Takeaways From DAS 2025 | Weekly Roundup

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All right. Happy Friday. Post-DAS day. What's up, Mibs?

How are you feeling, buddy? You get any sleep last night? You got a little bit of rest?

Yeah, a little bit of sleep. How we doing?

I'm doing great. Yeah. What a week. What a week.

Did you go to the March Madness celebration last night?

You know what? I actually missed it.

Shame on us.

I didn't go either. Yeah.

I ended up getting, I went to the, there was a Superstate event. I know you were there. We were there at the beginning and I ended up staying there decently late, but might've had a couple of whiskeys and yeah, ended up staying longer than I thought.

But yeah, it was a great, everyone does at the end of a good event.

Yeah, good. Really good. Yeah, it, you know, the, the vibe is just so polar opposite to, I mean, a lot of the sentiment in the industry, especially just going to some other industry conferences, which, you know, like ETH Denver was a completely different story. And that has nothing to do with the organizers of ETH Denver or anything like that. It's, you know, usually conference organizers get blamed or, you know, kind of praise dropped on them based on stuff that's roughly out of their control. But I cannot tell you You know, we opened up talking about this at DAS, the divergence in sentiment in between different parts of the market. Uh, it's pretty unlike anything I've ever seen. And usually you have the natives in the space who are all bulled up and excited and building cool stuff. And that corner of the industry is a little bit in the gutter at the moment, or just feeling down. And the institutional corner, which is usually much more measured and, you know, long-term oriented, you know, they are like coming out of their shoes excited.

So the most excited we've ever seen them. I would say that, yeah, there's a real divergence between, uh, the, you know, since we started Blockworks, we're coming up on what, this is 7 and a half years now. The crypto natives were always excited trying to get the institutions to come in and try to get them to come to the events, get to sell some things to them. And now the institutions are more excited right at the same time that the crypto natives are getting exhausted.

It's fascinating. And yeah, yeah, it might actually be worth doing a little bit of a history of this event because, you know, a lot of people, I got a lot of questions like, oh, we finally have this institutional conference and we've been doing this for 6 years.

That both made me so happy and so frustrated. I got that so many times. They're like— so many people are like, yeah, great, you guys are finally doing an institutional event. I was like, dude, oh, if only you knew the trials and tribulations that went into getting here.

Oh my God. I mean, DAS was the first big bet the farm, uh, event that we did at Blockworks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the first day. Okay, so Mike and I started Blockworks December of 2017. 2018 We were just hosting these kind of— what do you even call them? Happy hour networking event.

Happy hours. Yeah. Yeah.

Happy hours.

I think we can call them.

Yeah. They were 3 hours after work. Yeah. Drinks, maybe one talk or something like that.

One panel. Yeah. One panel. And yeah, they'd usually be 6 to 10 PM. I think our budget for each venue was somewhere between $5,000 to $10,000. Something like that. We would usually do them at this like loft area in Chinatown. Chinatown.

Yeah.

Where the elevator worked. Half the time, and somehow it always rained on the day of our events. So that was 2018. And then we hired this woman, Julie Muroff, who's still our head of events. We're so lucky to have her. And she basically brought this idea. She said, look, to be in the event— and she had built and helped sell two, I think, events businesses to Informa, which is a big events company. She's like, you got to go really big to do events. And she put this budget in front of Mike and me to do an event in 2019. And remember, our events were like, I think we would spend somewhere between $5K to $10K and top line would be like $15K to $20K maybe.

Yeah. It was to give people a sense of the numbers here. So we started doing this in May of 2018, really full-time. We did, we did our first event in February 2018, but you and I both still had full-time jobs. The first, one that we did when we went full-time was May. Uh, I was actually the one that we lost money on. So only event we've ever lost money on. Not great. Not great. Like 2 days after quitting our jobs.

Quit our jobs May 1st, 2018. May 10th, we hosted that event during, uh, New York Blockchain Week when that was still going on.

Yeah.

And we whipped. We whipped.

But the whole, the revenue for the entire year was about $200,000 or $220,000. And Julie put a budget in front of us, uh, for $400,000 for this event. And the two of us were too scared to tell her that we couldn't do it because we had no business hiring someone like real, like real employee, you know, like we should work at real companies.

Our first employee was Mike's high school friend. Second was this NYU grad who I think Blockworks was his first, first job. Shout out, Rito. And so Julie was like our first real employee. So we didn't want to show that, like, we were like, Blockworks is a real company, so you can't— you got to do real company things, like spend a lot of money on events, not a little bit of money. Yeah.

So we went into that year and keep in mind, let's setting the scene here. The 2018-2019 bear market was really pretty brutal that, you know, there really hasn't subsequently been anything quite that bad. You know, it was bad after FTX blew up in 2022, but this was really—

1/10 as bad. Not nearly. I mean, I remember sitting with you having beers in 2019 saying like, if this industry doesn't work, Would you work at like Uber or Netflix?

Yeah, it got really dark. It was like tumbleweeds proverbially blowing through the industry. It wasn't even, you know, I know people look at sentiment on crypto Twitter today, but at least there's energy there. People are arguing and debating about things. It was just, it was just tumbleweeds. Yeah. And so we took this really big bet the farm event on an institutional conference in the form of DAS. Yeah, the budget was twice what we did, um, in all of 2018 revenue.

And the institutional thing was important because there was already this 800-pound gorilla in the industry, and that was CoinDesk's Consensus. And so we, I think actually still to this day, we have this really strong, like, go-to-market belief that you can't just try to, like, attack a market as this, like, all-encompassing thing. You have to find your niche. And so our niche was the institutions were underserved in crypto.

Yeah.

And there weren't even like today, it's like, yeah, there's an institutional crowd in crypto. But back then it was like, I mean, you would, you would email 200 people who worked at banks and hedge funds and get like, what, one response maybe? And then you have to convince, you have to get on the phone with that person to get them to attend the event for free. Like it was, uh, so that, but that was our niche. It was really important to have that niche, I think. So that was May. We set up the event for May of 2019. And we rented Cipriani and we're like, look, if we're doing it right, we're doing it right. And you remember Fusion coming in?

I do. Saved the day.

We bet the farm. We bet. I mean, if, if that event didn't work, we bet every dollar in Blockworks' bank account. If that, if that didn't work, there would be no Blockworks. Like, we just— the event had to work or there would be no Blockworks. And we were coming up against it. Leading into it and, you know, got some big sponsorships near the end and made the event work.

