Bankless - The Return of the ICO | Ryan & David

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

ICOs are suddenly back, but this time the projects are real, the mechanisms are better, and retail isn’t shut out. Ryan and David break down why MegaEth, Monad, Aztec, Zama, and Infinex are launching public sales all at once, how onchain auctions are fixing 2017’s mistakes, and what regulatory clarity means for U.S. participation. They also dive into the rise of internet native capital markets on Ethereum, the shift away from airdrop farming, and why fair price discovery could be a defining theme of 2026. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔵COINBASE | ETH & BTC BACKED LOANS https://bankless.cc/coinbase-borrow 🪙FRAXNET | MINT, REDEEM, & EARN  https://bankless.cc/fraxnet 🦄UNISWAP LABS | SWAP NOW https://bankless.cc/uniswap-labs 🛞MANTLE | GLOBAL HACKATHON 2025 https://bankless.cc/mantle-hackathon 💤EIGHT SLEEP | IMPROVE YOUR SLEEP https://bankless.cc/eight-sleep ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:13 Are ICOs Back? 2:54 The Rise of Capital Formation 5:04 Learning from 2017 ICO Mania 7:19 Regulatory Challenges & Arbitrage 10:56 Recent ICOs Overview 17:01 Exploring the MegaEth Sale 26:21 Monad's Unique Approach 30:40 The Innovative Aztec ICO 45:19 Upcoming Auctions: Zama & Infinex 1:04:41 The Future of Capital Formation 1:07:46 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today on the show, we explore the frontier of capital formation on public blockchains. The big question we're asking today are ICOs back. Mega-Eath, Monat, Aztec, Infinex, Zama. These are five big high-quality projects, and they are all doing public token sales. Some of these, even doing the work ahead of their sale to classify their trade. token as a consumptive good, as opposed to a security, which allowed unaccredited investors to invest right alongside everyone else.

Ryan, I want this to happen. I want ICOs to return. The fact that we are seeing not five C-tier projects or B-tier projects, but five A-tier industry-leading projects, all doing token sales inside of two or three months of each other, I think it's a very big deal. It's something that I hope continues. And if it does continue, the implications for what this does to crypto and what this means for Ethereum, I think are very, very large.

And that's what I want to discuss with you here today on the show. Yeah, I think the question is not have they returned, but it's just like observing that they are returning and then trying to extrapolate that moving forward if this trend changes. To me, capital formation has always been one of the central money verbs. of decentralized finance, right? So when we started talking about, like, what is this bankless thing? If Bitcoin brought us the ability to hold a store of value asset without a bank, going bankless and holding onto your value and also transacting some of that value,

okay, those are two money verbs. There's holding and then there's also payment or transacting, right? Defi was about pursuing all of the other different verbs, borrowing and lending and swapping and also capital formation, or maybe raising would be a term for that, or minting would be a term. It is true to say, though, that crypto has had a complicated relationship

with capital raising on-chain in the past. Capital formation, right? So the ICO, I guess maybe the Immaculate ICO for an eth-maxi out there was Ethereum, and it was relatively unpolluted. It's just because it was the first time that this happened. Every other ICO since, particularly in the first cycle of these capital formation ICOs, had kind of a taint to them and it got progressively worse as the cycle continued.

I know you were awake into crypto in that 2017 cycle. Many have called this the Ethereum cycle or even the ICO cycle. You actually, correct me if I'm wrong, David, but you got your start in a an ICO company during those days when there was a lot of like shenanigans going. Like it was it was not all good on the capital raised formation side of things. So I imagine you have a complicated relationship to this topic as well. What was your first experience with ICOs and how did you experience 2017? Yeah, the importance of capital formation to go back all the way to 2017 really was the big

unlock for me in crypto. I don't think many others. This was before we even had defied. The word defy didn't exist. Defy itself didn't exist. Uniswap wasn't around. Maker Dow wasn't around. We didn't even have stable coins.

And the first real, real movement about crypto post-Ethereum using smart contracts was the ICO. Yeah. They said that was like Ethereum's only use case, basically. Only use case. Yeah. It's like what is, ETH was an investment bank where the currency of ether was used to invest in speculative ideas called ICOs.

That's right. It was like the first idea of what Ethereum was. And there was something very powerful about somebody else across the world having an idea and then me resonating with that idea and being able to like one or two click invest in that idea. Did you participate in some of these? I participated in one ICL. I will get to which one later.

I know you're baiting me on which one it was. I'm definitely not ashamed of it. It takes a little bit of context. But we'll get there. We'll get that. We'll get that. Obviously, this power of, there's an idea out there that I want to invest in, was powerful for many people because that's what fueled the ICO mania of 2017.

We had the basic attention token token sale sold out in three blocks for like $30 million. And really the race was on because it was a little bit too easy to come up with a very attractive idea and it became a little bit too easy for people to send their ether and get some tokens. That's right. But nonetheless, anytime crypto does something, far too much for far too long, we learn how to do it correctly like five to eight years later.

And that's what I'm seeing happen right now. Not only did we go through the ICO mania and learn about the power of capital formation, but just as like a completely parallel research and development path, crypto has also been developing very sophisticated auction price discovery mechanisms, which ICOs of today are now leveraging.

And so there is a lot of just work that the industry is standing upon in 2025, December of 2025, that really shapes up and tunes up some of the ICOs to the point where, like, now if you were an ICO back then, it might have been averse selection. You're probably like a C or B tier project. But the fact that we have Coinbase purchasing Kobe's Echo platform with the Sonar ICO platform. and then you also have uniswop with their CCA auction. We have some of the biggest players with the biggest reputations in the space building out ICO pipeline infrastructure,

token floating, token price discovery infrastructure, and some of the best projects in crypto are using it. And so it's time to return to this subject because as an industry, we went through some fucking bullshit, excuse my language, that we shouldn't have needed to do. The points programs, the yield farms, retroactive airdrops, like all of this stuff

was just a runaround for what should have been an ICO that was, we just were forced to do that convoluted mess because of the regulatory environment. Yeah, I guess we're like almost 10 years out from the inception of the idea of the ICO. And there were a lot of problems with ICOs in general, like principal agent problems, incentive problems, alignment problems that I would say happened and a lot of investors and participants got burnt,

I actually think the market would have figured that out in a shorter amount of time had we just let the experiment continue. Because what happens is initial ICO participants, they get burnt and then they come up with better auctions, better incentive alignment, just better mechanisms so that all boats rise together. But we were prevented from doing that. I would contend by some of the regulatory apparatus, which just shut down all of the free market ICO experiments with a hostile SEC and Gary Gensler regime that effectively made it illegal.

