Token Transparency And The Hot Ball of Money (Hyperliquid/Circle) | Weekly Roundup

Hyperliquid is the best trading venue that people, to your point, has captured the mindshare in this rerun of a cycle after the last year. So can this approximate Solana's $100 billion fully diluted market cap? Absolutely. This is a 3x from here. Hyperliquid at $100, I wouldn't flinch twice.

This episode is brought to you by Geodnet, the world's largest decentralized RTK network, delivering real-time, centimeter-accurate positioning around the globe. You'll hear more about them later in the episode. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. What's up, everybody? Happy Friday. Welcome back to The Roundup. We got Santi and me. How we doing, Santi?

Uh, doing good, you know. Uh, excited to finally, uh, see the— what you guys have been cooking there for a while.

Launch day, baby.

It is launch day.

The best day. Actually, we're recording this on Wednesday, so you're listening on Friday, 2 days after launch day, baby. But yeah, we just launched the token transparency framework today. Um, Pretty cool. What do you think as an outsider? I mean, I can, I can share, but what do you think?

I mean, I saw it immediately. My, you know how I feel, like we've been talking about this for a while. I think it is one of the biggest opportunities in crypto because it is probably top 2 or 3 problems that we have as an industry. It's almost like we're open source as an industry. We, but we do have a lot of room to grow in terms of standardizing reporting and disclosures to create market integrity and fairness. And that's like the most important thing. If we really want to grow up as an industry, you need to have that. And I'm so happy to see you guys deliver on that. I mean, we were talking about it earlier this year and, you know, yeah, I think it's one of those things that can have so much potential. And I don't think there would be anyone out there that would disagree that it is needed. I think some people might argue, hey, other people have tried to do this before. Like, why are you guys Why is it different this time? I think like when I initially tweeted about it a while ago, everyone's like, oh, Messari tried to do this and so and so and so and so. But I do think that it is a great framework and it has the potential to truly at the right time, you know what I mean? Like this is very much needed where we are as an industry. But yeah, why don't you tell us more about it? I mean, what went into it? What do you guys see? The amount of— I did see a lot of really good projects initially get behind it, which I think is one of the most important things.

Yeah. So we launched— all right, so we launched this thing called the Token Transparency Framework. This is— so the problem that we saw in the industry is that there's, there's all these backroom dealings, right? There's backroom dealings. There's no— here, the better way to describe it is there's, there's kind of a mistrust of tokens at this point in the market. Industry has been around for 15 years. And I think if people are investing in tokens, there's this underlying feeling of like mistrust in the tokens and mistrust in the markets. And everyone just kind of says like, oh yeah, these markets are kind of, you know, the information's hidden. Like people do backroom deals like the OTC deals and market maker deals. And I don't really know how much like, you know, circulating supply really exists. Like, but it's crypto token markets. We just see that as a fundamental flaw in the market today, I'd say. And I mean, yeah, like when you were at the Blockworks office a while ago, we were talking about this. It's like I actually feel like 2025 is a growing up year in the industry. Like there's a real line in the sand, right? There's IPOs happening, there's consolidation happening. And I would say bringing transparency to token markets is another thing that just needs to happen, especially like you have all these public crypto vehicles, which we can talk about more. We've been talking about them a while, but like for a while, but like one of the reasons they're so interesting is you get the regulations and legal for frameworks and disclosures of public, of public entities. And so, you know, I'm sure you have a lot of these conversations with institutional investors. A lot of them at this point, I mean, it's very different than when you were at ParaFi. Like when you were at ParaFi, people didn't like crypto markets. Now people like crypto markets. They just refuse to allocate to tokens because there's so much, so much like behind closed door stuff. So yeah, we launched this token transparency framework. It's an open source framework. Open-source disclosure framework that we created. The thought is like you want to— so we launched with 6 tokens, 6 projects: Aerodrome, Jito, Jupiter, Morpho, Radium, and Stride. And what it looks like, I can show you this. This is what the framework looks like. So it's a 12-page report. This is the one for Jito. So we're judging them on 18 different criteria, disclosure of revenue streams. What's the relationship between the equity and the token? Disclosure of advisory billings to the foundation, governance and token documentation provided, insider vesting, initial allocation. So like we go through all these different things and we give them a score. So initially we launched with 6 people who we thought were doing a really good job. The fun part is going to be there's people who we're going to add who are not doing such a good job. These people all rated, you know, 30, you know, Stride is a 38 out of 40, Radium's a 38 out of 40. Jupiter's a 38, Jito's a 39, and we wanted to celebrate the people who are doing a really good job and very transparent. The next thing that will come is people who are not so transparent. So that's when it gets fun.

That's great. I mean, so what, you're going to be Moody's for crypto?

I mean, look, you said it. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of business models that you can build, which by the way is a fantastic business model for anyone who doesn't know.

Radio agencies, print.

Yeah, Moody's made $7, $7.5 billion last year alone. So yeah, there's a lot of business models. We are very importantly, we actually, you know, we had a conversation like, should we take money to list basically? And very, very, very importantly, we decided no. And I think that's key here. So you actually saw this a couple of years ago, you know, probably remember 2017, 2018, there were two different types of exchanges. Some exchanges got paid for listings and some didn't. And anyone who got paid for listings, they're not really around. Like Coinbase wasn't taking money for listings and we feel the same way. Like you can't— so anyways, no one can pay to get listed here. You can't pay to have your score changed or whatever. So I think that's very— there's a lot of upfront, there's a lot of easy money you could make there, but obviously we're not going to do that.

So a couple of things come to mind. One, how often is this going to be updated? Like if there's a material change in any of these categories, per project? Like, who's—

So what's interesting is actually, I mean, we're updating this in real time. So one of these launched at a 35 and they literally go, oh my, they DM'd us, they go, oh my God, I didn't realize how much traction this was going to get. We're going to share an advisor to foundation deal that we've never disclosed with anyone before so that you— so that it— and actually that's— that pulled their score up from a 35 to like a 38. So look, and that's millions of dollars in that deal had never been disclosed to public crypto markets before. And now because of this, it's, you know, they said, shoot, we don't want to be a 35, we want to be a 38. So it pulled them up.

Are you guys going to provide alerts if you're a subscriber of changes? And like, because Moody's, a lot of what— when I was at— yeah, whatever, like you get a report by Moody's like, hey, we're downgrading or we're upgrading the Mexican government bond.

Totally.

And they have like a write-up about it.

So yeah, we don't have an API business yet, but I will say that is something that is probably with a business model like ours, probably makes sense. So this would be something that would— that's one business model that could come from this, I'd say. And then, I mean, the most interest we've gotten is from law firms, actually. Who want to include this stuff in legal documents. Like when, like basically let's say you're setting up your new foundation or DAO or protocol, whatever it is, like you should just think about this framework when you're setting it up. And then actually once you set it up, just send, send us the info and we'll add it. Listings teams at exchanges have been reaching out a lot. Listings teams basically still have no framework for like, do we list this or do we not? And you've seen folks like Coinbase, oscillate between like, we're listing everything to like, we're not listing anything. And we have listings team that makes decisions versus like the market makes decisions. And I think this gives a really easy, like, third-party way for listings teams to be like, all right, we're just using the Blockworks transparency framework. And so listing teams are really excited about this and actually funds are very excited. So you saw we got nice messages from, I mean, several of the top venture funds in the industry.

Like if I were a fund or I'd be dictating terms, I would make sure that it was like part of the docs where it's like you have to commit to token transparency.

Exactly. So we're just scrolling through this. Oh, there's, this is crazy. Look at the response. 220 people like quote tweeted it and said good things. So yeah, here's, here's Pantera saying that it's essential infrastructure for the industry. You had DBA, um, uh, you had Dragonfly. So yeah, people, people seem very excited about it.

Yeah. What, um, this is cool.

Oh, go ahead.

Go ahead. I'm just thinking ahead, like, is there gonna be a way for someone to contest the score?