And it was, uh, yeah, I mean, you brought the, yeah, Fusion sponsorship in, which made the event, uh, cash flow positive. And it wasn't even massively cash flow positive, we did like a little bit of profit, but we're happy we were in the game then. And, you know, that's when we learned, uh, you know, Blockworks has been a series of just learning lessons, but definitely scale of events matters quite a bit. But that's what got us into the bigger conference game. So it told us, you know, be niche, like own a niche. And, you know, within that niche, scale up as much as you possibly can. And so, you know, we had, you know, we've changed our event strategy a little bit over the years, but the next year we started doing—

Oh no, no, no. Then we were like, oh my God, these are so good. These are so much better than the happy hours. Let's run it back. So we decided to do DAS markets. Later that year, which was chaos. Chaos. And then we're like, could we outsource our events? And so we did like Coinalts and other, other, we hosted Multicoin Summit, right? You remember that? I think in 2019 too. Yeah. And, and then we were like, okay, actually there's all this opportunity in, in London, in Europe. And Asia was like really dead then. So we'd like never really even thinking about Asia, but it was like, we're like, oh, we could, we could go to, to London. So we did London, we did DAS London, February of 2020. And I remember there are these two Israelis there who were wearing masks. I was like, a bunch of scrubs.

Like they took, they took the Balaji tweet seriously.

Like, I remember that too. Yeah.

It's like, what are these people doing wearing masks? Yeah.

I was like, come on, guys. Come on. And yeah, a month. But we basically had another Bet the Farm event planned for New York, which was New York Blockchain Week, May of 2020. We were all in on this event, by far the biggest event we'd ever started planning. And yeah, obviously COVID hit March 2020. And, um, that was, that was scary because we had basically the, the economics of conferences are you outlay all this cash up front to book the venue and you have to book venues way in advance. The bigger the event, the farther in advance you have to book them. So we'd outlaid all this cash and then we didn't know if we'd get the money. Or we didn't, we didn't know if we'd get the money back for the venue. And there's all these legal terms like, what's the thing in the contract about like, worst measure? Yeah.

So you're so basically the way that the cash flow profile for conferences, what it looks like is you're deeply in the red until about 1 or 2 months before the conference, and then you're in the green. And what you're kind of trying to line up—

you hope you're in the green.

You hope. Yeah, you hope you're in the green. But it's like there's a big outlay upfront for, you know, venue costs and things like that. And you're gradually, you know, sponsors and tickets are kind of coming in and you're gradually kind of breaking closer and closer to breaking even. And then, you know, in the 1 or 2 months before you go into the green, hopefully if you've done a good job. And so yeah, we— COVID hit basically right around the time that we were breaking even. And so I don't know if people remember this, but there were all these— this was very controversial from an insurance standpoint because you actually had, you actually had a bunch in a bunch of force majeure clauses. You were specifically, if you like business interruption insurance, you were specifically protected against a pandemic. But, you know, insurance companies aren't set up to pay out every single company in the US at the same time. Right. So they literally just couldn't do it. And yet at that point, Blockworks, something like 80% of our revenue came from conferences.

Yeah. Yeah.

So yeah, you can, and by the way, people forget this because they just remembered 2020 and 2021, but Bitcoin dropped from something like $9K to $4K in almost 2 days. And so we were thinking this industry might be cooked, but even within this industry, we're in like the worst episode possible.

We're definitely cooked.

And we couldn't even, we couldn't even come in.

Company in crypto. How stupid are we? Yeah.

So. I actually have to shout out at the time, you know, sponsors, it took us a long time to get money back from the venue, like a year or something like that. And I have to shout out the sponsors of that conference, actually. BitGo was in particular, I don't want to, you know, call anyone out in person, but they were really good about renegotiating and turning that—

BitGo was the GOAT. BitGo, I remember Belshi came through and was like, turn my sponsorship into a digital thing. To him was probably a small thing. I don't know. I remember it was like $30K or $40K or $50K, but for us it was huge.

Massive. Yeah. And so we basically just ground it out for the rest of that year. We couldn't do anything. That actually was the acceleration of the media part of our business. So editorial was birthed at the beginning of 2021. We launched January 11th or 12th, 2021. Uh, that's when we really started to lean into podcasts and that's when we created webinars because we literally couldn't do in-person conferences.

So we had to We, it was that, that was the, that was the genesis. That event getting shut down in March of 2020 is why Blockworks is the media company it is today. Cuz we said, oh my God, never again will all of our revenue be tied up in events. Let's go all in on the digital side too. And so we spent, I mean, we had no events to host obviously cuz it was COVID. So we spent all of 2020 building the media site, hiring the journalists, building the in-house podcast to, to launch in, you know, Q1 of 2021 and. That, that created Blockworks, the digital, the media company as we know it today, right? So back to DAS. So then what did we do in '21 with DAS? Did we do two? We did DAS London and New York, right?

Yeah. And we did that for two years. We did London and New York. And then we had a strategy where, you know, we've generally— the trajectory of Blockworks conferences has been bigger and fewer. And so We're like, we might be splitting. There's a lot— there's a huge amount of overlap between New York and London, which I don't think is the case anymore. But at the time, the industry was much smaller, especially the institutional part of the industry. So like, you know, we should be consolidating this. And this was in the beginning of 2022, if you remember, this was before everyone found out about FTX. And there were all of these companies that were really interested in spending more time in Washington, D.C. then, right? So SBF and FTX were kind of leading the charge here, but it was, it was all the big institutional players. It was, you know, the Coinbases of the world, the Circles of the world, the BlockFi.

Oh, you're jumping ahead. You're thinking about— this is 20— you're thinking later on.

I was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is '22. We were planning because you have to plan.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2 or 3 years out. And so 2021 was good. It was a, it was a good year for institutions. Yeah, everyone was coming in.

2022 was good too, but permissionless was so good right? It was such an outsized success and such a bigger event than we'd ever done. We said, what are we doing hosting these little dinky institutional events? Yeah, barely any institutions still in the game. We've been doing this for 5, 6 years. It's like no institutions still in the game, all in on the crypto natives, permissionless. So in 2023, we said, let's go all in on permissionless, mm-hmm, US crypto conference. And we made the big mistake of not hosting DAS.

Yeah, right. Yeah. Well, what I think we were going to do, we were gearing up. We remember we were going to consolidate DAS from London and New York into D.C. and then FTX blew up. That was the plan. And then.

Oh, right, right, right.