And then you saw all, you mentioned the points meta, largely I feel like a chunk of that was regulatory arbitrage, just like to not call it an actual coin offering. A huge chunk of it. I would say that that was a majority of it. Okay. So anyway, I do think the free market would have figured it out, but now we are back into somewhat of a free market regime, but probably with some better guardrails than we've had in the past. And we'll see what- Internal self-produced regulations, I would say. Some of it, some of it

is internal self-produced regulations bottom up. Some of it is maybe some top down, and there's definitely an atmosphere of experimentation and freedom. And it's sandbox to crypto, which is good. So, but back to you, which ones have you participated in or which one did you participate in 2017? Because I must know. Okay, so Amin Soleimani was a consensus developer. Dude, you did the spank chain ICO. I did.

And he left consensus. He was working on payment channels to do cheap instant payments. And he was like, okay, what industry can I apply the technology to that also needs the anti-authoritarian freedom technology that is crypto. And he went towards the adult entertainment industry and built an adult entertainment platform. But the reason why the Spang Chain ICO was interesting to me was

you were in it for the tech. I know, David. It was very very viral. But also there was a natural price discovery mechanism that the Spain Chain ICO did that no other ICO did. And I saw like, I saw Amin's leadership do this strike price mechanism where people would submit bids and then the, organization doing the ICO,

Spang Chain, would create a strike price and anything that paid anything that was outside of that strike zone didn't actually participate. And so the company only received, only sold tokens to the amount of people that was appropriate and only only

received money from people that were willing to pay at the particular price. And so it was a natural demand and supply side finding an equilibrium that no other ICO had, and I respected the auction mechanism that I mean had. We're going to follow a similar pattern today with UNISwap's CCA model, but the whole idea is crypto has smart contracts. We're public infrastructure. We have unknown demand for supply of tokens, and we need mechanisms to

equilibrate between these two things. And we have eight years of research of auction mechanism design that is finally being applied in some of these ICOs. And the, if crypto has actually succeeded in producing some of the best capital formation infrastructure out there, I would expect the world, the global capital markets, to leverage this infrastructure that we have built. And so that was, to answer your question, Ryan, it was bank chain in 2017. But also, we have the five recent ones that have gone on. Three of them have gone on in the last like month or so, mega-eath, monad, and then also

Aztec, and then two, we have on the horizon, Infinex and Zama. And so we have a bunch of ICOs that have happened and a couple that are happening. Well, let's maybe talk about them now, because let's see what the latest is. I think that part of the initial crop of ICOs, and any time we've tried these experiments in crypto, certainly there were some auction mechanics that went wrong, but there were also economic mechanics that went wrong and economic alignment mechanics. Most of the ICOs, people will remember from 2017, they probably have a bitter taste in their mouth

if they participated in any or invested in any because none of them really outperformed ether. And certainly, like a large chunk, maybe call it 98% actually collapsed to zero. A chunk of those were just sort of a vaporware, Bali rug type thing, where they invested in some hype rather than actually capturing some economic upside

And like there's a question of, oh, that's just how, you know, startup and new projects, that's just how they work. Or maybe there's some fundamental flaws with like the token economics or the token rights you receive. Maybe it's a combination of those. And I'm unclear if we've also made progress on that. But I hope to hear your perspective on that as we go through some of these recent ICOs. The one maybe we could start with is the mega-eath sale. And these ICOs are sort of really crescendoing in. in Q4 of 2025.

That's when I've started to see this uptick hit. Let's talk about mega-eath. So what is this and what was unique about it? Yeah, a handful of things. Maybe to just be able to compare some of the metrics between all the ICOs, I'll rattle off some similar stuff like token supply. 5% of the mega-Eth token supply was sold

at a $999 million valuation. You were allowed to submit a bid for like if you didn't want to spend more than at a $500 million dollar valuation, you were as a bidder allowed to bid for a particular price. So that's, that's pretty cool. This was used on the Echo platform, which was recently bought by Coinbase. It was a 72-hour public auction. And it also had a max bid per wallet. So $186,000 per wallet. So you couldn't bid more than that. And that was a matter of just like allowing for the token to be distributed widely, wide distribution. We're going to see the wide distribution show up in

in other ICOs as well. It was massively oversubscribed. So they were selling $50 million. About $1.4 billion of bids came in. Now, on the Echo platform, it's important to note that you don't just fill out a number and hit bid. The platform looks at the tether,

in this case, tether, the USDT in your wallet, and says, okay, you have $47,000 of tether in your wallet. You are allowed to bid up to $47,000. You can't bid $187,000. and have no tether in your wallet. So you can only bid up to the amount of tether. And then once you do bid, your tether goes into an escrow.

And so when I say that there was $1.4 billion of demand, there was actually $1.4 billion of tether locked up for people bidding into this mega-eath token sale, a 28x over-s subscription. Now, it's not known what the mega-eath valuation was at the last equity round for mega-eath. but I think everyone assumed that the maximum cap that they were going to sell the tokens at $999 million

was well under the valuation of MegaEath on the private markets between the VCs. And Mega Eath did that explicitly. They just said, we want to make sure that retail investors or investors generally get access to subunicorn valuations. And so they did it to do it for their community, which is why it was so oversubs.

Because if you look at the perps, the valuation, the implied valuation, of mega-eth on the perps, that was like a 75% discount. It was trading at $4 billion. So these are some of the sale facts that are probably notable. You've used the Echo platform. So in the 2017 era of ICOs, all you needed was an Ethereum wallet and you generally, you wouldn't even purchase these things with stable coins. You purchased them with eth and anyone could participate. And there were no limitations. It was just like kind of a free-for-all, right?

What's the experience of using the Echo platform? So I imagine there's some compliance involved with this. So AMLKYC, so they don't want bad actors or terrorists or money, you know, like known entities that are like a band, they would do that. Also, accredited investor laws, do they pertain for U.S. users as well? So that would mean you have to have a certain net worth threshold over a million or certain income thresholds, I believe. Is that what the Echo platform does? What's the experience of using this? Yeah. The Echo Platform asks if you're an accredited investor and then it asks how you qualify as an credit investor.