Um, yeah, people can contest or comment on it.

Like if you're a community member, if you're like, I, I don't know if it's, uh, People can contest their score.

It's a very, there's a very easy, and if someone wants to contest their score, we would love that because what does that actually mean? We, we, we rate someone a 20 out of 40. They're like, guys, this is ridiculous. We're like, great. You rated a 0 out of 3 on insider vesting. Um, there's no visibility into your insider vesting. Send us your insider vesting contracts and we'll happily improve your score by 3 points. So there's, there's other things. So, um, actually. The first time in history venture anthropologist has said a nice thing about Blockwork. So thank you, Balloon Lover. But he had a good point. He said, look, cool initiative. The next step is some form of enforcement or verification. So that's, that's obviously phase 2. Yeah, I will say we hadn't shared this until, until today, but I sent this tweet. I said, if you're going to do something, you might as well go all the way. So we actually met with the SEC on Friday about this, and you can see the agenda here. So it was us, Rebecca Redig, and I didn't go, but it was Mike, Dan, and Ryan from Blockworks. And we covered— you can actually see the agenda because it's the SEC, so they have to share the agenda publicly. So we covered like why issuer disclosure, why market maker disclosures, presentation of disclosures, SEC CTF feedback, presentation of disclosures, presentation of the scoring system, And then, and so for both the token transparency framework and then there's actually some market maker disclosure stuff that we want to start to add in here too. And so there's, there's a lot coming. So I will say, I think this framework will start to get rolled out across legal firms, exchanges, venture firms will just request that. We're actually seeing our dashboards become a requested thing from venture funds as people are raising. They're like, hey, I don't trust your data. Can you have Blockworks build it? Like, let me see the Blockworks dashboard for this. And so I think that'll start to happen for token disclosures too. It's like, hey, can— like, I see you're not on the token disclosure framework. Like, just, just send me a ping once you're up there so we can see how transparent you are.

All right. Let me fire off a couple of questions that someone that might be like skeptical or not know much about it. If you go back to like the criteria real quick, this thing. Yeah. So say like, okay, market structure. Like, or financial disclosures, like what goes into that?

That's a good question. So let's look at like, we can actually pull it up. So which one do you want? Okay, let's pull this up. Market structure. So do we have information on insider and related person transactions? So how this actually works is we like a 0 would be the project does not commit to disclosing related party transactions. Within 30 days. A 3 would be the project commits to disclosing related party transactions.

Um, for anyone who doesn't know, related party means anyone that's an insider or an affiliate, or—

right, exactly. Um, prior token sales and fundraising. 0 would be no prior sales are disclosed. A 1 would be all prior sales are disclosed but terms are absent. A 2 would be prior sales are disclosed and the terms are provided to us. Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of other stuff. So public token holder relations reports, right? So what this means, we define all of these. The foundation's assets or working capital are held on-chain and publicly labeled, providing the ability to track asset holdings, revenue, and expenses. So a 1 would be foundation wallets are not labeled. A 2 would be treasury wallets are tagged, but the revenue and expense flows are incomplete or fragmented. And a 2 would be wallets that touch any assets or revenue streams are labeled on-chain with clear traceable expenses, and they have quarterly reports detailing assets, revenue, and expenses. So what this does is it forces them to send it to us. We audit everything and then we actually make that information public. So you're not trusting Blockworks. Like we, we, we thought about this for a while, like, cause you, you could have—

feeds directly into a dashboard, right? You could just create a dashboard of all this stuff.

Yeah, exactly. Actually, I mean, from a— I will say from a business model perspective, that's a—

that is the business model.

It's, it's, it also gets people to self-report to us. So it feeds into our data business quite well.

Yeah, this is the key. You self-report, you want to be, you want to be— you guys are doing upfront work to rate something for free. But of course, there are dashboards, there's data that will be constantly provided because of this intake.

Right. So here, I'll give you a really good example of this. So this is the, this is the Radium. So this is the Radium report right here. So Radium reported scored very highly. They got 38 out of 40. And if you look at— let's see, I'll just pull up anything like they're actually sending us a bunch of different— they're sending us a bunch of different info, multisig holders, buybacks, buyback details, treasury information, all that kind of stuff. And then this flows Right. Here's like insider tokens and like how much they're vested. That flows into analytics. If you go into our analytics platform, Radium, where is this thing? Oh, here, the finance. I got to make that search better. So then this— it's no surprise the Radium dashboard is so, so, so complete, right? So you can go in here, you can see all the finance. So then we build this dashboard off of kind of what they send us, right? So this dashboard has all the financials, all information on their token, all trading volume information, TVL of their pools, pool activity. Who are the LPs? What are the LPs doing? Who are the traders? I don't know much about Launch Lab. Oh, this is like tokens that are launching and graduating. So anyways, that flows into here, which then drives subscription revenue, et cetera, et cetera.

Of course, the big, the bigger business. Um, the verification, um, what, to what confidence interval, to back to that Venture Anthropologist post, I could imagine a lot of people saying like, hey, now we're trusting you guys to do all the verification. Who, like, to what degree of confidence do you think like you're able to provide a pretty complete picture. Um, like, I mean, there's, there's a piece of like people lie and omit info and like, look, I mean, that at some point is, I guess, could show up in the data in some way, shape, or form.

Yeah.

So there's unaccounted tokens, unaccounted movements.

There's 3 angles to this. There's punishment by social, like you have social capital, there's punishment by the law, and then there's our ability to actually assess this. So punishment by social capital, that's kind of just the industry saying, look, they lied or whatever. That's like, that's been a thing. We both— the industry so far has only had punishment by social capital. The next is, yeah, we are, I mean, working with folks like the SEC and different, you know, different people to say, hey, look, if you lie on this, it's illegal. You know, it's— you're not allowed to lie on this thing. Um, and then the third is, uh, we're actually building out a team. So if you think about like an audit, the probably the best comp here, you have two comps. One is like the Moody's business model, but actually like the audit firms are a decent comp too. It's like, can you lie to an audit firm? You can, but if it's a really good audit firm, they're actually going to find it because they, they're the best in the world at like following the trail of capital. So we're hyped.

We haven't—

we're about to open up these job positions. For people on the token transparency team. It's a new team we're going to create and we're going to hire crypto-native auditors. So like an auditor, like audit people from Big Four firms who also are crypto-native. It's going to be hard, hard people to hire, but so that when someone says, hey, these are the foundation tokens, we can actually see if those are all of the foundation tokens, you know?

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

And then of course, like, yeah, I mean, like an audit firm would provide like At the beginning of any financial statements, audited financial statements, they provide like a letter of— what is it? Where they like vouch to the integrity of the data. Sometimes they have going concerns and when they have going concerns, like the market kind of like reads that into, yeah, okay, there's something here and they dump the stock pretty heavily, gets impacted by that.

Exactly. It's also our trust is on the line, right? So if we are unsure of something, we will just rate it lower. And we'll be like, look, it's not clear. Like, you need to make—

the onus is on them to, to furnish more information.

Exactly. It's not on us. If we're like— if we're actually— we have that right now. We're unsure of something and we gave someone a 1 out of 3 and they're like, hey, it's— why is it only 1 out of 3? We gave it to you. We're like, oh, it's a little unclear. Like, if you want to— if you want a 3 out of 3, make it more clear. Give it to us.

This is great.

Thanks, Ben.

Very, very good initiative. I'm— you know how I feel about this. It's, uh, It— okay, so now you have 6 teams, give or take.

Yeah, we have 6. We have received 57 inbounds. Um, there you go. In 4 hours— in 3 and a half hours. So, uh, I would guess by the time people are listening to this on Friday, we'll receive a couple hundred. Um, so yeah, yeah, hopefully makes the industry more transparent.

Amazing. Uh, how quickly did you guys build this?