And then we, you know, we got— it went from companies wanting to be in Washington, D.C. to being completely radioactive and they didn't want to be seen, right? They didn't want to get on anyone's radar because you know, chances were you were going to get sued or indicted or whatever. And so, yeah, we just— we— that was a pretty tough— that was a really tough mistake to make because not only did we then have to pause on having DAS at all, but we had to move it from Washington, D.C., and we pushed it out a couple of months to London of 2024. So there was a big gap in hosting DAS. We had to eat a bunch of event costs, you know, right at a time when you know, 2023, everyone's revenue fell quite a bit.

We wanted to do DAS in DC in '24.

I think, I think it was, it was around that. It was either end of '23, it was end of '23, and then we pushed into March. But yeah, it was just, yeah, it was a really costly strategic error. And then we missed the Asia. Yeah, we didn't, we underestimated the amount of energy that was going to go into Asia. And we hosted Permissionless at the same time as Token. And people kind of memory hold themselves, like Token is a phenomenal event, right? Like huge success to that team. But they went from something like a 750-person event to a 5,000-person event in one year. It was a huge, huge growth. And so yeah, that was a very tough year for us on the event scale. But that was tough.

That was tough. But, but now anyway, or then it came back though, then we, but we still didn't do We didn't do New York, right?

It was just London.

So we just, we did DAS London, um, and then we'll get forward to 2025 and just our takeaways from this event in a second. But so we, we did DAS London and Permissionless in 2024. Both of them went great. And actually DAS London was our biggest DAS in history, right? We went from 500 people to 800 to 900, 2,000 to DAS London had 1,700. I remember it was 1,724 because the the hotel we hosted at capped out at 1,724. We had to cap our registration. Um, and at that point I think we were like, oh yeah, DAS is very much back. This is a good event to be hosting. So we said, let's go, if we're doing this, let's go all, let's go, let's go big with it. And so we got basically the, um, dynamics in New York are really tricky because there's only, if you wanna host an event over 2,000 people, in New York, there are only 3 different places you can do it at. There's either like a Brooklyn Warehouse type of vibe, and you have to like create your own space. It's really difficult. That's Brooklyn Warehouse. The, uh, the other is like the Hilton or the Marriott, and they're just kind of like meh type of venues.

Yeah.

Um, I don't want to speak too poorly in case we ever do host an event there, but you're hedging. I'm hedging here. I'm hedging, but we didn't, but we were like, if we're going big, let's go big. And then the third is Javits Center.

Yeah.

And Javits is like just a massive, massive venue. And we're like, look, do we think, because you have to bet on these things far in advance with events, that's why they're so tricky. And so we said, we think the institutional crowd will be here in 2025. Let's get Javits. And so that's why we did it at Javits this year. And this was obviously March 2025. And, yeah, I guess that takes us into this event unless there's anything else from the lore that you want to share.

No, that's great. I'm sure people, uh, this is enough of Yan, but that's, you know, we share this story if there are founders who are listening, you know, there are so many crisis moments and I think this, this informs a strong belief that you and I have that you really only, most of the major innovations or, you know, forward progress in Blockworks has actually come from crises. So the media business part of our business really came from a crisis of not being able to do in-person events. And the strategy of Digital Asset Summit was, um, you know, it went a lot, lots of ups and downs, but now—

yeah, so this ties back into the very first thing we're saying. There's all these people at DAS this year saying, oh my God, so good, you guys are finally doing an institutional event in New York, like, about time you guys did that. And I think every time someone said that to Mike and I, it was just a little pain because I'm like, we've been doing this since 2019 and we're idiots, and at some point we just either didn't do it or pivoted to London, which London is great. And we're doing London again this year too. But like, anyways, happy to be back in New York. It was an awesome event. So takeaway— so summary of the event, then we can do takeaways. Summary of the event, it was the biggest DAS in history by a country mile, right? We had 2,500 registrants, 3-day event, 2 floors at the Javits Center. By far our biggest digital asset summit in history.

Yeah, we had some of the best speakers that we've ever had. Obviously, you know, the headline get here with the sitting—

we got the Don.

Yes, we got the Don. Um, we had, you know, we had Michael Saylor, we had Cathie Wood, we had Mohamed El-Erian. Mohamed El-Erian. It was just, you know, it was a phenomenal, uh, set of speakers. And I think the quality of the attendees— one of the things that I'm most proud about, we used to have all these discussions about do we want to scale this up to more people because you lose the high quality of attendee. I think we've done a good job of scaling the conference while keeping the quality of the attendees very high and very institutional. And so, yeah, I think in terms of the takeaways for this year. Yeah.

The other highlight for me, this is a— I got dinner with them. There was a Galaxy dinner last night hosted by Alex, Alex Thorn over there who runs the research arm and I sat next to Saylor and he's like, he's like, you guys are— it was a machine. He's like, during my talk, I had like 250,000 people watching that on Twitter. And in real time, pictures of me were getting up and then you guys were clipping it in real time. And then there were news stories about my talk on Blockworks. And, uh, that was like, I mean, it has taken us 7 and a half years to get to that machine. Every— I feel like every year we have an event, we're like, oh, Why didn't the livestream go better? Why didn't we get the pictures up and like faster? Why don't— so it did take us 7 to anyone building anything else. Like, it takes a while to get the machine going.

It absolutely does. And a massive shout out to the Blockworks team here. I mean, there were so many people that were involved in that.

But yeah, I think we had 40 people on site to make that whole thing happen.

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All right. You want to start with takeaways?

Yeah. Yeah. So I think the— I think that it's a really interesting time to be in the RWA and the stablecoin space. That's the most obvious thing. But let's try to dig a little bit underneath that, right? I think maybe you can separate out a little bit stablecoins, the stablecoin story, and the RWA story. And the way that I would differentiate that is there's real organic product market fit for stablecoins, both amongst crypto natives. And the original product market fit for stablecoins was, you know, originally all like the, the trading pair, the dominant trading pairs was like Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoins to alts. And now it's mostly stablecoins, especially on offshore exchanges. And that's mostly a Tether story. And then the USDC story has been basically the same thing, but, you know, on US exchanges, and then also in DeFi, right. So there's real product market fit for stablecoins as a trading pair, but also just people wanting to hold dollars on-chain. We will get into this, but I think there's a huge amount of demand for issuers on— there's going to be a bunch of new issuers that come into the market later this year, Although I think they actually have to wait until this stablecoin bill, the genius stablecoin bill from Bill Hagerty, gets passed. But there's like a very organic— there's a lot of stuff on the stablecoin side of things. RWAs are also big, but I think the story there is a little bit nuanced and interesting. And so there's about—

well, you— before we go too deep into RWAs, will you say more about what you mean by the issuers and your thoughts there?

