. On-chain revenue. I was trying to find this. I think on-chain revenue is only at like $40 or $50 million from DePIN right now. I think that grows 3x. I think DePIN companies lead the way. From being incentive-led protocols to revenue-led protocols. I think if you look at like Dawn and Daylight and Hive Mapper and Helium and Geodnet, these guys are going to start generating real revenue. It won't be crazy. It might be $5 million a year, $10 million a year. But a lot of those founders are, I think, built very different than crypto founders. And they actually will talk about the revenue and talk about, I don't know, the like growth of the actual underlying business. And I think Deepin will have a nice year.

I agree with that a lot, and I was wrong about it in my prediction earlier this year. I think it will happen in the next 12 to 18 months, and you're seeing it in Helium, just the number of users and the burn. Hive Mapper, I was talking to, you know, founder there, and GeoNet, like across the board, I think you're seeing some real, real demand that I think transcends the pure speculative drive. And I think that's very real.

Yeah. My very last prediction, number 15, is I think perps come to TradFi. And this looks like a couple of things. I think stocks move on-chain and get perpified. I think on-chain trading venues— I think on-chain trading venues will be the winner of this. I think they'll do well. The DEX-to-CEX ratio will keep going higher. And I think actually the inverse is true, which is perps will start coming to traditional venues, exchanges, brokerages, rather than just being this clear, like purely crypto-native play. And I think a lot of traditional tradfi folks will see perps as just a really, really, really good product. And also stocks will come on-chain. I mean, it's already starting to happen, but I think that'll only increase.

Yeah, Brett Harrison announced the deal today, earlier today, which is—

did you guys do that?

No, no, no, we didn't do it. My ex actually led it on the strategic side. But, you know, obviously he's trying to bring—

I thought you were saying— I thought you're saying I thought you were saying my ex, like my ex-girlfriend. I took a stick in there.

Yeah. No, but, um, you know, obviously he's trying to bring perps to traditional markets. There's another startup called QFEX trying to do that. Uh, that's been obviously a topic of conversation at all of the, um, all of the major, you know, crypto brokerages. I, um, I think perps are a really, really good retail product. And I agree with you that we'll probably get perps that will— one, I agree with you that, you know, decentralized exchange will continue to take market share centralized. And two, I agree with you that we'll see perps on more and more products. I mean, Trade XYZ has done an incredible job, uh, here. Um, I don't— but I don't know if perps end up being a huge institutional product, uh, in the traditional markets yet. I think it's more of a retail, uh, business. But, um, I do think it will— it'll be an interesting year for that.

So Anything else before we wrap, guys?

Last thing I'll say it. I think Agentic Commerce disappoints. So that maybe, maybe that's the final one.

I like that. I like that. I think it's a little over, overhyped right now. Um, cool. Well, before we wrap, I just want to say thanks to everybody for listening. We, I don't know if we'll record another episode in 2025. Um, maybe we will, maybe we won't, but yeah, it's been a good year. Big shout out to Will, our producer, for just everything, putting in the work behind the scenes, making the show go out. And, um, Santi, Rob, thank you guys. And yeah, to all the listeners, we've had, uh, hundreds of thousands of people listening to this, uh, every month and every quarter, and it's crazy to see. And yeah, just appreciate all you guys.

So absolutely. Yeah.

Cool.

Cheers, folks.