Um, or it was a sprint. I mean, you recommended that we do this. That was probably 6 months ago or something, maybe 4 or 5 months ago. And actually, um, it was really bottoms-up initiative at Blockworks where, I mean, Mike and I were just like, we're too busy to take something else on. And, um, we're like, we're too busy to take something else on. Ryan is our head of research. Dan is our head of data. They were like, we need to do this. The market like needs this. And we're like, no, no, no, too many initiatives. Focus, focus, focus. Let's get like our dashboard. We're launching new things soon in the data space. So we're like, let's get those shipped, stuff like that shipped. And then, and then we can do this. And honestly, this is a lesson learned for Mike and I. Uh, the market was just pulling demand out of us here. And so Ryan and Dan basically bulldozed our decision and said, We're gonna, we're gonna do this, we're gonna work nights and weekends, and we're just gonna make this happen. And, you know, Mike, I didn't do anything. Mike, Mike's, Mike was pretty involved in this one, but it's really Ryan and Dan. And Mike started to get on calls and people, we realized the market really, really wanted this. And yeah, so it was kind of a, went from a nights and weekends, it was a couple, honestly, probably a month of just all-out sprint, 7 days a week sprinting at this.

Yeah. Plus you guys have distribution. Again, I'll say time and time again, once you have distribution, you can layer on more products and, and the time to roll out products and the ability to tap into your existing customer base and develop something is powerful.

It's funny, Mike called me today. He's like, can we just— because this is definitely the best received launch in the history of Blockworks. I mean, the post in and of itself has 200,000 views, 600 likes, like 225 people have quote tweeted or retweeted or whatever. Easily the best received. And Mike calls me, he's like, we just appreciate that, like, You know, we used to DM like 100 people on launch day and we'd get like 3 people to like it. And I was laughing with Mike this morning. I was like, I specifically remember a post in 2018 where we made an event post and Mike Dudas retweeted it and we were like, oh my God, Dudas retweeted it. Like, this is amazing. And yeah, and here you are, you know. Now it's 7 years later, but I, you know, you didn't even pick me.

I was, I was waiting for him. Like, I think I heard him say it was going to come on Monday and I was in Amsterdam for a conference. I was like, where is it? Like, why haven't they announced it? And then I saw it like I was at the gym and I saw it like within 20 minutes of the post. I was like, immediately.

Yeah, you were like the first person to— I appreciate that. So I'm pumped.

Here we go. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am a very small investor in Blockwork. Uh, but I genuinely believe this, this is what's needed, you know. I mean, market integrity.

This episode is brought to you by Geodnet, the world's largest decentralized RTK network delivering real-time, centimeter-accurate positioning around the globe, powering technologies that enable precise navigation for drones, autonomous vehicles, first responders, farmers, and robotics. Geodnet shows that blockchain can be a truly transformative force. By delivering real-time, centimeter-level accuracy, Geodnet enhances emergency response, boosts construction precision, and enables advanced navigation for drones and surveyors far beyond the limits of standard GPS. To find out more, click the link in the show notes or follow them on X. Hey everyone, Jason Yanowitz here. Earlier in today's episode, you heard me mention the weekly CIO memo from Bitwise. In an industry as hectic, fast, and complex as ours, it's incredibly hard to get an easy, no-nonsense stream of what's actually moving crypto. The memo comes from Matt Hogan, Bitwise's Chief Investment Officer. He's been on the show before, and he has this amazing ability to take the most complex topics and break them down with clarity. Trust me on this one, the Bitwise Weekly CIO Memo is really worth the 5 minutes of your time. Check it out at bitwiseinvestments.com/ciomemo/empire, or just hit the link in the description of today's episode to get started. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. We have permissionless. We'll talk more about it. Permissionless.

So if anyone's, if anyone's coming, um, you should just have a booth of like token. We have a booth.

We have a booth. We have a Blockworks booth or a Blockworks Research booth. We have like all of— I mean, we have like, I think we have like 50 Blockworks people coming to Permissionless. So come find us at the booth. We'll be hanging. Um, yeah, so come. Did you see our video that we launched, by the way, this week? No, you don't see every single tweet that we make. Look at this.

Um, shaming me public. So look, public praise, private shame.

Sure. I'll send you this video afterwards because you can't hear the sound right now.

I did see this.

I did see this. So we— so the— the prediction market put out a video and they were like, we used— they're like, we used Veo, the new— we used Veo 3, the new Google-like software, the new Google AI thing to create this video. And I sent it to our head of creative. I was like, yo, this is dope. And in 2 days he created a full video with like sound and images and there's a full commercial in 2 days. And actually we'll link to the thread. This guy Reed Hannaford is our head of creative. And he wrote up like everything that he did, all of his prompts. So it's really cool. People should go check that out.

That's awesome. You also launched something that I was like poking around over the weekend, which was the, the like the rating tool.

Oh, Story Score.

Dude, that was awesome. I was like, I want to know how poorly am I delivering.

Oh my God. Should we, should we do this and should we do this right now? Should we? Yeah, let's do it. All right.

You're going to—

here we'll—

oh, YouTube, it doesn't work.

There you go. All right. So yeah, I built this thing using Replit AI. I keep raving about this thing. It's like a magical tool and it rates how good of a storyteller you are. It's better for like presentations, but I just input our token transparency podcast episode that we released today with our head of data and some other folks. And, uh, so it's analyzing the content right now. So basically what it does, it processes the audio, it transcribes it, and then it tells you how good of a story it is. So look at this, so 71 out of 100. The hook is a 20 out of 25, the emotion is a 15, structure is 18, delivery is 18. And it tells you, it says it's a podcast, here are the 4 speakers. Um, we got dinged 1 point for filler words. It tags it: token transparency, investment, cryptocurrency, industry analysis, and finance. It gives you the— oh, I just added this. This is a fun part. What are the drop-off points? So at 11:40, it says the complexity of equity versus token risk may cause loss of attention. Uh, and then at 56 minutes, extended discussion of best-case scenario with heavy detail might fatigue listeners. It's pretty cool. And then key storytelling moments. So It's really cool for like if you give a presentation. I had— this is what sparked this. I gave a presentation. I was like, I have no idea how I did. I'm never going to know how I did. So I wanted to— I wanted a tool to put that in.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Yeah. Should we talk about crypto news?

Wait, are we a crypto podcast?

Let's talk about crypto news.

Strong hook.

Strong hook.

Poor structure. No emotional peak. Your emotion will be peaking.

Honestly, I'm like, uh, yeah, I got, I got no emotional hook here. Um, all right. Crypto news, crypto news, stablecoin news. Stablecoin bill passed the Senate, um, which is pretty dope. Genius, genius bill. Um, I think everyone kind of expected this to happen. So I'd say like, you know, the price quote unquote was baked in, although, um, so anyways, Genius Act passed the Senate 68-30. Very exciting. Next up is the reason this is exciting is now we can move on to market structure. So that's awesome. Have you seen the price of Circle?

$138.

Oh, $180. $182.

It's wild. It went public at $30.

$30. Look at that. Look at this chart.

6x.

Can you explain this to me? Like, actually, what do you make of this? Why are people— I mean, this thing's up 6x.

It's like, what, what did we say? 2X.

Market cap is 44. What's the market cap of Coinbase?

55, 60?

72 now.

Yeah, I mean it.

Oh, let's go. Yeah, but I'm thinking 286.

Go the same timeline. Today up 12%. Well, uh, tokenized stock, so that's what's rallying, I think. Go, uh, monthly.

For which one? Coinbase?

So Circle is up 6X. Um, it was— I think it's added $10 billion in market cap. A lot of that today. Um, but you know, clearly, I mean, I think it's like extreme left curve. It's like people, this is another asset they can add to their crypto public market exposure. It's starting from a smaller base.

They need a way to long stablecoins, right? And there's no way to—

it's just like, it's a simple thesis of long—

a bunch of TradFi people start buying USDC, they're like, why isn't this thing going up?