Yeah. So Okay, so I think you can broadly break the stablecoin market today into two groups. There's really USDT and USDC, so Circle and Tether, and then there's the more decentralized stablecoin markets, so like the USDSs of the world from Sky. And a big way to differentiate that is how much, how yield is getting passed back to users and how centralized the issuer is, right? So USDC and USDD are just, you know, dollar collateralized stablecoins. They've got a big pile of treasuries. There's a centralized issuer. And there's an enormous amount of yield that's getting generated there. I think Tether obviously has a much larger market cap than USDC. And, you know, I don't have any special knowledge here, but my sense is that they keep more of that revenue, right? So they don't, you know, what I've heard is that Tether doesn't do a lot of like kickbacks to offshore exchanges or anything like that. They're pretty strict about that. Whereas USDC has a very generous revenue share with Coinbase, which is public. So you know, something like 50% of the— if USDC is custodied or held on Coinbase goes to Coinbase. It's a very large revenue share. And there might be, you know, certain kickbacks to market makers or things like that. And so I think that there's probably a little bit of pressure on the USDC business now. But either way, they're just— these are centralized issuers of the stablecoin. And then you also have more decentralized issuers in the form of Maker, right, where it's a DeFi protocol, and anyone can go in there and dump collateral and then mint DAI or USDS. And so that's what I mean when I say issuer. But when you look forward into the future, I think the product market fit is probably on the more centralized issuer front. And so you're going to get a bunch more brokerages. So like the Robinhoods or the Revolutes of the world, you might get banks, right? The CEO of Bank of America, Brian Moynihan, said that he would consider issuing a stablecoin if this legislation gets passed. You might see large asset managers, right? It's anyone that has a large, uh, it could be there's a bunch of new issuers that are going to come into the market. Um, and we'll have to see who's ultimately successful there.

Nice. All right. You're, uh, going to go into RWAs.

Okay. So there's about $20 billion worth of RWAs that are issued on-chain, like $18 point some as of, uh, looking at rwa.xyz. Uh, a large part of that is private credit. Um, so I think there's like, uh, $14 billion of that is private credit. The rest is mostly treasuries. Now, the caveat to that is that a huge portion of that, some $11 billion is a figure. So that's HELOCs on-chain. And there's a little bit of nuance there about whether or not that's actually on-chain or not, but skip that. The, I was reading one of the takeaways that you posted in your thread from Cindy, um, over at Drift. And, you know, her, her thought was that, okay, there's, there's product market fit here on the issuer side. So people who are issuing on-chain, uh, RWAs and buyers, right? right? Yeah, exactly. Actually, you wanna just read this? Can you just read this?

Yeah, I can read.

Uh, okay.

So this is from, uh, Cindy, who's one of the co-founders of Drift.

Um, okay.

So Cindy said, it's clear from all my conversations at DAS this week that now is the best time in history to be building for institutions in crypto. And there are a couple sub-buckets here. One on the sell side. So the issuers, the largest financial institutions want to tokenize their own RWAs and they need DeFi rails to create the utility, right? Borrow, lending, trading, vaults, things like that. On the buy side, so the investors, crypto-native institutions and high-net-worth individuals are hunting for yields beyond crypto, especially now that DeFi and funding rates lag the Treasury rates, right? So big moves toward higher-yield assets beyond Treasuries that are traditionally unavailable to crypto users like private credit, non-US Treasuries, things like that. She said, I haven't seen so much fervor around institutions and crypto and the intersection there in a while, except this time it's very much becoming a reality. Okay.

Let's, let's pause there for a second because she's got interesting takeaways, but I just want to address that. Okay. On the buy side, I absolutely do see that. And I think there's a huge, there's early product market fit for protocols like Maker, right? Who, it's a, it's a net interest margin business, right? So they've got a bunch of depositors. That they need to pay some amount of yield out to in the form of the savings rate, which I think now is around like 6-something percent. And then they've got a portfolio of assets, right, that are generating yield. And some of that is like some non, you know, yield-generating assets like USDC and their peg stability mechanism. But they've also got, you know, they actually just did their Grand Prix, right? So they've got Biddle, which is signed on, they've got treasuries, but they're going to explore other forms of mostly off-chain yield that they're importing. And whatever the net amount of yield that they're generating across their portfolio is minus what they're paying out to USDS or DAI savings rate holders is their profit. It's their business for the year.

So, and that's where Cindy's spot on where we'll start seeing things beyond, right? Just kind of the traditional treasuries moving on chain into things like private credit.

Yeah. And actually Michael Anderson from Framework did a great expl— I want to, there's an RWE, real world energy, um, like yield being brought on, which I think is super, super interesting. But what I still struggle to see a little bit is on the sell side. I don't fully understand what the value proposition is at this point from the issuer standpoint, you know, and I think that this is where it's important to get very specific and realistic here because, you know, what people say is, oh, you're immediately opening yourself up to a global market. Okay, maybe. But look, look, if I'm Apollo, right? So Apollo issued one of their, um, you know, fixed income, you know, funds, right? Like a, like a distressed credit vehicle on-chain. And they did it on Solana and INC. And I'm asking myself, are there really more buyers on-chain of like, okay, you've got this credit fund, right? You can do it in the off-chain way or the on-chain way. Do you really have more buyers on-chain? I highly doubt it. I would be very surprised, right? Apollo has no problem with distribution. Like they have access to—

this is exactly— okay, so this, this thing that Sailor said to me last night, he said, if you can structure yield in the right way for, for institute, there's an unlimited amount of money in this world for you, right?

Off-chain.

Like there's an unlimited amount of money with Fidelity and Vanguard and the sovereigns and the endowments and the pensions and the Capital Groups of the world. There's an unlimited amount of money in the world. You cannot, you cannot fathom how much money those folks have. And so there's, I agree with you. This is what he's saying. Like you don't need. To move on-chain to get more capital, basically.

I agree. So why are they doing it? I think I'm— this is me completely guessing. I have no insider information. I would guess that I just see you wink.