I don't remember ever submitting any proof. So I'll just leave that up for the listener. But yeah, are you a credit investor? You self-certified. Self-certified. I stamp myself as an accredited investor. And then the thing that Echo did was they asked you probably the most rigorous financial questionnaire

that I've ever been asked. It was like maybe 20 questions and it was like, what are the possible outcomes of this investment? and it's like, I make money, or the investment doesn't work, but I get my money back, or it goes to zero, it potentially goes to zero. It likely goes to zero. And it's a multiple choice. And like, if you use, if you're smart enough, you can just pass it on their first attempt. But like, it was, it was by far, I've done some of these questionnaires before in different walks of life. Definitely the most rigorous. Better than reading, I guess, a disclaimer,

some long read me legally. It just wants to make sure, like, make sure that you know you are investing in something that is highly speculative, right? And you could lose it all. Yes. And so you would imagine if some regulator comes knocking to echo and be like, why did you allow people to invest on this platform? They're like, Grandma lost all her money. Well, grandma filled out a survey. Grandma passed the test. You know, and I do remember seeing on Twitter, people saying, oh, no, I failed the test. Can I take the test again? And Kobe's like, no, no, you failed the test. Sorry.

But the fact that it's a test that anyone can pass. Yeah. Like, you don't have to be born into anything. You don't have to have a certain amount of money to pass the test. Like, I like that. And so that was cool. And so if you pass a test, you could invest. And yeah, I enjoyed that.

The other, the U.X of it was like had to bounce back between the. the sale.megaeath.com web page and then the echo web page a handful of times, and that was a little bit confusing. I expect those experiences to kind of get collapsed in the future, but that's kind of just like the clunkiness of a webtooth phenomenon. Nothing to do with crypto. People are always angry at these things and they talk about fairness a lot. This is, in particular, crypto, Twitter. This is kind of a sentiment. It's like, oh, only 5%. I mean, the thing to remember about ICOs is like, what's the status quo? Well, the status quo is the thing stays private.

But just about, you know, like until it's, I don't know, a Deca unicorn, right? Or until it's worth, you know, this is what we're seeing with companies like Stripe or companies like SpaceX, right? Retail doesn't get involved at all. And I don't think that regulators acknowledge enough that U.S. capital markets are broken from that perspective, from the perspective of retail can't participate until it's like overinflated and all of the upside has been squeezed out of the thing. What's interesting, though, about 2025 and the evolution of these ICO,

versus 2024. 2024, as we said, was very much like points meta and very much still in the airdrop meta side of things. I'm not sure actually what mega-eat-eat strategy for airdropping a token is,

but certainly they had a strategy around an ICO, which I like and I appreciate because if you are skin in the game purchasing these assets at a particular price, like you were invested in the ecosystem. You're not gaming this thing.

You're actually participating. And that is, so much more pure to me than kind of just getting free money basically and trying to gamify the system for doing weird activities. For doing weird activities that just become sort of these metric, you know, propaganda type of things. Anyway, so mega,

it is it true to say that Mega-Eath has really focused far less on anirdrop and far more in the ICO mechanic? I don't expect Mega Eath to issue an air drop at all. Okay. Why would they? They did a public sales. sale. They sold $50 million. In addition to that, they did an NFT sale prior to this. So they've already done a round of sales to allow interested community members to get in the door. Maybe they do

a small air drop. Did they also do some economic work here too? So have they made it clear basically what token holders receive? I mean, one of the things that I recall from Mega-Eath is, you know, they have a stable coin on the Megheath platform that Stablecoin is going to generate yield. Do they have a story of how the, like if they get a, a billion in stable coins on mega-eath usage, how that yield generation, that 4% or whatever, flows to mega-eath holders?

Because this is part of the story we never had back in 2017, which is like, okay, how is the token actually going to accrue any value? And it seems like the 2025 crop is more crisp on that, or although, correct me if I'm wrong here.

I don't think they've released any documentation on the matter. I think you are intuitively filling in some gaps that have been left because, I mean, That's a level of like 300, 400 level question, which I also am curious to the answer to, but no, I do not think that there is a robust economic report about the nature of the mega-eathe token that's out.

And I don't think that they would do that ahead of time. But that is becoming the consensus, the social contract, the social consensus, right? I mean, they have to share the economic activity with their token holders in some form. Do they not? Yes, yes. Do they want to broadcast that? I don't think we are totally out of securities law regulation hurdles that we want to just say, hey, there's going to be a stable coin and mega-Eath holders get access to the economic upside of that.

I don't think we're there quite yet. As a investor in Mega-Eath, I participated in this one. I would like to know those details, but I can also totally understand that you don't want to wave that flag around too loudly. The other thing you mentioned is just the general interest in Mega-Eath ICSO. You said it was 20x oversubscribed? 28X over subscribe. So how did they determine or how did the auction determine who actually got to participate if there were limited slots here? Yeah, this was part of their post sale like just documentation announcements.

So they said the project, it used what they called a U-shaped allocation, prioritizing both key contributors. So, you know, early supporters, you know, community promoters, et cetera. And then also giving a smaller baseline allocation to many participants. to have broad distribution. And so there were a lot of things that you could have done that there are like Mega-Eath projects that if you had used with your wallet,

like Cap Money, for example, if you had used that, you probably got some amount of allocation, maybe not your full allocation. And they did that to disperse the project widely. And then also they gave full allocations to people who are very loudly, publicly pro-Mega-Eath and other community partners.

So in a way, they air-dropped allocation slots rather than actual token. Yes, the airdropped allocation spots. That's right. Which I think is the right way to do it. Yeah. Again. Interestingly, there was a Twitter account, ICO Beast, who made a joke about how

Mega-Eath is trading at like some $4, $5 billion allocation and he wants to learn, he wants to figure out how to hedge his position. What that means is selling. And so when he tweeted this, he got his allocation yoinked, which I actually think is totally fine. Like, we are out of the air drop meta. like if you don't feel alignment with the team, why are you investing?

The whole idea of ICOs is direct relationship to project believers and how do we know who a believer is? Somebody who's willing to give up the money, their money and then hold it versus people who like we're doing the whole air drop farming and be like, I don't care about this project. I'm farming it to zero.

We're trying to get rid of the ladder and reward the former. And anyone who's like, I'm going to take my free 4X because remember, Mega-Eath heavily discounted the raise. I'm going to take my free 4-X and hedge it. Like, no, that you got their project joined. And so Megheath had the option to be opinionated about who gets access to the allocation.

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during their holiday sale. That's 8Sleep.com slash bankless. You also get 30 days to try at risk free. Link in the show notes for more information. Let's talk about the second. This is the Monad sale. So another chain ecosystem. Yep.