Like, ah, I mean, look, uh, are people really digging into and doing a lot of analysis on the, like, the revenue and the contract with Coinbase and their, uh, you know, J— it's interesting because JP Morgan, like, was— what is it— piloting their stablecoin too? JPMC or something? You would have thought that Circle would have responded, like, reacted negatively to that, right? Again, more competition, more distribution, JP Morgan, USDC's market share goes down and their revenue and profitability goes down. And yet the market—

no, but it's validation. Think of how many people don't believe that. We're still in the area where people don't believe. So every time something like this happens, it's like, oh, oh, these stablecoin things are actually real.

100%. Like that when you're in the crypto trenches for too long, you just assume that everyone understands these things. And now it's like, you know, the logical, like, response is like, no, just JP Morgan just validated stablecoins. The only way to express that view today in the public market is Circle. Boom. Up. Bid. Bid.

Bid. So do you think that the next— so, all right, so we've got like Gemini filed bullish, filed, um, There's some other people I think about to file. Do you think these— I like, let's say, let's say Gemini, let's say Gemini went public tomorrow. Is that just an auto buy?

As a trade or an investment?

A trade. Yeah, it's got to be just a smash the buy, right?

Yeah, yeah, just get an allocation, try to get an allocation or buy immediately as soon as it lists. Yeah, not, not financial advice, but I mean, look, go back to Coinbase. Do all-time max. Do max. Uh, no, that's not right.

Yeah, it is.

No, no, it's not. The opening day, it went up dramatically, and then, and then I think, oh, I'm trying to— yeah, like, I wanted to look at more precise here. I'll— oh, because what I'm trying to say is Coinbase Max. If you look at TradingView, all time.

Yeah, yeah, people are about to see how bad I am at using TradingView.

I'm done.

Let me cut all these things out.

Okay, you have it open there.

Where is it?

You do all in the bottom, bottom left.

No, no, I can't see it. Oh, there it is. Oh, you—

yeah, do you do adjust? Go top, bottom right, ADJ, all, then go, go bottom right, ADJ, adjust, adjust. Oh no, no, I'm sorry, that's dividend. Sorry. Okay, yeah, that is, uh, that's what I'm trying to say.

Like, oh yeah, I see what you're saying. It went from 300, it popped all the way to 429.

That was pretty dramatic because it went down like, like a circle is only continue to go up 6x. But, um, look, I mean, you might be in a dynamic where, you know, again, is it a trade or an investment? Are you willing to hold Coinbase at 40— what is it, $45 billion, trading at, uh, what multiple?

A lot. I don't know.

Yeah, so again, I'm not comfortable at this level. Um, I feel better about some like Coinbase, more reasonably valued, some like Robinhood, more reasonably valued. Yeah. And but, but yeah, look, I think there's a whole set of like just funds that their own strategy is to like buy new listing. Yeah.

You know, it's funny, I was for the first time, you know, remember especially when it was harder to get money on chain, you'd have— you'd be like, oh man, I need like— you'd be like waiting for like a wire to hit into your Coinbase account and then you could— so you could move money from Coinbase into like MetaMask or something like that. For the first time in history, I was like, I need to get more money out of my crypto wallets and into my brokerage account so that I can start buying these public entities.

Yeah. Um, what do you think this does? Because it's interesting because, uh, pick your token of flavor— Bitcoin, maybe not Bitcoin, but like Ethereum, Solana. We're in this like dynamic where like the market's not rallying as much, the tokens.

What do I think it does to ETH or just tokens?

Like, if you look at the relative price performance over the last— since, since Coin went— since, uh, Circle went public, and you compare that against like pretty much any token on chain, it's vastly outperformed, right? Like Coinbase, Circle— the relative performance of Coinbase, Circle, and then pretty much any token. Like, you would have been vastly more— vastly outperformed by having exposure to coins. Yeah, public market crypto exposure is outperforming crypto-native token exposure. And the question is, does that persist? Because we have a pipeline of IPOs, you have liquidity, you have less—

like, yeah, like, I know what you're saying. Does all the return just still stay in these public vehicles, right?

The way I read it is putting aside the public vehicles that are just warehousing tokens, I don't think that persists. I think that there's varying views of how long this persists. I think it's clear to people that like the music will stop for most of them, absent MicroStrategy, maybe, right? But, um, um, I, I think that yeah, the— as you have more public the public will express their views through the public markets. I think that vastly outperforms tokens. And honestly, this might be like a same dynamic as you had the Grayscale premium, but with less financial engineering. Like, there's something so powerful about people reading the legitimacy of being a public market company is strong, particularly in an industry that still gets discounted, right? If you walk into your PM's office and you say, hey, we should, uh, buy Solana, he's like, what? But we should buy Circle because these things, stablecoins, are going to dominate fintech. And so the PM that now covers tech and fintech is very much on board. That PM, right, that allocator is not coming on-chain.

Yeah, I don't think they need to come on-chain. Um, I— so I think everyone's about to Hasib had a great tweet about like the hot ball of money is now public, public equities, I guess you would say, like crypto, crypto public equities and these treasury companies. I, I think, I think that's true for maybe 6 to 12 months. But I think, I think the mania that we're seeing in equities will eventually spill over into the coins. Yeah, that's, that's what I think.

But again, like in what version? I guess the temptation in crypto has always been it doesn't take that much liquidity to drive ETH and SOL prices. Uh, okay, said differently, right? We'll, we'll see where Tron— we got to talk about Tron Trump kind of like vehicle in a minute. Park that thought. Back to this: how much of billions of market cap has Circle added over the last couple of trading sessions? And if you take like Public, you know what a good dashboard should be for you guys? Give me public market crypto exposure and the aggregate market cap of that. And that includes, you can filter by pure crypto, like that's basically Coinbase, uh, Circle. You can have crypto, crypto-enabled strategies, like, uh, that includes all the public holding, like SOUL strategies. And then that includes also like Robinhoods of the world. Um, and then you can filter by revenue, profitability, like, that's a good one. And then, and then you could say how much, and then you can have a really good metric of like, like almost like a dominance score, which is like, um, God, you could do so much. Uh, but you could be like, what percentage of market cap has been added this week in the public markets for pure crypto exposure versus what percentage of market cap has been added to everything except Bitcoin? Uh, how many flows have gone through like Bitcoin ETFs and related strategies and MicroStrategy? How much flows have gone on-chain? Like, I want to know that because that's good.

I like that. Yeah, well, that's a good idea. We should do that.

And then you can have like the 13Fs, like major funds holding Circle, uh, major funds holding— like in the episode with Rob and, and, uh, and, uh, Diogo, Diogo, Diogo, uh, we were talking, I asked him the question, like, who's buying this thing? Who's buying the Sol strategies and MicroStrategy versus who's buying Coinbase and Circle? And their response, which I agree with, is very different. Very different type of investor. So I always want to see like, who's buying this? Who's on 13F? Who are the major holders? What are they doing? Are they selling positions? Are they adding? And then do we have any info on on-chain analytics? And I mean, that would be like—

I mean, you can see in the filings who's buying these things. It's like the same funds over and over again. Yeah.

But what is it like BlackRocks of the world?

Or I mean, your guys at ParaFi. Yeah.

Well, ParaFi is very active. Yeah, in the corporate—

in the corporate treasury.

Yeah, in the corporate.

Oh, you're saying who's buying Circle?

Yeah, like who's buying Circle? Who's buying Coinbase? I don't know.

I really don't know. But anyways, this has seemed to be—

yeah, go ahead.

This was the Hasib tweet. Here, let me share this. He said, every cycle founders chase the fireball of hot money. Last cycle meant launching a token. Crypto capital markets were white hot this cycle. It's bringing your token to the stock market à la treasury companies, but hot money never stays put, which is why treasury companies will not be the final meta. But I'd guess 1 to 2 years of this until the heat dies down. I would take the other side of this. I don't think it's 1 to 2. I agree with this whole tweet until the 1 to 2 years thing. I think markets are just moving faster than ever and like metas don't stay metas for 2 and a half years. So yeah, I think this will be like, I don't know, we got the rest of the year, basically a bunch of companies go public, bunch of token structures happen. I mean, I saw Hyperliquids doing something today.

