Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Why Crypto Finally Makes Sense to Wall Street | Jason Yanowitz

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

Jason Yanowitz, Co-Founder of Blockworks, joins Sebastien Couture on Epicenter to discuss why crypto is entering its biggest transformation yet. From institutional adoption and the Clarity Act to token transparency, AI, on-chain capital markets and the acquisition of Messari, this conversation explores where crypto is actually heading.Jason explains why Wall Street is preparing for crypto, why token fundamentals finally matter, how Blockworks acquired Messari, why capital markets are moving on-chain, and why the next crypto cycle could look completely different from previous bull markets.The conversation also covers Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, stablecoins, RWAs (Real World Assets), tokenisation, venture capital, crypto regulation, SEC policy, the Clarity Act, Token Transparency Framework, AI, Robinhood, Coinbase, Hyperliquid, self-custody, crypto infrastructure, institutional finance and the future of blockchain adoption.In this episode:1. Why Wall Street is preparing for crypto2. The Blockworks × Messari acquisition3. The Clarity Act and US crypto regulation4. Token transparency and the future of crypto markets5. Stablecoins, RWAs and on-chain capital markets6. AI's role in the next generation of crypto businesses7. Why the next crypto cycle will reward real fundamentals8. Building one of crypto's leading media and data companiesIf you enjoyed the episode, don't forget to subscribe for more conversations with the builders, founders and investors shaping the future of crypto.Links:Lido: https://lido.fi/stvaults?mtm_campaign=epicenterSponsors: Lido V3 introduces stVaults: a modular staking infrastructure that lets builders and institutions deploy custom staking vaults, while staying anchored to stETH as a shared liquidity layer.Get started building with Lido V3 today: https://lido.fi/stvaults?mtm_campaign=epicenterBlock Space Forum: https://blockspace.forum/NEAR AI Cloud now lets developers deploy OpenClaw—the rapidly growing open-source AI agent platform—inside Trusted Execution Environments, providing hardware-level encryption with cryptographic attestations. With OpenClaw on NEAR AI Cloud, you can run agents with cloud convenience, but without traditional cloud data exposure. No hardware to manage. No trust assumptions required. Learn more at near.ai.

I spoke with a hedge fund in New York, about a $10 billion fund. They have $300 million allocated to crypto tokens if clarity passes. That's one fund in New York. So the amount of funds who are on the sidelines waiting for clarity is way more than people realize. There were walled gardens being built with banks and there were walled gardens being built with Facebook and Google. And now, obviously, there are walled gardens being built with anthropic and open AI. Crypto is supposed to give you the ability to opt out of the system. How did this Masari acquisition happen?

What's the story behind that? It is the biggest endeavor the company has ever taken on. Masari by far was our biggest competitor-owned sales calls. 47% of all sales deals, half of our deals we competed against Masari on. And so I think there's always been a natural fit there. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm the best thing with you. I'm here today with my guest, Jason Yanowitz, who's co-founder at Blockworks.

But before I talk to Jason, here's a word for you. from our sponsors this week. This episode is brought to you by Near AI Cloud. OpenClaw is one of the biggest stories in AI right now. Rapidly, it gained over 200,000 GitHub stars with adoption from Silicon Valley to Beijing. Why? Because OpenClaw makes it easy to create an AI agent that actually does stuff, like manager emails, browse the web, schedule appointments, and remember contacts across weeks of interaction.

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You can learn more at neer.a.i. Hey Jason, how's it going? Good, man. Good to see you. Good to you too. Yeah. I was just looking at when we last talked before hopping on here. And the last time we we chat on the podcast was in 2024 in October at Permissionless. And it feels like that was a decade ago. RIP. Permitsil is no longer even existing. this. Exactly. Yeah. And that actually kind of like brings me to some of the points I wanted to touch with you. But like, you know, during that podcast, we were talking about how infrastructure was shifting into applications and the applications were coming. And to some extent that has happened, but maybe not in the ways that, you know, people thought or would have liked, right? We've seen