Is that a—

no, that was not. No, no, I did not. So no wink, no wink happened there for people who are just listening. But I would guess that there's, you know, chains are paying these issuers to issue on-chain. That's— I would, I would guess. In the short term, that's what's happening. Um, and there's a huge— and that could be anyone from L1s to L2s to interop, uh, protocols, right? Like, uh, you know, everyone wants to be very close to the issuers. But I think long term, I think what BlackRock and Apollo and whoever is seeing is that maybe in the long term, there is actually validity here to this idea of a global permissionless, uh, ledger, right? Like, it does actually make sense to me that in the long term, once you break down some of these walled gardens around institutional capital, you could be opening yourself up to a broader market. I just don't think that's the reality today. So if I had to construct a rational argument from the issuer side, say, hey, like, this is a better mousetrap, right? Like, right now you have a bunch of assets that exist in siloed databases with a bunch of compliance hurdles around them. We're going to, we're going to move these things onto a global, you know, permissionless ledger, although we'll get it. We'll do a little caveat around permissionless, you know, going forward into the future. And eventually there's going to be more liquidity here and everyone's going to move their assets onto this. But in the meantime, it doesn't really make sense. So we need a little bit of a sweetener. And I think that L1s, L2s, interop protocols, whatever, happy to give them that sweetener. But I basically think that these issuers are basically yield farming existing protocols today. I think that's right.

I tend to agree. I tend to, yeah.

Yeah.

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So one interesting— I mean, uh, just a small thing, but I thought it was very cool, um, what Michael and Vance on the framework side of things were talking about with real world, another form of yield that exists in TradFi that's being imported on-chain is an energy derivative. And so there's a protocol, I guess, called— well, I don't want to blow up their spot because they're not quite public yet. But basically, there's something called a PPA, a power purchase agreement in the US, where you can kind of go around and put a bunch of solar panels on people's roofs. And where the energy is stored in a battery in their garage. And if you get enough of this energy, you can kind of package it up and then resell it to the grid. And then in addition to that, the US likes this form of renewable energy, right? Because it's solar as opposed to gas or coal or whatever. And so there's a, uh, there's a credit that you can get, which actually trades on a liquid market. And then you can depreciate this asset and further generate another form of yield. And so if you actually can bundle up this stuff and coordinate it at scale, you can generate a pretty good yield, which again, you could import on-chain. And so I think this is another pretty interesting— there's going to be more experimentation here of crypto people looking to coordinate potentially through DePIN additional sources of yield that you can import on-chain. So I think that's a very underexplored— and I know Meltem, you know, she kicked the whole conference off and she's very interested in the energy space as well and where that intersects with crypto. And so yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of experimentation around energy based yields and importing that on-chain.

I like that. I like that. Yeah. Um, all right.

I've got some thoughts.

Um, I'll, maybe I'll do one of my takeaways right now, which is, so I met with a lot of, uh, a lot of founders and CEOs from exchanges, fintechs, and brokerages. So I met with US exchange founders, uh, Asia exchange founders, slash some, some CEOs. Uh, and then there were a lot of actually fintechs and like traditional brokerages, like the Charles Schwabs and TD Ameritrades of the world there. And so I had a lot of interesting chats. Um, one, so let me, I, uh, I wrote down my kind of takeaways from, from this bucket of conversations. The first one is that, uh, all US exchanges are racing to offer equities. And we saw this, um, acquisition with that Kraken made of NinjaTrader. And I don't actually know why they made it, but one, one of my guesses would be because this is part of this big race for US exchanges like the Coinbases of the world to offer equities. They're all, they all want to offer equities on-chain. And I think this, there's this idea that the market structure bill will actually come by the August recess. And if that comes, all of these platforms, they're all, there's a, there's a great convergence of these platforms, right? Robinhood fully turns on the crypto switch. Coinbase and Kraken fully turn on the equity switch. So I think US exchanges are racing to offer equities. Uh, I think the Asian exchanges are racing to enter, or in some instances, reenter the United States. So a lot of them maybe were here in 2017, 2018, they got booted. And now I think— not I think, they are— I know they're all looking to reenter the US. That's very interesting. I think, uh, fintechs are like, I'd bucket this as like the new brokerages, like the the Robinhoods of the world, um, they're all racing to offer crypto assets. And I'm not talking about, you know, Robinhood offering Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana. I'm talking about the top 100. So all the fintechs, all the Robinhood-like companies are looking to offer all crypto assets, as many assets as someone like a Kraken or a Coinbase lists. Um, stablecoin bill, I think people are extremely 95% optimistic it'll come by August. 60% optimistic we'll get it in like the next 60 days. Um, depending on who you ask, obviously everyone's thinking about launching a stablecoin. Um, maybe not actually launching their own stablecoin, but issuing a, basically issuing a stablecoin and doing some sort of rev split. So this could be partnering with USDC and getting more of the revenue. It could be doing like Agora, like a Nick Van Ex thing and do it, you know, doing some sort of revenue share But everyone's thinking about how do they make— everyone looks at Tether's profits and they say, I want some of that. Traditional brokerages, TD Ameritrade, Charles Schwab of the world, they're all thinking about how do we offer crypto tokens. Market structure bill comes in the summer. That means they can start to hopefully offer tokens, they think. How do they actually do that? And then the last thing is like these exchanges are sitting on a ton of cash, billions of dollars of cash. Uh, one, one of the exchanges I spoke with said they're going to do several hundred million in profit just from their on-chain wallet this year. And that's a side business for them, right? So that's, they're sitting on a lot of cash, highly valued equity. They're all going to use cash and equity for acquisitions this year. So that's what I was like, that's a big bucket of takeaways, but it all kind of falls into this bucket of like brokerages, fintechs, exchanges, and their 2025 plans.

I agree. Okay, let's talk about the, let's talk about the exchange bucket here because that's very interesting. I, you know, for such a long time people have talked about consolidation on that side of things, and a big part of why we haven't seen consolidation on the centralized exchange portion of things is local regulation and jurisdiction, right? And that gets very complicated, uh, you know, as you, as you move internationally. But Coinbase has started to move international, right? So they have a US, or they have an international entity where you can trade, um, I think perps and they've got a derivatives product, right, that you can trade, um, internationally. And now you're starting to see the Asian exchanges move into the United States. And so there's going to be more direct one-to-one competition. And I think that's going to be challenging for some of the incumbents that might not have a niche carved out or they might not have critical mass in terms of liquidity or users, but it's going to be very— and there's going to be a lot of competition in terms of product set, right? Everyone wants to be a one-stop shop. So Yeah, you want to be able to trade equities, you want to be able to trade crypto. And yeah, it's going to be probably a little bit of a knife fight, I think.

Yeah, I think it's going to be ruthless here in the exchange space. I mean, if you're looking at the top 10 exchanges on CoinGecko, they're all— they're all Asian exchanges, right? So they're coming into the US. They've got— they know they have— they have customer acquisition dialed, dialed in Asia. And we'll see if they can replicate that in the US.