Interesting.

This episode is brought to you by Geodnet, the world's largest decentralized RTK network, delivering real-time, centimeter-accurate positioning around the globe, powering technologies that enable precise navigation for drones, autonomous vehicles, first responders, farmers, and robotics. Geodnet shows that blockchain can be a truly transformative force by delivering real-time centimeter-level accuracy. Geodnet enhances emergency response, boosts construction precision, and enables advanced navigation for drones and surveyors far beyond the limits of standard GPS. To find out more, click the link in the show notes or follow them on X. Hey everyone, Jason Yanowitz here. Earlier in today's episode, you heard me mention the weekly CIO memo from Bitwise. In an industry as hectic, fast, and complex as ours, it's incredibly hard to get an easy, no-nonsense stream of what's actually moving crypto. The memo comes from Matt Hogan, Bitwise's Chief Investment Officer. He's been on the show before, and he has this amazing ability to take the most complex topics and break them down with clarity. Trust me on this one. The Bitwise Weekly CIO Memo is really worth the 5 minutes of your time. Check it out at bitwiseinvestments.com/ciomemo/empire or just hit the link in the description of today's episode to get started. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. Can we talk Hyperliquid, actually?

Uh, yep.

Do you have takes?

Uh, what about?

The coin.

I don't know.

Did we talk about this last week? I think. Do you own HYPE?

No, no, no. Rather unfortunately to my demise, ladies and gentlemen, I do not currently own HYPE.

Would you think about buying HYPE now?

Uh, I don't have any time. If anyone wants to come manage my public positions, please do. Otherwise I'll just hold for life. Um, there's a good, there's a good comment. Go to Simon, uh, from Moonrock's Twitter and then there's a, there's a good response in there.

Oh, Ansem's response.

Yeah. Ansem's just Pretty good response, I think.

All right, here, pull this up. Okay, so, so Simon said— oh my Lord, Simon tweets a lot. Simon said to the haters, I love Hyperliquid. I genuinely appreciate everything they've built and honestly believe it's one of the best projects in all of crypto. But seriously, who's buying hype at nearly $50 billion? How is the risk-reward ratio still even remotely reasonable here? If you think this is going to $500 billion, so a 10x, I'd actually love to hear a constructive take on why you believe it'll be worth more than ETH and SOL combined. And even if you don't think it's going to $500 billion, then what the hell are you even doing? So that's the— that's— I mean, that's kind of the question I was asking for you. Like, hype is running. He sent this at $45. It's at like $40. I think it's at $39 today. Ansem had a good response. Let me see if I can summarize it because it's pretty long. And some— and some— I'll summarize this. And some responded, said risk-reward is there because it's the fastest growing product in crypto's most profitable vertical, and the leaders by comparison make $10 billion a year, make $10 billion a year. So he's talking about the exchanges. He said $45B FDV is approximate, 30% of the team, 40% future community allocation, 30% circulating. Something about them not taking outside venture money. He said since the protocol makes $1 billion a year annualized, 97% goes into the ecosystem through token buybacks. It's unlikely the team will need to exit via selling their token when they've demonstrated doing the opposite. So I said, why does it have upside? Said most dominant perp exchange, HIP3, and other markets. HIP basically allows external parties to stake a million in HYPE, which means they can then go create their own perps market on the exchange. Um, Hyper Gambling Culture, HyperEVM, which is their L1. So I don't know, I know you're not—

you don't— um, okay, so, so let's just— uh, I— perplexity is my friend. Uh, I said give me like exchange volume profitability and then overlay that with hyper liquid. So like Binance does roughly $15 billion of volume right? Um, they have other products and Hyperliquid does, um, $7 billion. So like half of that, give or take.

Yeah, sure.

I was, I was trying to back into like, cuz you have BNB, right? BNB captures some, oh, here, here.

Hyperliquid is currently doing 90% of all decentralized purchase volumes, but remains 10% of Binance volume, 20% of Bybit volume.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like Binance. So, so again, you're trying, I'm trying to back into like BNB's a $93 billion coin. There is only a subset of the profitability of Binance goes to burning BNB, right? I forget the exact measure. That's the comparison in my mind. It's like, what are the crypto-native investors, crypto markets valuing BNB relative to Hyperliquid? And how does that translate into, um, like KPIs, like volume of Binance and the burn of BNB, volume of Hyperliquid and the burn of, um, and the burn of, of HYPE. And, and I think like, again, like the percentage— BNB is not a direct exposure to Binance, right? Because it's only a fraction of— in the same way that Hyperliquid only burns a certain percentage, right? But I think that that would be the way I would approach valuing these things and, and seeing what kind of reasonable evaluation this thing has. Can Hyperliquid be worth as much as BNB? You'd have to back into that relationship, right? Profitability exchange, how much BNB gets in term via the burn. Actually, let me just do that quickly while you do something else.

You giving me shit for doing something else right now? I was pulling up what the, what the perps tokens like dydx did in the last market.

Yeah, but there's also scarcity value. There's no been— there hasn't been any breakout perp DEX up until Hyperliquid, arguably, of like reasonable consistent volume. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, there have been breakout perps DEXs, but no, none where they— people genuinely talked about them competing with SEKs.

Okay. BNB. Binance uses up to 20% of quarterly profits to buy BNB. How much does Hyperliquid— what is it, 40%?

97%.

Okay. Yeah.

I mean, Hyperliquid's bought back $350 million of hype so far, I think, which is now worth like $750 million.

Plus also like the, the operating structure. This is actually quite fascinating, right? Like if you, if you compare like a Hyperliquid cost structure versus Binance cost structure, there's clearly vastly different operating models.

You know how many engineers Hyperliquid has?

15, 20, 10.

Yeah, that's like the most efficient. They're like such a crack team.

You're right, that's what I'm saying. So like, again, although you know where else I used that argument was FTX, but, uh, I will tether to, right, NVIDIA. Anyways, like, so, so Hyperliquid is a vastly, vastly leaner machine. Fees are— so they're burning fees, which, um, I guess the team retains at 3%. And that is used to cover all expenses plus their own token allocation.

I'm not sure. I don't know where the other 3% goes.

It's a vastly more efficient thing, right? Because Binance has a huge overhead structure, is a massive organization, has vastly more. So when you think about like BNB again, um, uses up to 20%. So let's just at face value assume, okay, they're, they're burning, um, they're buying back 20% of BNB every quarter based on their profits. The profitability of Binance is vastly lower, right, than Hyperliquid. Um, and so it doesn't take— Hyperliquid doesn't need to make as much, uh, volume to, to be, I guess, valued, um, you know, higher than, um, than Binance, like BNB.

Yeah.

So, so like I said, definitely Hyperliquid doesn't have to do as much volume. I guess that would be the math that I would want to do. I don't want to do it live. My lizard brain can't compute right now, but that's how I would approach it.

So I have been buying a bunch of Hype. I've been buying Hype all the way in the 30s. It's now my third biggest liquid holding, non, non-stock. And so, A, I share that because we're trying to get better about disclosures and stuff like that. So if I'm like shilling Hyperliquid on the podcast, you know why. But my, my thesis for this is there's like the mid-curve thesis, I think, which is like, or there's— here, here's my thesis. They have the two, two things the market wants right now. No VCs and a bunch of buybacks. They also, if you look at the custodian exchange, the custodian support and the exchange listings, still very early. So like very, very little exchange listings, hardly any big custodians support them. They've got, yeah, the no VC narrative and the buybacks. Um, but I think they have this like one intangible thing that very few people in crypto have ever been able to achieve, which is they've been able to make a massive amount of retail users very rich.

Yeah.