Mega Eth was layer two, of course. Monad is a layer one, both of these EVM compatible. Monad did an ICO, too. They did it in a slightly different way. So describe what they did. Yeah, they did it directly through Coinbase. And so in order to participate in the Monad ICO, you had to actually make a coin have and fund a Coinbase account.

So big win for Coinbase. This is the first ICO after acquiring Kobe's echo platform. and it was just natively through the Coinbase front end. That in itself, though, is crazy. That's clearing a regulatory hurdle because for Coinbase to actually launch an ICO, that means they must feel very comfortable with their position with tokens and the SEC and operating the U.S. because they have always taken huge strides to not run afoul of securities law or U.S. law in the past.

Yes. That's a sign of itself, I think. This is one of the reasons why I'm so excited and optimistic about ICOs moving forward is like, yo, Coinbase is pushing this forward. They've built out a whole token offering pipeline. So you do your token sale with Coinbase. But then they also have, who did they buy? They bought some company called Liquefy, which does token compliance. And so all investors, they sign up the liquefied cap table management.

Exactly. And then once your token graduates and is sold, where do you think it's going to trade? It's going to trade on Coinbase. Full cycle. Yeah, the full pipeline. Okay, five-day token sale period, $2.5 billion network valuation at the sale. And so Monhead was selling itself at $2.5 billion.

That's down half a billion dollars from the last VC invested raise. And so while it's not down as much as Megheath was, Maggie's was like 75%. This is like 18% lower than the last VCs. And so the theme here is that the public sale is happening at a lower price than the last equity round or two for two on that. And so that's pretty cool.

7.5% of the total monad was sold. Again, at the $2.5 billion valuation, so 2.5x, the valuation that Mega Eath raised at. Roughly six hours after it began, the token sale was 45% subscribed. So 45% sold out with about $100 million of tokens remaining. So it was $43 million in 23 minutes. Crazy.

Sales slowed down after the first six hours, but ultimately came to sell out at roughly between 115 to 145% over subscribed. We have the token price of Mon. It's trading now. It's liquid. And it is currently at 0.085, so 2.85, up from the 0.025 cents that it was sold at. So investors are up 13%. Pretty cool.

And I should note that Mon is not fully liquid, right? So low flow, high FDV asset. But the assets in the mega-eath case and the Monad case, the tokens that retail investors are buying by participating, is there any lock-up associated with this? Because the investors do have vesting periods and lock-ups. That's why all of that flow is not available on the market right now. How about the ICO participants? Yeah, the ICO participants are the first people who get unlocked.

And so in both the Monad and the mega-Each case, the earlier, investors who got in at lower rounds and took our more risk are locked for a longer period of time. And so the first tokens that will hit the market are the sale participants. Okay. So so far we've talked about two of these new ICOs. And of course, when you have the power of the platform of Coinbase and the user experience and all of the compliance, I'm sure it was done, you know, like in a highly compliant fashion, good U.X, good participation, all of that. The onboarding had to be seamless. This is getting away from all. are on-chain, purely crypto-native.

All you need is a connection to the internet and you like some private keys and you can participate worldwide, no matter who you are, basically. It was getting away from that idea and we're going into these more closed garden-type ICO platforms. So I want you to bring in the third, which is a super crypto-native ICO.

This was the Aztec ICO that I think just concluded last week. Correct me if I'm wrong. So what's special about the Aztec ICO. What's not special about the ISSEC ICO? I think the ASSEC ICO is probably the coolest sale mechanism that I've ever seen in crypto. And you participated in this too. I participated in it. It's why I'm excited right now is probably why this episode is happening because the first two, Megheth, Monad, okay, cool, like interesting data points, but the fact that a third token sale of a very large

project is happening in the same manner, but in a completely different direction. Is all on chain? Without a bankless? Yeah. Completely bankless, completely on chain, no intermediaries, all just on-chain financial infrastructure for what I consider to be a grade A project, I think is a very big deal. And so really the key secret sauce here,

maybe there's two standout components about why this was a big deal. First, the uniswap CCA mechanism, continuous clearing auction. Well, we're going to talk about that. And also, the Aztec went ahead and, did a lot of legal work to get legal opinions that the Aztec token is a consumptive good, not a crypto asset security,

which therefore is their legal opinion that is not a security, and so that they can sell to unaccredited U.S. investors. So when you go to the Aztec sale page, you know when you would go to any sort of air drop page and then it would say, hey, your IP address is from the U.S., we're not airdropping, your geo blocks.

No, no, no. This one is, here's a pop-up, big bold letters U.S. token sales are back in the USA. U.S. residents can easily participate in the Aztec token sale. Asik is building the private world computer

and you're invited with a green button saying, let's go. How refreshing is that right? Okay, why? Why this do you think? So they did publish basically their legal opinion in all of these jurisdictions. I saw this posted. It was a legal document in all of these jurisdictions that the Aztec token, again, it's a layer two, so it's a chain token in the same way that

that Mega-Eath is, is not a security, right, in all of these jurisdictions, and including the U.S. But projects weren't so bold in the past, and certainly they were not as bold in the Gensler regime. You just think it's because the SEC has lowered its defenses and its attack. It is now saying, you know, like tokens are okay. There's going to be some regulatory sandbox that these projects are just responding in kind. Is it all about Gensler not being in office? Is that why we get this? Yeah, I think that's a very big part of it is if you had published a document like this,

it would be a flag of just like, yo, let's fight, Gary. Yeah, let's go toe to toe. They would have used that document in court to pursue their Wells notice against Aztec in the past. Yes, yeah. And now that's no longer happening. And this administration is much more, I think between the lines of this administration is people know when they're violating securities laws. The institutions of Wall Street and Tradfai also know when other people are violating securities laws. And the big money, the money that matters, aren't going to touch people to violate securities laws.

And so if you do your due diligence and if you're also correct and the market believes that you're correct, I know you're big markets guy. If the market believes you're correct, then institutions will believe that, yes, the Aztec is actually a consumptive good and not a security. Also, the more you do it, the more you do it, and the more parties that do it, so if you have Coinbase that's doing it, it's like the Sonar platform doing it, now Aztec doing it on chain, and the SEC is not pursuing them. We just had the guy, the lieutenant of Gary Gensler, Corey Freyer on the podcast, and he made the point that the SEC must as an institution, maintain self-consistency. Okay, so that means cross-administration, self-consistency. Some people are looking at this and say, yeah, because Gary Gensler is out and, you know, pro-Cryptop president is in charge, we can have ICOs. But as soon as that reverses, then these things are going to be banned.