I agree. I think the challenge from the US standpoint would be one of brand for Asian exchanges, right? Like the trust. Yeah, trust. It's just that's the general perception is that you've been conditioned, especially you've been living in the US, is there's maybe a little shady. I don't know about the risk management practices. There could be weird stuff, you know, around some of these exchanges and their connection to their local government, whatever it is. Right. And so I think that'll be, that'll be the challenge on their standpoint. And then I think from the US standpoint, maybe Coinbase, if I was looking at these exchanges coming in and say, wow, some of these exchanges have much, much more volume and users than, than I do. So what levers can I pull here to maintain my market share and potentially expand into, into their market?

Yeah. One thing that could be interesting to watch here is perps, right? Perps are this like offshore trading mechanism, I think, for— that hasn't really been in the US because it's not legal. And I think maybe the Asian exchanges get more comfortable launching perps in the US, and that pulls market share onto the exchange, uh, the exchanges who are more comfortable taking riskier bets. Like, um, I think Coinbase offers 10x leverage or 20x leverage. If you're an Asian exchange, are you going to be comfortable offering 50x leverage or 100x leverage? Are you comfortable offering perps before Kraken offers perps? Those are— I think it's, uh, they might be more comfortable pushing farther out on the, on the risk spectrum in order to win some of that market share.

Yeah. And I think that there's going to be some exchanges that I think— I know you've been talking about this and I completely agree with you. I think this is going to be finally the year that we see some M&A in crypto. And I'd be watching the exchanges in general and I would see it from all exchanges, right? Because the, you know, the Asian exchanges that are moving into the US, you know, whenever you're moving into a new geography, it's kind of like, okay, I can either try to land and expand here organically or I can kind of buy my way in. Um, so I think there'll be some, you know, some amount of M&A interest on that front.

Okay.

I've got a question on this. So the, you know, when we, the market cycle, 2018, 2019, you know, 2017, 18, 19, 20, if you were a founder like us building in crypto, you built a business on the back of equity, right? BitGo, Anchorage, Fireblocks, Copper, Chainalysis, AmberData, Kyco, Blockworks. Dune, whoever. These are like equity businesses. If you were— if you join— so all the 2017 founders built their businesses like that. You came in in the next cycle, 2021, 2020, 2021, you built token-based businesses. You never really thought about your equity. It was all about the token. And that's been the prevailing, I think, idea of founders is like, oh, if I'm launching a crypto business, it's got to be a token-based business. Yeah. Um, if you start seeing acquisitions of these equity businesses, and you start seeing fellow founders winning, selling their businesses for $500 million, $1 billion, $2 billion, and these are equity-based businesses, will this bring— will we see a new wave of equity-based businesses starting in crypto?

I think so. Yeah, I, you know, I— there's, there's still so many questions around this. And, you know, we look— one of the last panels that we listened to at DAS was a really fun one with, uh, Blockworks' very own Boccaccio hosting between Hasib and, and Mike Dudas about whether or not we still need VCs. And, you know, there's been all of this, you know, discussion about low float, high FDV sort of tokens. I think one thing that's going to happen is building a, building a business that has a token really early stage before you have any product market fit is a real double-edged sword. If, if you're in a bull market and everyone's kind of buying everything and it's going up, it's a huge advantage to you, right? Because you can essentially offer, you know, very non-dilutive but very significant, you know, token packages and get that for, you know, use that to acquire good talent. But it feels like that market's never really coming back. We're never just in an up-only market. You, you need to actually perform to make your token price go up. And so if your token price is going down, that is a massive drag on the morale of the company. And so I think what's going to start to happen here naturally is you're going to start to launch tokens just later in the life of a, of a company. I think we're kind of the market's solution here is just that it doesn't make any sense to me anymore to launch a token before you have a product. There are some exceptions here, right? If you're an L1 or an L2, you might need to do that for grants or whatever. But I think we're going to generally see tokens launched later in the lifecycle. And then I think once we start to, to your point, once we start to see equity M&A, happen on the equity side of things and have that be a viable path towards liquidity, then yeah, I think it will shift some things. And I think founders will be like, do I really need to launch a token here? Is this worth it?

I think, is this worth it?

Yeah.

I mean, Stani, we did this live Empire episode with Stani and Jack from Scale. And, um, hilarious Jack thing. So we sit down at this dinner and, um, sit down at this dinner and everybody's like, Jason, we got a big question for you. Who the hell is Jack O'Holleran and what is SCaLE? Because I swear, you know, the way that Blockworks is able to host the Javits Center, which costs millions of dollars, obviously we have sponsors. And so, you know, Jack is, you know, SCaLE is one of the sponsors and Jack was speaking. We said that Trump was going to speak at 10:40, but we were running like 10, 15 minutes behind. So You know, we got, I think we had like 280,000 people on this live stream waiting and the, and the conference hall is packed waiting for Trump to go on. Everyone's waiting for Trump. And meanwhile, Jack is talking about SCaLE and every, apparently there's like a, there's a big, I don't have a Bloomberg terminal, but there's this like Bloomberg terminal anonymous chat. And the whole chat was just saying, who is Jack? Who is Jack? Who is Jack? There's like hundreds of people.

So who is Jack? Question.

I think Jack, I think, uh, SCaLE got the best deal of the event.

I think they got their money's worth.

Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah, so I think that part of the reason that you haven't seen M&A up until this point was that there was massive overvalue. I mean, it's really overvaluation and unrealistic expectation from founders. And, you know, when you were looking at M&A between two protocols that had a token, there are a lot of questions about how you're going to combine these things and it never really made sense. But I think on everything from the infra side, which infra has been probably overvalued and overinvested in, and you're going to see some consolidation on that side of things, uh, that mostly look like acquihires, I think. But then I would be looking towards the exchanges to look at, um, you know, more significant M&A. And there's going to be two drivers of that. One, which is like, look, I got a lot of money in, this is the market to win, and I'm not going to be, you know, too stingy here. But then there's also going to be some exchanges which you know, are at risk of getting, you know, I think everyone kind of, this is the, this is your make or break time and it's, you got to do something right, uh, to make a splash here. And so I think you'll see M&A activity from both of those standpoints. Yeah. But, um, and then the other thing too is, you know, to complete the circle about stablecoins and why everyone is so bulled up about these things. I would, there was a really interesting interview that Scott Bessant, the Treasury Secretary, did on All In this week. And I would encourage everyone to listen to it and, you know, putting a couple of connecting a couple of dots here. So, at the White House Digital Asset Summit, the slightly lesser well-known Digital Asset Summit, uh, uh, Treasury Secretary Bessant spoke, you know, just a little bit, but he basically said Bitcoin and stablecoins, right? They've been very consistent on that message. And when you listen to his plan and what they're doing globally here from a macro standpoint, it's very, very interesting. I mean, there's basically 4 big policy levers that they have, right? Which is tariffs, spending cuts, tax cuts, deregulation. So they're actually going with the two growth-negative policies right now: tariffs, right, which is revenue-generated but like not good for private sector growth in the US, and spending cuts. And what the spending cuts are doing is— it's most of the growth in the US has been driven like job growth, um, and a lot of growth in the economy has driven from fiscal spending from the government. So they're bringing both of those two things down and they're hoping to make it up by deregulating and, uh, and by doing tax cuts. So they're shifting the growth impetus from the public sector to the private sector. And they're very concerned at this point as well with the amount of debt that the US has, right? And so, you know, part of deregulation, Scott Bessin has talked about, uh, changing SLR requirements for banks. It's actually mentioned that maybe even, uh, the supplementary leverage ratio, even getting rid of that, it sounded like in this interview, that would be very, uh, that'd be pretty radical. But, you know, he thinks they could lower, uh, treasuries by 70 basis points And the other big lever that they have is stablecoins, because they're buyers of US debt. And so, yeah, I think one of the, the interesting ways that you might be able to think about stablecoins are, you know, you have— they're very similar to bank deposits, right? Brian Moynihan, when he was discussing stablecoins, is these are just bank deposits. Um, but the difference is, uh, stablecoins are global bank deposits from day one, and they're lower overhead, and they're backed by treasuries. And they're kind of a new form of bank deposit, which might make sense for a global population. And so there's this unbelievable product-market fit here from, you know, the Treasury Secretary— Treasury Secretary of the United States wants these things because they're buyers of debt. And it actually might make sense for a lot of people globally that want, you know, basically access to US dollars, like a US dollar banking deposit. And the cool thing about this, you can almost think about this as a— if you wanted to get a bank deposit before, you actually had to have a bank that was domiciled in the United States and had all of this infrastructure built around it. But now you can almost start from the bank deposit and then have a bunch of fintechs take that bank deposit and build services around it. It's an actual money Lego where you can have, you know, real established fintechs build services around these stablecoins, which are untethered from any one bank. That is just so freaking cool.

So yeah, it is, it is a huge amount of global demand for stablecoins.

I think you're— I don't know what the play is here. There's a debate about is Ethereum going to benefit from this or Solana or whatever the L1 is that's issued. I, I'm not really sure about that, but man, I mean, I, I think I know everyone's bullish on it and it's a consensus bet, but I think everyone's going to get blown away by what the stablecoin market cap goes up to.

Yeah. Okay. I wish I was a better storyteller because I tried making this argument at the dinner last night. And we were talking, basically we're talking about the price of Bitcoin. And I was like, look, we've got this stablecoin bill coming. I think this thing comes in the next like 45 to 60 days. I know everyone's thinking August. I think it's actually like way more finished than people think it is. And I think it'll come in the next like 45 to 60 days. And I'm like, imagine what happens to the total supply of stables this year, not even '26, '27. Imagine. So what's the total market cap of stables today? Probably like $220, $230.

Yep. Uh, I had 20— yeah, $230 billion somewhere.

$230. Okay.

Okay.

$230 billion. Imagine that went up to $350 even. Imagine bigger. Imagine $500 billion. What does that do to the price of— what, where does— what does that do to the price of other assets in crypto like that alone? And we're talking about the price. And so I was basically trying to make the argument like, look, you doubled that, you doubled the supply of stablecoins. And the price of these other crypto assets will get impacted. It just has to get impacted. And people are saying, look, it's got no effect. Money stays in stablecoins once it's in stablecoins. Like someone buys USDC, someone buys Tether, it's just going to sit in Tether or USDC. And I think that is dead wrong. I think that is dead wrong. I think it was actually this Matt Hogan tweet as well this morning. I saw it too. He said, I can't stop thinking about this quote from US Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessen. We are— he said, quote, we are going to keep the US the dominant reserve currency in the world. We will use stablecoins to do that. And Matt says, however big you think stablecoin AUM will get, you're probably thinking too small. So then the question becomes, what does the rest of the crypto market look like if stablecoin AUM becomes multiple trillions? That's the, that's the story right now. We go from $230 billion to $1 trillion in stables. What does that do to the crypto market?

Okay, so I think it's very difficult to reason long— it is difficult to reason in the short to midterm about what— how stablecoin inflows impact the L1 token price. But here's one way that I would think about this. Probably, I think there are two ways, two takeaways, at least for me, is it helps at least for me to imagine everything including TradFi as different L1s, right? And what I would say is the more— like, imagine TradFi is one big L1 where stablecoins are, you know, interoperable amongst that security zone, kind of. Imagine Solana is a big L1, Ethereum is a big L1, etc. If you're Ethereum, Solana, TradFi, wherever you keep your US dollar, if it's USDC or if it's USD in the real world or whatever, you're more likely to buy assets where you have on whatever L1 you're on, right? So marginally, right? Like, and imagine this, right? Like, if there are crypto natives listening to this, if I have, you know, $100 grand on a Phantom wallet or $100 grand on MetaMask, I'm more— there's a lot of friction to moving in between, you know, these two L1s even today. So generally, I would imagine as the amount of stablecoins issued on Ethereum or Solana grow, there's just going to be more buying activity because you've already got your money over there. And so I'm mostly going to buy stuff on just Solana or Ethereum or wherever those assets are. So that's generally one way to think about it over time is the more stablecoins you have, the more volume that's going to translate to in exchanges on whatever platform you're on. But the other thing that it does is I think it's going to make people question this idea of, you know, there's always two, you know, there's two forms of value for these L1 tokens in general. It's like, is it the moneyness thing and it's valuable because you stake it places and you use it as money, or is it valuable because it generates fees? I think people are going to gen— this is going to force people to— it's going to, it's going to be fees. Because if people want to hold stablecoins over the L1, then you have to— the only way you can make this trickle down into L1 value is the fees from moving those stablecoins around that stable issuers have to pay to the L1 or the L2 or whatever the chain is that's, that's acting as settlement here. So I kind of think that you have— I sort of think that this is going to kill the Oh, this is valuable because I hold it and lock it up and stake it. And the kind of the TVL-based argument for value accrual for L1, it's got to be fees.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. That reminds me, there was the— just getting back to some of these takeaways, there was a Seth, Seth Ginz tweet. Let me pull this up. He said every protocol conversation at DAS has led to the same— has led to a discussion of token value capture. So important for fundamental investing. And fully enabled by the new administration's positive crypto stance. That become— this becomes the conversation.