Um, it's, uh, it's Ethereum did it and Solana did it and hardly anyone else has been able to achieve that at scale. So, uh, that actually gives me it makes it, moves it from a trade to an investment. Because why did people, why did Solana like stay through the bear market? Like when it went down from like $250 down to like $10, people stayed. And the reason they stayed is because it had at one point in time gone from like $1 to $260. And a lot of people made life-changing amounts of money. And you just attach your, you kind of not only attach your reputation, your brand, but like emotionally you get attached to the thing. And I think Hyperliquid has that. And it's made tens of thousands of individuals. I mean, you and I both know people who made tens of millions from that airdrop. Yeah, that's life-changing.

So what, what is the best— the inflation curve for Hyperliquid?

Oh, I don't, I don't know these complex questions, Santiago.

Oh, like, that's what I mean. Like, what is— because again, this, this thing that I look— as much as I like CoinGecko, like, why, why can't you show me what is the, the Of course it's a buy and burn, but like, it would be nice to know.

I know, I know. I want to just be able to click something.

Yeah, just click, like, put on your dashboard, please. Okay. Market cap, current circulating market cap, inflation year 1, 2, 3, excluding burn, and then projected at the current pace of burns. What does that look like? Net circulating supply, right? Like simple things like that. Like, come on, guys. You know what, you know, it's programmatically built in. Unless you're like double zero, which is not live yet. But like, you know, like we know what the curve looks like. Show it to me and then give me a reasonable approximation to model out. You know what the sliding scale is like? Volume, burn. And then you kind of assume, okay, this is the circulating market cap and you're 1, 2, 3. So I can then start to think, not make the lazy assumption, which is like, oh, it's $38 billion. Can it go 3x from here and approximate Solana? Absolutely. Trading is all there is in crypto today. Hyperliquid is the best trading venue that people, to your point, has captured the mindshare in this rerun of a cycle after, after, you know, you know, over the last like year. So can this approximate Solana's $100 billion fully diluted market cap? Absolutely. This is a 3x from here. Hyperliquid at $100, I wouldn't flinch twice. Like that easy. Now then, then you say, okay, Can it go farther than that? I guess the question always comes down to, if you're willing to hold SOL, what is the catalyst for holding SOL? And if you're going to redraw your portfolio, like, what is going to drive valuations of crypto assets? For the foreseeable future, it's going to continue to be trading. And that's like the killer use case. Who's on a dollar-per-dollar basis, which venue is going to attract more trading in the— for every dollar gets invested on-chain? Probably Hyperliquid, more than a third or 40%. How much does Solana capture? Solana ran up from like $8 to the current, because, you know, in large part mean trading and on the margin, like a lot of community, of course, the whole FTX thing kind of like went away, right? Same thing. Yeah. Like, like, tell me why, you know, BNB has $93 billion market cap. Could Hyperliquid be that?

Yeah. Yeah.

Right. Can— SOL has $87 billion fully diluted market cap. Uh, yeah.

Yeah. There's, there's another thing we haven't talked about, which is the OTC markets. And we're, um, we really want to get, um, you know, talking to Omar about this, trying to get Second Lane data inside of the Blockworks platform. Cause I think there's this whole opaque OTC market in crypto, which like people have no visibility into and we want to add some of that data into the platform to give visibility into it. There's a— if you look at the OTC markets, a lot of things are trading at these huge discounts right now, right? 20% discount, 50% discount, 90% discount. Hype trades OTC with no discount, sometimes little discount like 5%. So if you look at like a lot of the low float, high FDV tokens, they're trading these. And I think it was like Mosey had a good tweet about this. Vana, Charm, whatever the guy's Twitter is, a lot of those are trading at these huge discounts, like 50% depending on how much of the float is unlocked. Hype is trading at like, yeah, 5% discount OTC right now. So I think that's a pretty good signal as well. Yeah, yeah, agreed. Earlier in today's episode, I mentioned Ledger's latest products, the Stax and Flex, and I wanted to take a few seconds to tell you more about them. These wallets feature the world's first secure touchscreens, which don't just simplify your digital transactions but also keep them extremely safe. These wallets are virtually impenetrable to online attacks because they store your private key in a secure offline chip. You can manage more than 5,500 tokens and install up to 100 apps. Choose the most trusted name in hardware wallets and take control of your digital security today at ledger.com. Or hit the link in the description of today's episode to check out their latest wallets. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about Citria, the ZK rollup expanding Bitcoin's utility without sacrificing its security. Using ZK technology, Citria enables Bitcoin to function as a fully programmable financial platform. Citria is optimistically verified by Bitcoin, offering the most secure and native way to extend Bitcoin's utility to DeFi. With Catria, developers can build scalable payment systems, tap into Bitcoin's liquidity with financial applications, and build privacy systems. Catria is currently on testnet and approaching mainnet. To follow their progress, click the link in the show notes or follow them on X @Catria_XYZ. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. Other things that happen— go ahead.

The Tron stuff.

Yeah, you want to talk about Tron?

Sure.

What do you think?

I don't have an opinion other than like it's getting a bit out of hand, don't you think?

Crypto group Tron to go public after US pauses probe into billionaire founder. All right, let's find another headline. Um, okay, here's some more details. Justin Sun's Tron reportedly plans to go public in the US following a reverse merger with SRM Entertainment. The company to be named Tron Incorporated, will focus on stacking TRX, starting with a $210 million investment. Eric Trump denied rumors of involvement in the alleged Tron Inc. Um, so I mean, let me see this. So this is basically just like— it's just giving public markets a way to buy Tron token. And honestly, I think the public markets want that. Tron is a play on stablecoins, weirdly enough. I was talking to an institutional investor last night. They're allocating to crypto. He's interested in Tron. 60% of Tether moves on Tron. He doesn't know how to buy Tether stock, so he thinks that Tron is a good allocation. Never would, never would buy the Tron token, but would buy this Tron Inc. And boom, there's your, there's, there's the actual market reason for why this is smart for Tron.

Yeah, exactly. What percentage? I actually think it holds up better than most of the other stuff. Like the Ethereum one, like, was not very successfully, like, it was, it was a bit of a chaos. The Joe Lubin, um, one, um, it was down like 70% that day or something. I think it was trading at now, I think It went back up. Yeah, I mean, everything stopped today.

Yeah.

Um, oh no. Yeah, like stablecoin, like if you look at the stablecoin charts, if you go to our dashboard, what percentage of stablecoins get traded on Tron? Like, it's like a lot. 40% of USDT is like a whole lot. It's a primary venue of USDT, I believe. Ethereum and Tron are the two largest chains that handle most of the stablecoin activity.

Yeah.

On a number of users, active users, I believe Tron is more. Yeah, it's just like a lot of developing countries retail. Like, it's just— that's why Tron's strong.

I mean, this is the bet, right? So there's this Bessant tweet. He said— this is actually kind of crazy. He said, recent— so recent reporting. I love this tweet because it's so clearly written by AI, but that's okay. Recent reporting projects that stablecoins could grow into a $3.7 trillion market by the end of the decade. The scenario becomes more likely with passage of the Genius Act. A thriving— okay, so actually the other stuff's less important. What he's saying is the stablecoin market cap is going to increase 10x in 5 years. If you are an investor, boom, there's your investment. When you don't know, SaaS is unattractive right now. Defense tech is already overvalued. AI, you can't get into those rounds and they're probably— and they're overvalued. If you can even get into them. What are you investing in?

You don't want to invest in, you know, Mag 7's out of control.

Like, what are you buying right now? Boom, stablecoins. Easy thesis for like a senior analyst.

Let's just remind ourselves, the absolute left curve, maybe right curve argument to crypto has always been it's a drop in the bucket in terms of aggregate asset class. It's, uh, you know, you're talking about like 60, you know, coin at— what is it, $6 billion it went public at? Yeah, I mean, it's—

I don't know, I forget what it went public at, but $15, right? I know, I know what you're saying.