I don't think that's going to be the case. Why? It's because the SEC from the period of 2025 to whatever. 28 has been very crypto favorable and essentially not only allow this to happen, but Paul Atkins is having like talking about tokenization and speeches and talking about a regulatory sandbox. And so the next administration, even if they hate crypto, they can't go back and take these projects to court because the judges will just like laugh them out of the court. Like they can't, they must maintain some self-consistency because they say, no, this is the

SEC's position that these things were not securities and these were legal for a whole period of time. You can't now go back on that and say there. So I think the cat's out of the bag, and I think this is crypto projects realizing that U.S. investors can now participate, that these are not securities, and they're never going to be in the future. And it also behooves the industry to supply the market with a collateral that it needs in order to understand the legal nature of these tokens, which again, is why ASSEC made a 28-page document called the token regulatory report about the ASSEC token, about the legal opinions of Aztec. And so that's just good for Aztec to give to investors, potential investors, funds anyone who wants to just read about the nature,

the legal nature of the said token. So that's the first awesome ingredient of the Aztec token sale. The second is the UNISWOP CCA, the first UNISWOP CCA auction. Like I said earlier, CCA stands for continuous clearing auction. And the way that this works is that a token issuer seller submits an allotment of tokens, 5% of the supply, 10% of the supply, whatever, customizable. It also picks out a time frame, one day, three day, five days, also whatever. And the way a CCA works is it takes every single block, it takes an allotment of tokens and sells that amount of tokens in that particular block until the very very,

end of the auction. And it's just a very dollar cost averages the investor in over time. Yes, exactly. And so on block one, and the platform will allow pre-bids. And so when the auction goes live, there's already people that have bids waiting. But as bids come in, there is an allotment of tokens, a thousand tokens a block, and people are bidding for those tokens. And then also teams can set the floor price. So the Aztec team set a

floor price of something like $300 million. which was 75% off of the last VC valuation raised for Aztec. And so once again, for three for three, the community is getting a discount to the last venture capital valuation. And so at a $300 million price, the Aztec's token was starting to get sold by the Uniswap CCA every single block.

So Aztec put in 15% of their total supply of their tokens into the Uniswap CCA auction over a five-day period, I believe, And so every single block, a pro rata amount of those tokens were sold to the bidders who had taken ether and put a bid into the market. Now, as a bidder, you could put in the max valuation that you would not want to pay above. But other than that, it would just take your ether, pro rate it spread it out for the whole rest of the sale. And every bidder was like this. You couldn't end your ether bidding early.

Every single person who put bids in had their ether spread out until the rest of the sale. So you were slowly DCAing in to the asset tokens at the price that it was clearing at with all the other bidders. This one felt the most like like 2017, but with like 10 years of enhancements from a few perspectives. Number one, and I guess we should just underline this, the 2017 ICOs were mostly just like white papers with a promise to watch some sort of product or something that would change the world later. They were ideas. In all of these examples, these are networks that are basically getting ready to mainnet. It's like the token, it's the last thing that's coming. Yes.

And they've already done kind of the pre-work, the idea phase, in sort of the angel investing and VC investment phase. And now they're getting ready to launch. So now when they go main net, they're giving us to retail. So you don't have the risk of like, it's just vaporware. It's just a white paper. As soon as these founders raise, they're going to leave. like these are actual products that work. The other thing that's great about the CCA mechanism is there's no rush.

You don't have to be on your computer by like 1201 Eastern in order to catch the bid or it's all sold out or you have to buy at some exorbitant price, right? How long was the CCA open for? Was it like a week or something? Something like five days, maybe a week for Aztec? Okay, five days or a week? And at any point in that time, you could decide how much you want to allocate. and allocate it, and you'd get about the average bit of everybody who's participating in that.

So there wasn't this huge race condition where you'd have to stay up and make sure that your transaction got in the block and gas fees would be so high and you'd have failed transactions on your wallet. All of that chaos was contained in this auction mechanism, which was brilliant. And then the other point, maybe you could get to this too, is it was actually compliant as well. they did do some sort of an AML KYC type of check only it was in an incredibly crypto-native way. So I know you participated in this. Can you talk about that part?

Yeah, let me check off a few more boxes about the CCA. Then I will go to that. The sale ran from the second to the sixth, so four days. Okay. You said that there's no rush with the CCA. That is true, but what's cool about the CCA is that you actually still get a lower price if you are earlier in the bidding order.

it's just not critically better. And so the highest price of the Aztec token was sold at something like $490 million. The earliest price was something like $350 million. Okay. So that was the dispersion. So over those four days, if you were in the first, you were getting $350 million.

If you were at the end, if you waited towards the very end, you got something like $4.80 million valuation. And so there is rewards for being early and enthusiastic. But if you're just lazy or slower, it's not a catastrophic error for you. That's right. You're just paying a few percentage points higher.

So that's noteworthy. Importantly, there's no edge to any whale. There's no edge to anyone who's sophisticated. When we do these on-chain sale mechanisms or points programs or yield farming, usually there's a unfair, there's a way to have an unfair advantage. The sniper bots.

The sniper bots, like all this shenanigans. With the UNiswap CCA, there's no way to have an unfair advantage. Or it's very, very minimized. And so these are very good mechanisms. And then like you said, in order to be compliant, ASSEC needed to do KYC on all the investors. And there were two ways to do KYC. There was the normal way where you have a third-party service provider, scan your passport, scan your ID, look you up, you know, give you the thumbs up.

You send them pictures, basically. Send them pictures of your identifying information. They also, ASSEC did this ZK passport thing where some of the model. and passports. Maybe your passport has this, Ryan, that has like a little RF, an NFC chip in it. And your phone can scan that.

And the query will be, you know, is this person of age, right? Like, is this person on any sort of list? But it's ZKs everything. So it's completely privacy preserving. So cool. It's as cypherpunk as I think it could possibly be, while also complying with regulations.

That's right. It ZK approves all of it. ZK verifies all of it attests to it. And so it's like, okay, you know, David is U.S. citizen. He's not on any kind of like sanction list or no fly list. And then it doesn't share all of the precise details of who you are, your address, or all of those details. Only shares what it needs is required. And then all it does is it whitelists your address so that then your eth address can go participate in the CCA auction.