So yeah, I agree. The Reverend, uh, shout out Dan Smith, Reverend, did a really great, uh, talk on this, kicked off day 3 talking about, uh, token value accrual as well. So I'd highly recommend people go watch that as well.

Good chat.

Um, and just one final thing on the regulatory front, these two landmark bills here, which is the Genius Stablecoin Act and and the market structure bill. People are waiting until these actually pass. You know, this is how the institutional world works. It's not like, oh, we think this is going to pass, good vibes. Like, let's— there, we have to wait until these things actually get passed. Like, the slightly more, you know, um, on the slightly less positive side, there are a lot of institutions which are excited. There's still not a ton of money that's moving on-chain and buying a lot of these assets. And I think what's holding everyone up is the Stablecoin Act and the market structure bill. The Stablecoin Act, I agree with you, I think is mostly, mostly finished and we'll get within the next 3 months or so. The market structure bill, there's a lot more open questions on, and it's going to be thornier because it really, really impacts everyone in the industry. The TL;DR high level is what's a security and what's a commodity? And there's going to be a lot of very spirited back and forth because man, does that impact everyone in a really big way. So that is still TBD, has to get figured out. Yeah, agreed.

What are the takeaways you got?

I think those are pretty much the big ones. I think one, one other thing that— so on that Cindy tweet, you know, she described, I think something that's getting figured out here as well is how permissioned, you know, TradFi is a very KYC'd, permissioned world. DeFi historically has been non-KYC and permissionless. And there's a big question around how are these things going to interact? And the early, the early iterations and tries of this did not work very well. And I think we're going to get more specific around what parts specifically of like where do we need the permissions exactly? And I'll give you an example of Aave. So Aave rolled out Aave Arc at the end of like 2022 era and they, everyone had to KYC, right? The borrowers and the lenders. But now this new Horizon product from Avara is, you know, if you are a, if you're bringing a, um, you have to KYC if you are bringing like a, you know, uh, a, an RWA, but then you borrow in permissionless stablecoins. So there's a difference there in terms of who has to actually KYC and where those permissions exist. And so I think by making small iterations there, we can actually start to bring DeFi and RWAs together. And so there's still a lot of work there, but I think work is being done on who needs to KYC exactly, at what level do we need permissions, etc., to make these two worlds come closer together. So still questions there, but I think it feels like there's, there's progress.

Big breaking news right now. OFAC, uh, US Department of Treasury, Tornado Cash delisting based on the administration's review of the novel legal and policy issues Hold on, let me just skip to the important part of this. We have exercised our discretion to remove the economic sanctions against Tornado Cash. Wow. OPAC has removed Tornado Cash addresses from its SDN list. Wow. That's big.

Okay. Let's end on this. There was a really great quote or a very long series of takeaways from Jeff Park. And this is, uh, so Jeff is over at Bitwise. And, you know, he's got this long take with my state of crypto thoughts from Dask convos. And I'm not going to summarize this because it's very long. We can link it in the show notes. It's a really great tweet. But, you know, the TL;DR is everyone's very excited about the structural macro opportunity in crypto, Bitcoin and stablecoins, venture equity companies that are servicing this area. It's unstoppable cheering for these trends and it's very refreshing to have policy on our side. And this is where I'm going to start to quote him. Yet I also couldn't help but sense that this might be a mission-critical moment for the crypto industry to reassert its values for the new entrants and stand tall. Unsuade by the known incentives of Wall Street capitalism and government self-preserving inertia, which eats up so many truly radical dreams. And man, first of all, very well-worded, Jeff, poet. But I agree with him. Like, this is— there is a part of crypto which is a tech upgrade, but there's also very different culture and set of values. And so that's where the rubber is really going to meet the road here on are we just rebuilding the same thing with a slight tech upgrade, or are we meaningfully differentiated in terms of the value proposition and the set of values? And I think a huge challenge for this industry is going to be privacy and like KYC, right? Because one set of value— I could make this argument on, on the left here, which is KYC is a failed experiment. You know, it mostly is just a, uh, is administrative overhead on retail because anyone who's sophisticated can trivially evade KYC programs and they don't really work. And it's, surveillance state tool and all that kind of stuff. Or I could say, look, guys, at the end of the day, governments have to deal with pedophiles and human traffickers and terrorists. And these function like— we are not going to let these people just use our rails. And it's been interesting to watch the industry's response to North Korea right after the Bybit hack. Yeah, no, a lot of this went through DeFi protocols and even like industry stalwarts and people that really care about this stuff like, guys, we got to be better. We cannot let— we cannot let crypto facilitate this type of activity. And so we all, as industry participants that care about the future of this space and are the set of values that brought most of us here, we need to think about where the rubber is going to hit the road on this stuff. And they're probably going to have to be compromises on both sides, but I think not losing ourselves here and, you know, completely just bowing to the whole point of crypto is doing something new, right? So I think it's important to push where we can for privacy, for non-KYC, for being global from day one. All that stuff is really important and we should not lose that in the excitement that these institutions and all of the money and success that that's going to bring us. You know, we don't want to get changed too much here.

Basically. 100%. Good call. Yeah, that was a— again, this dinner last night, keep mentioning it, but that became one of the biggest conversation topics was North Korea is a way bigger issue than anybody thought. We are going to have to do some sort of KYC stuff. Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good event, buddy.

Yeah, this is a really good one. Appreciate you, dude. This is— how are we going to—

how are we going to— we got to do something even bigger than the president of the United States. What do we do?

We should get our dads to do a little— the dads, Joel and John. That would be actually quite a fireside.

Yeah, we've got something bigger than the president. We got the dads. Um, we have Permissionless. Uh, Permissionless is coming up June 24th through 26th in Brooklyn. Um, and then there's 2 days of a hackathon the 2 days before that. And then we have another DAS, uh, DAS London, much more focused on the European audience. And actually the Asian audience usually comes out big for that one too. So, uh, DAS London is October 13th through 15th. Yep. Right. I think those are the dates. Um, Permissionless is 24th through 26th. Are you frantically looking up the Len— the London dates right now. I was looking them up.

I just nodded as if those were the right dates. Yeah, I saw that. Double check us, double check us. I saw that Julie shaking her head. Yeah. Um, all right, buddy, this was a fun one. And, uh, yeah, hopefully we'll see you all at, uh, Permissionless in Brooklyn in June. See you at Permissionless.

Thanks, folks. Appreciate you guys coming to DAZN.