I know, but you know what I mean? It's, um, but then there's also this dynamic where like Coinbase just got listed on S&P 500. Then there's also like, there is a point by which a stock graduates to be large enough for a large manager to put it on position. Because if you're at— if your minimum ticket size for large funds is like couple hundred million, well, you know, you can't ever be more than 5%. So if, like, you know, if your average ticket is $100 million and you can't make it like more than 5% of the, you know, it needs to be at least a— what is it, $2 billion? No, a— yeah, $2 billion market cap. Like equity value company, right? But you know, or maybe your standard is like 1%. So like, again, I feel like once assets cross the $10, $20, $50, $100 billion in market cap, it unlocks new allocators to that particular, um, to that particular strategy. Because, you know, they have to put in size, and if you're too small, they're not going to put in— they're not going to— they can't add a position. Yeah, there's all these like weird market structure things that actually, funny enough, play into you know, why, why, why particular stock catches a bid or not.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it is detached from like, like fundamentals or whatever.

Anyways, this tweet is why Circle is ripping. It's why Tron Inc could catch a bid. You're buying Tron Inc? I'm buying any token. I'm buying anything that publicly lists right now. I mean, I'm not actually buying Tron Inc, but like, yeah, like if Gemini or Bullish go public, like I'm just smashing that. Feels like an easy trade, just like Plasma. I mean, I didn't end up doing Plasma, just like too busy, but like probably an easy trade. Pumped up Fund token, probably an easy trade. Like you kind of just—

what does that say about the aggregate cycle, sir? If it's too easy to trade, too easy money going around, I think we're late stage.

I think we're— I think we're 70 to 80% of the way through this cycle.

Feels about right.

You know what would be crazy?

What?

Remember, like, a year ago, I was like, 4-year cycle's dead. No such thing as a 4-year cycle. You know what would be nuts? If the cycle tops in fall of, fall of this year and the 4-year cycle is just perfectly intact.

Such a good meme. It all— you want perfectly intact.

2017 tops December 2017. Uh, 2021 tops November 2021. If this cycle tops like Q4 of 2025, the 4-year cycle is intact.

If this cycle tops in the fall, you're to blame. Everyone unfollow Jano, and, and, and it's his fault.

Okay, no, you blame the people doing these stupid treasury companies. That's who you blame. Okay, that's who you blame.

What else? Is there anything else coming up in the hour?

Yeah, I've got, I got 14 notifications. Hold on, I got to take a quick, quick scroll, quick scroll.

All right, he's just, he's just flexing, ladies and gentlemen. Look at him. Uh, where are we, where are we in terms of follower count? Just, just for the record.

For Suze?

No, well, for you first.

Oh, for me? Oh, Suze is booming. Nice week for Suze, 1731. I'm growing, 124.8.

124.8. And me?

Probably less. We don't even need to check.

127.3.

Dude, we know you just launched a company to try to boost your—

I have actually not gained. Inversion cap is sitting at You want to do another parlay, like a double or nothing, like emerging cap? Guess how many? Guess how many?

Uh, uh, 3,500.

Pump those numbers.

Oh, 6,000. Not bad. Oh, you hired, you hired a, you hired an executive, an EA this week, I think. Yeah, Lindsay.

Lindsay, she's great. She's great. She's actually like also like—

How did you hire? Okay, why did you make your second hire an EA? I, I, that, that sounded like, uh, like I disagreed with it. I did. I don't disagree with that. Like, why did you—

Bandwidth too. Like the amount of stuff that, I mean, she's, she's taken on a lot of responsibility. She was, um, you know, we've been able to get, um, freeing up more of our time is critical to do other functions. Uh, but she also, she used to work at a recruiting agency, so she's quasi people too. So like she's been taking a lot of recruiting. Like we have—

Oh my God. You know what, Brian? So I went to this Coinbase alumni event last week. Do you want to know what the advice Brian gave to the founders in the room? He said Coinbase's 5th hire was a recruiter. He said hire a recruiter way, way, way earlier than you think you should.

100%. I mean, we have had—

we're gonna—

you're an investor in Inversion, so we're gonna give you guys this data, but the amount of inbound we've gotten in terms of applications for all the roles that we're hiring, too much to keep up. And so we've been like, we've been like systematically building systems to capture that and like make sure that the right people get, you know, we see them and there's a process. So we also have a bunch of interns actually.

I know, I see them on Twitter.

They are great. The energy that they have. I pick up, there's something like, I pick up like 2 in the morning on Saturday because yes, yes, we're like, not a flex, but like, yeah, we're like doing stuff, right? And they immediately, there's a couple guys in there, they're like, that chat is bumping. 2 in the morning, they respond within 5 minutes. I tag him, they send us weekly memos of like what they're seeing, they're serving people in all across all Latin America.

You want to know what I think of when I think of you and the interns? What I think of— I think of— right here, this is you. This guy is you, and Gerard Butler is you, and then the interns are just—

ho ho—

just ready to go to war. You know what I like too is, um, this is a sign that you're doing something right. She's saying these things that that you say, like, I'll be inverting full-time, like, this is a forever company for A+ talent. Like, you got to get these messages into the wild.

Yeah, no, it's super— honestly, I am addicted to hiring super passionate full agency people that are just bought into the mission and are like, I'll tell you one thing, when I hired Suze, we kind of worked together for a concentrated period of time where we minimize the gap between expectation and reality. Because sometimes, to your point, how many times has this happened where you hire someone that is super competent but like they join the company and they are twiddling their fingers because they don't know what to do and/or they don't feel relevant, and then that just kind of like, you know, the ramping period takes too much time, or they never fully immerse themselves, they're not a fit, and then they leave. Not because they're not smart, but just because it wasn't a fit. And like I think oftentimes I've observed like we over-index on is this person smart and competent, not so much as this right fit. And the fit, unfortunately, the fit part of the interview comes at the end, whereas I think you almost invert and you say the fit actually comes at the very, very beginning. Because it's like, at the end of the day, like, as simple as it may sound, like, you're gonna be spending so much time with these people, more so than like other— like, are you actually gonna enjoy working together? Right. And honestly, like sometimes, like, I think you mentioned this in the prior segment episode, which was like that you had two candidates and you picked the one that like, you were like, yeah, this like, so anyways, it's super rewarding to hire good people. So.

Especially in the beginning, first 10 people set the tone.

Yeah. The other thing is like interns, like a great, I mean, I could almost tell you like, it's just a scouting program. Like I feel like, yeah. Low-cost, de-risked hire. And these guys, like, we get so much bandwidth out of the entire intern group.

And let me ask you, so you'd hire interns? Would you hire— there was a thing that I tweeted this week and posted on LinkedIn that people were really not happy about.

Um, Yano owns LinkedIn for what it's worth.

Like, it is crazy.

You got him locked in.

I dominate LinkedIn.

You truly do. I need to level up my game.

My Twitter, fine. My LinkedIn, I dominate that platform. All right, so there's a— you got to dominate one platform. Yeah. Otherwise You do. We're not happy though. The— there was a Wall Street Journal article that said young graduates are facing an employment crisis. Slow hiring is especially daunting for those just starting out right now. Some entry-level positions require 3 to 5 years of experience. So I tweeted, I said, oh, this is actually really interesting. I said, usually this happens in recessions, right? 2001 global financial crisis.

Right.

Anyone who graduated college in 2008, 2009 has horror stories. But now it's different, right? We're not in a huge recession. I said now it's happening because AI— I said if AI can do the job of an entry-level grad and it's 50 times cheaper, this trend is only going to continue. Because if you think about like the slope of— the slope of value that someone could add at an employee, like their ROI at an employee— at an employer, oftentimes it's a negative ROI the first 2 years because you have to pay to train them and a lot of them end up leaving and stuff like that. So I was saying there's no reason for companies to take on the work of training new grads when they can just give their existing team the latest and greatest AI models. So you hire all these interns. Would you hire a 22-year-old right out of college?

No.