Super cool. Very cool. Very cool. at the end of the CCA auction, the proceeds, some of the proceeds went into a Uniswap V4 pool. That LP positioned is owned by Aztec governance. Oh. And so the money is owned by the governance,

the liquidity is owned by Aztec governance, which is very cool. It is locked for a year, and then after one year, Aztec governance can decide what they want to do with it. The liquidity is locked for a year. The liquidity is locked for a year. Okay.

Now, I understand the Aztec tokens themselves is those that participated, the investors that participated in this, their assets are locked for like 90 days, but there is going to be, okay, there's going to be a governance vote, which presumably would unlock all of this. And again, better terms than the existing investors get. Existing investors have some sort of vesting schedule multi-year, probably like three plus years. That's right. Yeah, vesting schedule, whereas the participants in the ICO do not have that. And then you could do something as soon as you're done, which is like, again, live network,

work. There's actually staking going on. There's, there's blocks being created. No transactions yet. It's kind of like a beacon chain launch where they just have the sequencers. They call them validated, but they have sequencers that are live. So you can take your Aztec tokens. You can actually stake in the network and participate in it. So that's different, again, from the ICOs. Live networks after you get the tokens? Crazy. All of these felt very wholesome. And again, it's like, Who knows what's going to happen to the price? They could collapse. They could go to zero.

They could go to $10 billion. They could go to $100 billion. So you don't know, but investors should have the ability to allocate and choose. But all of these projects felt so wholesome compared to the 2017-era ICOs. Yeah, yeah.

We got two more sales to talk about, the Zama public auction and also the Infinitex sale. Just to get some of the details, these are the ones that are incoming. They're on the horizon. We'll talk about some of the details to them, but I've just got a bunch of takeaways and themes about what's going on here, Ryan, that I want to talk to you about. So let's go and talk about all of those things, but first,

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10% of the Zama token supply will be sold in a sealed bid Dutch auction on Ethereum using the Zama protocol to keep bids private. Now, okay, what's Zama? Zama is an FHG platform. It's another privacy platform. unlike ASSEC, it's on a layer two, it does shielded things on other blockchains. So it's like a privacy service provider for general privacy service provider for blockchains,

generally speaking. The other cool mechanism about this is that like MegaEath, you need to have the either USDC, USDT, or dye in your wallet, and then you need to shield that USC using Zama to submit your bids. Oh, so you actually have to use it. And by the way, you mentioned a whole bunch of stable coins.

It's just stable coins, or can you also buy an E? Just stable coins. Just stable coins. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because they need to fix the price. And so they are assuming every stable coin is $1, they're fixing a stable coin to a dollar. And in order to actually do the Dutch auction mechanism, it wouldn't work if the ether was fluctuating.

By the way, of the three we just mentioned mega-Eath and Monad were USD, right, dollar denominated, whereas Aztec was ETH was ETH denominated. It was all Eater. Interesting. Okay. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, you shield your sable coins using Zama to be able to invest in the Zama Dutch auction.

And so I'll just read from the blog. Behind the scenes, shielding deposits your ERC 20s into a wrapping contract and issues you the equivalent amount of ERC 7984 tokens whose balances and transfer amounts are encrypted. While shielding is visible on chain and the transfer you make from that moment will be fully confidential. As such, we recommend shielding more tokens than you intend to bid with, otherwise we will just assume that you bid with an Ithon on tokens, which is pretty cool. Okay, so what is a sealed bid public Dutch auction?

The way that this works is that everyone submits one bid privately sealed. That's the sealed part because you can't see other bids. After all the bids are in, the seller ranks them from the highest to the lowest. Then they determine the lowest clearing price at which the entire amount of tokens or assets can be sold. everyone who bid at or above that clearing price gets filled at that price and everyone plays the same clearing price, not their individual bid. And if you bid below the clearing price,

you get your stable coins returned to you. Very similar to the strike price auction mechanism that Amunani did with Spank Chain forever ago. And another auction design mechanism that crypto is using to discover price, to do price discovery that we are just not seeing in Tradfai. Like, could you imagine, how much more money circle would have gotten

if it had done something like this, a sealed bid Dutch auction or even a unoswap CCA, for example. They would have, actually, I do know the answer to this. Do you know how much more money circle would have gotten? How much? No. Something like $1.2 billion of money that they did not get because they IPOed at such a low price. The investment banks, like I'm going to grossly oversimplify this.

I've not been on the side of investment banker, but they kind of guess at the price, don't they? They just put a finger. It sounds like this. Oh my God. We just, yeah, we did the exact same thing because they just feel like it's worth X billion and they price it as such.

And they're either incredibly right or they're incredibly wrong. I guess there's some room in the middle, but they never get it perfectly. And so there's inefficiency. There's waste here. It's like auctions, guys. Who do they think there are thinking that they're more efficient pricing tool than the market?

100%. 100%. Okay. How is the Zama auction? different than the CCA, which we went into exhaustive deed. Is it kind of similar? Am I getting an average price type of setup? It's a binary event.

So you actually don't know the price that you will get. You can submit a bid. You can submit a price that you don't want to pay more than. But at the final outcome, you don't know what the price will be. You do know that it'll be lower than the amount that you put or you won't get it. But Zama does some balancing between. I feel like that's a little bit more mental overhead than the CCA. The nice part about the CCA is you just say how much you're going to invest

and you just know it's going to be sort of fair, I suppose. Well, actually, you don't totally know that because with Aztec, they had a very large amount of tokens to sell 15%, and it's a pretty reputable project. But you don't want on a CCA, you don't want to submit an infinity bid because that could actually end up ultimately getting filled at infinity. If the CCA issuer issues a very low amount of tokens in the final blocks,

You can customize the curve of the token allotment per block. Yeah, but you could just with the CCA, you could just say, hey, I have like $1,000 and just buy, do a market price. You don't have to like name your price. I guess I'm just saying with the Dutch option, isn't there cognitive overhead here? Yeah, there's a little bit of cognitive overhead.

And people think that there was cognitive overhead with the CCA. I think there was much less than there actually were. I would encourage you to not submit an infinity bid. Because as we get into like longer tail projects, I hope many, many, many more projects use the CCA. Like smaller projects, community projects. And the CCA is very customizable.

Yeah, I guess you're right. And so don't like, do think about the maximum valuation that you want to put and actually put that in there. There's a place to put it in there. I guess you're right. If you put it in infinity, there's going to be something that you do where you literally do pay infinity dollars for a token. Aztec worked out fine because there wasn't exuberance for the Aztec token.

Yes. And they also had an ample amount of tokens selling. out in the final blocks. And so what that allowed is that it didn't allow a price spike to happen at the very end. Right. Okay. Okay. That makes sense. This, this, this has not happened yet. This auction, this is a future event. Zama's in the future. January 12th to 15th, it says in the tweet from the co-founder of Zama. But then also it says registration opens in five days. So I guess you could register first. Yes. Register first. And then the bidding happens for three days and then claiming happens on the 20th. Okay. Do you need a special wallet for this? I guess TBD, if you go and you participate in this and use this, but like you said, you have to kind of cloak, you have to make your...

I would assume you can shield your stable coins. In a web interface, probably. In a web interface, yes. Yeah, so all the standard wallets and then there's a web interface, it probably is with a shield button in it. That's right. That's right. That's kind of cool. Another example of the network is like here, basically. I know it's not a chain, but it is a protocol. smart contracts and they've spent years building this literally and they're basically going to Mainnet and doing their token generation event at Mainnet, which is very refreshing. Yes. Yeah. We are 4-4-4 so far on Mainnet token sales. Well, I don't think anyone's going to buy a white paper anymore. I mean, that was a 2017 thing. This is good. This is good for the industry. As investors, the listener included, I think we should be

pro-ICOs that are associated with main nets, and we should generally speaking be anti-ICOs that are not associated with respective main nets. Yeah, and the market will do that. The market will do that, but listener, you are the market. Don't do anything stupid. Don't do anything stupid. Yeah, don't do anything stupid. Yeah, general advice. Last one you wanted to cover was another future one, the Infinitex sale. Yeah, Infinex token sale. They're selling 5% of the total token supply targeting a $15 million raise that comes to a $300 million fully diluted valuation happening through the Sonar platform. Not any crazy mechanism here.

Sonar, same thing as Mega-Eath. There's so no crazy auction mechanisms, but it's just noteworthy. Kane Warwick, very high reputation, Infinex Projects, very high reputation, happening soon. And so there's just another data point that this is the meta-th trend.

This is an app, which is different. This is an app, yeah. So everything we just said about a main net doesn't apply because there is no main net. Yeah, there's no main app. It's not a white paper either. Yeah, it is a fully functioning project.

It develops this fully functioning project. And that's happening in January as well. So do you think 2026 will be a year that this trend accelerates? I hope so, dude. And like, we have all the ingredients for it. We have the investor clarity and regulation, regulatory clarity that we have. Man, like, I don't know why it wouldn't be that. I do think that this could be a very big theme for 2020.

I want it to be a thing. You do need, though, David, you do need good projects. You do need good projects. All of these examples were, like, projects that have literally been building for years towards this end. And that doesn't happen overnight. That's very true. Now, that being said, you know, B and C tier projects will just be valued at the appropriate level of risk.

So I'm showing me a C tier project is not going to raise at a $1 billion. The C tier project is going to raise at a $5 or $10 billion. And you have a lot more upside and also a lot more chances that it. goes to zero. So I'm also okay with that. I just want more choice in the ICO market. Five is a great start. Five A tier companies is a great start. I want for 2026, 10 more A tier companies and like 50 B tier companies to all do token sales, public token sales direct to the purchasers, direct to the investors, ideally with a uniswap cCA model or some other on-chain price discovery mechanism. I think that would be good for the industry. Are you worried about the exuberance at play here? So these have been

successful. You know, the fact that they've sold out, they've done well. They haven't been exuberant, I would say. I guess, I mean, some of these valuations are in the billions, so some people would say they're already exuberant, but nothing like we saw in previous ICO exuberance cycles. Are you a little bit worried that if the successful ones are successful, that that will just bring new tranches of entrants who are the B and C tier, but they sell like their A tier and S tier? You know what I mean? Like, whenever we get into capital formation types of events, we generally, and when they're successful, we do see narrative ahead of price and things get messy, right? And things get exuberant. And then, like, eventually, like, for me, as the free market take is, you just have to accept that that's the fact. That's what markets do. And you have to be comfortable and okay with that. I think there are others that take a dim review on that, though, and they try to dampen these. exuberance cycles. Are you worried about that in 26? I'm less worried. I think the

crypto market, the market participants are the sharpest that they've ever been. Like, when is the last time you've seen exuberance, a crypto dude? It was probably pumping Tia to $25. It was probably meme coins. It was probably meme coins. Yeah, but not in the same way. Yeah, not in the same way. Everyone knew it was a game. Memcoins itself

was a smaller microcosm of the broader crypto industry, as opposed to the NFT mania in 2021, which was the whole industry. So even our exuberance is happening in the smaller and smaller silo. And so But some would say, these projects are still multi-billion dollar

projects. I mean, that feels huge. Maybe we're in part of the exuberance without realizing it. Yeah. Well, I don't want to think about that. No, I'm less worried. I'm less worried. Because, like, there are these, the, even the monad, the run that raised at the highest valuation here,

has it needed to get the token out of the door to launch the network, to get the network started and have that be decentralized and distributed. And like they sold at $2.5 billion and it was like 1.4X oversubscribed. Not, that was a roughly about the value that the market was willing to pay for it.

So I don't see that being too exuberate. What does all this mean? What are your takeaways here? Yeah, there's a bunch of takeaways. It's interesting to see there being a pattern of the discount for the public compared to the last VC equity round, both as second mega-eat gave me 75% discount. Monad has something like an 18% discount. These are not the only examples that has happened. There have been sales earlier in this year that did back-to-back raises first with a VC equity round and then a later token sale.

And the token sale, even though it was happening like weeks or a month later, was something like 20 or 30% off. I like that theme. The public gets in at a lower price right before the token gets liquid. Yeah, can you imagine if that happened to something like Uber? Where like, let's say for Uber, like pre-IPO, let's say all of the early Uber drivers and users' participants had some sort of discounted allocation slot as an airdrop in the company. I love this example. And then they could go purchase it. That would be super freaking cool.

None of that happened in U.S. capital markets, of course. So the investors made out like bandwidths, but the early quote-unquote network participants and early believers. The value providers, yeah. They got nothing out of it. Yeah. That can be inverted in crypto. Yeah. Totally.

Yeah. Perfect point. So that's my big takeaway. I like that theme. I hope that continues. The second theme is just the price discovery mechanisms as tech and Zama, both are using pretty sophisticated price discovery tools. if there is any industry that should be using well-designed price discovery tools,

it should be ours. We have almost a decade of R&D and the perfect tools at our disposal, smart contracts, to do fair market pricing token sales. We have the tools, let's use them. We're way better than tradfiedness. We are so much better, dude.