Right. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Okay, well, depends. My interns, the prompt for them is always like, I They need to send us a memo every week. And what is the thing that you, like, you almost say like, I never want them to send me stuff that I can easily pull in Perplexity or ChatGPT. Get me data that doesn't exist. What data doesn't exist?

Oh, so you go do interviews, qualit—

you do, you do only, only user interviews. The, the, they need to every week interview people across to inform product development.

That data doesn't— that's good. That's fair.

It's, it's, it's a grind, but like you have to go and you talk to users like, This is where I think like the value will really differentiate. Like, I don't ever wanna see a Perplexity report on like public companies and stuff that you can easily do. You could supplement that. I, I think you showed me over the weekend how you did that website for ranking. Like you, you, you asked ChatGPT to del— to give you a prompt and then you inputted that prompt. Like, I think like being able to go through that sequence of like how to, how to prompt correctly is, is, is a skillset that you've developed. And I think if you don't have it, like you're gonna be at a material disadvantage. But the real thing is Scale AI, I think, is that company is differentiated so much. Like Meta made a huge investment, right, on it.

Uh, $15 billion.

$15 billion. Why? Because like they focus on data. Like data is the key to training. Data is the thing that doesn't exist. If you're able to create new data that is actually really differentiated and you own it, that's where, that's where the value is. So Susan and I made the conscious decision of saying, okay, let's hire like 10 interns across every single Latin American market and let's Validate assumptions and use like user surveys, constant, constant, constant to inform product development. Um, and, and we were just talking yesterday to Simon Taylor, who's really good, like he's one of the best fintech guys. He introduced me to this guy because I tweeted like, who are the best fintech brains? Like, we were speaking to him yesterday and he's like, honestly, like, he was telling me, um, he's like, can't tell you how many Fortune 500 companies ask me about stablecoins, want a strategy. And then he was talking about Latin America. He's like, honestly, most people bucket the region as a whole and they do not have a single understanding. Of like fintechs in Latin America. And he's like, the data doesn't exist. Very few public companies, like only Nubank. And so they only disclose so much. And I just heard that. I was like, yeah, exactly. This is why you have to just go there. And you could hire Bain, McKinsey to do a million-dollar consulting project for a month that is going to be very cookie cutter. Or you can hire someone that is there doing actual work. So, yeah, I think that to me, that's like constantly is like, why, How do you differentiate in a world where everyone has like— it's just collapsing the access to information and analysis, like that's been commoditized. I think you have to just create new type of data or lean into your distribution or both.

Yeah, there was a really— I would recommend people go read the Andy Jassy note to the company at Amazon. He just published it yesterday. It's just Google like some thoughts on generative AI, Amazon CEO AI message or something like that. The takeaway is that any job— it's any job that has repetitive thinking involved in it, AI will replace. If your job is just making decks, sending emails, summarize this document, it's coming for your job. So you need to figure out ways to start new projects, get new data. Like, don't— if you find yourself falling into repetitive habits, AI comes for that job.

Yeah.

The last— coming up on time here. The last thing that I saw that was— I don't fully understand it, I'll be honest with you, but a lot of smart people in the industry were talking about it was EigenLayer launched EigenCloud. So again, I haven't read too much about it, but this is like the one-liners, like blockchain-secure data. Rollups scaled execution. EigenLayer introduces EigenCloud, a verifiable cloud that externalizes compute while preserving trustless guarantees. So if you look at some of the people I really respect, like Yuan Li at Blockchain Cap, talks about, says, not only is this massive for the EigenLayer ecosystem, we believe that EigenCloud has the potential to shorten the timeline for mainstream adoption. It's of, of crypto. Um, Joe Lubin says the future of internet is about verifiability as a foundation for trust. Um, uh, verifiable economy is on the way. This is Brother Bing at MegaETH talking about how, uh, Shriram is gigabrain, super smart. This is Uma from, uh, Sync saying the Eigen team deeply understands the importance of verifiability as a primitive cool to see their product steps to further this vision. So anyways, this is just like a weekend thing to dig into. Seems like the TL;DR, the summary is this is like a verifiable AWS, which could then create a verifiable internet. My problem is I have no idea what verifiability means or why, why I need it or what problem it solves. So I was giving a recommendation to the Eigen team and be like, tell me.

Not to mention a16z put another $60 million, $70 million locked into Eigen.

So that seems like the more crypto-native news of the week. Definitely. Anything else?

No, I think we can wrap. This has been a good segment. Congrats again on the token transparency stuff. It is— I, it's one of the things that I'm so, so fired up about and I think can have a lot of, a lot of really positive effect to the industry at the right time. Right. And so congrats on that. And content of the week, anything you— OceanGate came out. I haven't seen it. Is that the new, um, documentary? Documentary about OceanGate? OceanGate, like the submarine that went missing or something.

Oh, oh, you know what's funny? You mentioned this on the last time.

Yeah, goddamn. No, no, no, no, no.

You mentioned OceanGate, that there was a documentary. So last night I was looking for something and I typed in ocean documentary and I watched for like an hour this random ocean documentary by— Blue Ocean, like BBC. No, it was like, who's the guy who narrates all the nature documentaries? Oh, the British guy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you mean.

Wait, you know, you know who I'm talking about?

Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

Yeah. David Attenborough. David Attenborough.

Oh, you want to go to sleep or just—

So I watched like an hour of this David Attenborough and I was like, I mean, this is It's fine. Like, it's our producer.

Our producer's on it. He was like, David Attenborough, dude. Oh yeah, thank you, Jared. We see you. We appreciate you.

Yeah, so anyways, I watched it. I was like, I mean, it's fine. It's like, it's like decent, but like, it's not the craziest movie. But Ocean Gate is the documentary. Okay, noted. Yeah, I am watching it, but, um, Matilda? No, I, I listen to this Mark Andreessen podcast, as one does. No, I got nothing.

You know what I read? You know what I read over the weekend? I presumed I took my Kindle because I was traveling a bunch for these conferences and whatnot. And I read The Bond King book. Oh, good. The story of PIMCO and Bill Gross. Really, really awesome. I mean, it's like one of those legendary institutions and like it was pretty good.

Oh, you know what I read? It's super easy to read. You read it in a day on a weekend. I read 24 Hours in Ancient Rome. Oh, nice. It's, it's like a fun book. It's, um, it's not like the best written book, but it— every chapter is a different person in Rome. So they'll be like, the baker. It's like the baker. No, it's not like— it's like the baker, the, the farmer, the slave, like, and they, and they kind of chronicle their, like, a day in the life of this person. And it's cool. It's like a fun— it's like, literally read it in like 6 hours type of book.

You know, we should have Honestly, the biggest life hack is carrying my Kindle with me when I'm at conferences or like traveling. My reading rate goes up like multiples because it's just the form factor. It's so convenient. It's practically indestructible. And reading in the sun is great if you're out on beach or whatever in the summer. There's such a cool guy, like honestly, I should just start gifting that. I think it's one of the best gifts. Like you preload a Kindle with like a bunch of books or stuff. Yeah. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe we get sponsored and we get Empire branded Kindles. That would be a nice gift. I think we always— I think we can do that without sponsors, but yeah, we can do like a, like a 10 or whatever. Sure. Okay. So Permissionless is coming up. We'll be there. We're going to be live roundups. We've got live roundups.

We've got a happy hour. We've got all this cool stuff. So we'll see you there.

And if people want to get tickets, is there still a discount going on? No Empire 10. If not, try 40 Empire 30. Empire 35. Empire 30. I think I get, I think there's, I think I get a free speak, a free ticket actually as a speaker to someone else. Do you? I believe so. I, I was graciously invited as a speaker, as a, at the last minute, which is like, I was like the 10th in line, you know, like after the 4th round, it's like, crap, no one said yes. I give it to Santi. Fine. Jared, uh, we gotta cut that. Cut it, cut it. I know.

All right, folks, great, great, uh, great hanging with you. Um, have a good Friday, have a good Saturday, and we'll see you Monday. Likewise.

Thank you so much, everyone. Have a great weekend.