We are auction maxis. Yes, yes. We, and the reason why being an auction maxi is so future proof is that these auction mechanisms need to happen on inside of adversarial environments. An IPO is not an adversarial environment. It's like, oh, Walt Garden, like little bubble boy ICO is like,

don't harm it. It's cute. It's cute. It's cute. What happens when everyone is trying to like game your system? We have the public market infrastructure for people who are trying to exploit the hell out of our auctions. FlashPoss has learned this. Oh my God. Uniswap has learned this. It's fair and orderly and capital efficient markets. Isn't that the SEC's mission?

That's exactly right, right. We're doing it for you guys. We're doing it. Yeah, in public. We've never had public fair orderly capital formation tools until today, and we've got them. We've got them. Globally accessible, I should also add, which is super cool. And that goes without saying for all of these ICOs.

Third, big takeaway, the UI, UX of Internet Capital Formation has never been better. All of these that I participated in were seamless, very smooth. We even, like, extrapolating from the AVE announcement, the AVEA app, have you downloaded the Avey app yet, Ryan? I'm on a waiting list. Is it available for me? If you DM the right person. It'll be available for you.

Not a single mention of a blockchain or smart contract anywhere. You just have assets and an app. And I think that is where these are going. Like, I don't really actually remember encountering the blockchain really anywhere other than signing messages with my wallets. And I think that trend will continue.

As internet capital formation, the blockchain is going to be obfuscated. And, you know, imagine a world two, three, four years in the future where everyone has stablecoins in a neobank app somewhere, like etherfi, fracks or whatever. More people have access to stablecoins. And all of a sudden, they are just one click away from investing in the next thingy that they want to invest in. Whatever is trying to raise capital. Whatever local idea is interesting to them. Regulatory favorability, it's the next one.

We just had Aztec do a token sale without having to need to adhere to invest. investor accreditation laws. Very cool. Very cool. Wait, investor accreditation laws. Yeah. Yeah.

That's right, because they're a utility. Because they're a consumptive good. Yeah, they're not even, and that was not true of, I guess, Megateath, but still went through. Assec was the only one that did this. Yeah.

And so they are setting precedent for network tokens to be treated as consumptive goods. And we also have a CFTC and SEC allowing crypto assets to be treated as crypto asset commodities instead of crypto assets securities.

I mean, maybe tomorrow, or the SEC comes out and says that they disagree with Aztec, but that's not... Aztec is doing it all right, too. They've had years to prepare. Like, there is a consumption case as soon as you get the tokens. You go stake it. Like, it's the purpose of the tokens is to run sequencers, right? To protect the network.

Anyway, go on. Okay, regulatory favor. But do you think that could reverse? We don't get the clarity act. In theory, in theory, time is on our side. So every single day it doesn't. We get to continue on this meta. All right.

Yeah. It's nice to say this, Ryan, but we are done with points programs, yield farming, air drops, retroactive air drops, gaming airdrops, all this. Done for now. I'm not convinced,

and we'll come back. Mostly done. At least we could be done. I'm a fan of this. Just all of those things had intermediaries. We get to call things what they are. Yes. Tokens rather than just using like,

I guess, euphemisms for token, calling points tokens and stuff like that. 2020 through 2025 had pretty terrible token distribution mechanisms. This, the public ICO with fair market discovery tools, is the best distribution mechanism for tokens that we've ever had and we ever will have. We should continue down this path. And the last one, this is my favorite one, Ryan.

This is where I really want the listener to use their imagination. Sophisticated on-chain capital formation tools like Unswap CCA or blind Dutch auctions, whatever, pairs really, really well with tokenization. If you can tokenize a bunch of assets and also have the world's most robust token floating tools, how to float a token onto the market for the first time. Discover a token's price for the first time. Put those two things together. I collide those particles.

I think there is a whole world of stuff that can happen when we have a lot of people with Neo-Bank stablecoin wallets, fair and orderly token sales. mixed with the tokenization revolution where we tokenize everything under the sun. I think you can add all those things together and you can come out with a very big white space for capital formation and tokenization on Ethereum.

That's pretty bullish. I think this tokenization theme, you know, attest to me, and I don't know how many years we are away from this, but I feel like the tools we are building here, the auction innovation, just the global participation, are better in a number of aspects

than trad-fi. Not on all aspects, but on many aspects, it's actually better. I mean, we don't have the liquidity. We don't have some of the big institutional purchases or purchasers. There's some things we don't have. But I can imagine a world. And I don't know if this is three years away or five years away or a little bit longer where Elon Musk, say, his next company decides maybe to do a internet native IPO, let's call it. Right? And it's maybe it's a tokenized asset or it's a security in some form, but rather than bring it to the New York Stock Exchange and ring the bell, you bring it to internet capital markets. And that's your main event. That's the way you kind of release this to the public. Or maybe you do a hybrid. So you do

your stock exchange, but then you have a tokenized version of the same company share on Ethereum effectively. And you're launching that on the internet. Once that starts to happen, it's over. Once that starts to happen, then Ethereum and crypto becomes the new New York. It becomes what Amsterdam once was when we created the first joint stock company back in the markets, back in the 1600s. And all of this capital, all of this activity moves to the internet for its central point

of raising capital and that happens on blockchains. We're still a ways away from that, but some of these mechanisms, you can see it. We have all the puzzle pieces. We just need to put them together. That's right. Very bullish, very exciting. We have often said on the show, we are speed running the history of money and finance. Yeah.

It's just to really emphasize the point that you just made is that capital formation comes before defy. We always think defy the basement. No, no, no, no. We need tokens first. Investing in tokens is actually a pre-D5 phenomenon, and it's bigger as a result. That was the order of operation. It's such a big part of capital markets.

Moving capital markets on chain is the biggest thing that crypto can do. And I think there's specifically a lot of tailwinds on the Ethereum side of things. It has a stable coin liquidity. It has the Unisop auction mechanism. It has just a lot of stuff going for. It has the tokenization narrative. So internet capital formation on Ethereum could be a big theme in 2026. Very bullish, very exciting.

Guys, got to let you know, of course, this is not an endorsement of ICOs or any particular ICO. Of course, you guys know. Whatever legal or financial advice you thought that we gave you, we did not. You know that crypto's risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone.

But we're glad you're with us in the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.