this very big shift towards institutionalization of crypto and kind of crypto growing up. And a lot of the, you know, more cyphir-punk-y aspects of the industry, if I could kind of put a word on them, have not done so well or kind of moved to the wayside. So, you know, give us your view on how the ecosystem has evolved in, you know, this year and a half, almost two years since we last spoke. Yeah, yeah. I would actually correct you and say that cypherpunk stuff has done way better than anyone has ever thought it could do. And it has just, because it has evolved and done so well, the cypherpunk nature has been kind of, you know, has been shed. So we've lost, you know, we've lost a lot of the, we've exited phase one and we've entered

phase two, right? So if we look at, let's use, so we talked about permissionless where we did this last podcast, Um, me and Sunny. And, um, you know, we used to have two conference friends. We had digital assets summit and we had permissionless. Permission list was this like crypto native, you know, DGens. And it was, it really started as a defy conference, which back then was like, meant retail, it meant crypto nativity, it meant kind of degeneracy on chain. And the reason we kind of

disbanded permissionless is because we also have this other institutional conference. Well, where has DeFi gone? It's done so well. It's done so extraordinarily well that it's now starting to get embedded into institutional finance. So these topics, you know, they used to be so separate. I could even conceive of them being one thing. It's now, it's now, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's all one thing. We're now just moving capital markets on chain. And so I know people maybe think that like, oh, we've done a lot of the early crypto ideas didn't do well. We've moved on to other things. I would say they've done so extraordinarily well beyond anyone's early beliefs that it just feels upsetting to some of the early people because we've lost some of the maybe extremely

hardened core beliefs in exchange for Tam, penetration, and mass adoption. Yeah, I see what you're saying. And, you know, I was kind of expecting a similar answer from you. But at the same time, I was just in Berlin about a month ago. And, you know, Berlin very much is the kind of cyphrepunk capital of crypto where a lot of the early ideas kind of took off, you know, Ethereum, Pokedocodok, Cosmos, and all these teams that were building what I think they would have described as an antithesis to the financial system, where you had privacy, where you had self-custody of assets, where you had agency

and sovereignty over your assets. And it does feel like the space generally has moved away from a lot of those ideas. You know, we don't have privacy to a large extent. And I think there's a lot of regulatory pushback, at least in Europe. I'm not sure, but you ask, maybe you can, you can sort of give some color on that. But to having privacy on chain, you know, a lot of the ways that people hold assets now, even with fintech, even with, you know, if it's like Robin Hood or Revolut, you know, assets are not fully held, like not fully held by someone's personal private keys that they have full access to and are the only in sole um, uh, proprietors of those keys and able to move the assets.

There's all these things that crypto has kind of, um, in some ways not fully like built into the system. Do you, do you think that that's a loss or do you do you think that like it's just a necessary sort of middle ground that we end up into where you know, we have the, uh, all this kind of user experience benefits of of being on a blockchain, you know, fast transactions, cheap, 24-7 markets, etc. But we have to give up some of the other stuff and some of the other ideas that were really pertinent in the early days. So I don't think the, this is where, you know, maybe some people will get upset with me.

The goal of what we're, what is the goal of what we're doing here? Why are we all spending so much time and money and our lives building this stuff? It was never to make it so that everyone in the world would self-custody their assets. You might disagree with me on that. I don't think the goal of crypto was ever to make it. So everyone in the entire world is this self-sovereign individual. The goal as I saw it was crypto is supposed to give you the ability to opt out of the system. The scary thing I think about where the world was going pre-crypto

was there was no way to opt out of the system. There were walled gardens being built with banks and there were walled gardens being built with Facebook and Google. And now, obviously, there are wild gardens being built with Anthropic and Open AI. And the scary thing about that world is there's no. way to opt out of it. You're trapped. You cannot access money or the internet without it until crypto came around. The UI and UX of self-custodying your assets is bad. We can just say it's bad. And that's fine that it's bad. But the reason crypto is so powerful is it gives you the ability

to do those things. By the way, that's one of the things that crypto does. It also does the less sexy things. It's better financial rails. It lets you move money around the world faster and easier and cheaper. All those things are true. But I think the, um, the ideology of crypto was half correct. The, the ideology that I think was wrong was that, um, was this ardent belief that every single person in the world should become a self-sovereign individual. Everyone should opt out of the system. Everyone should self-custody their Bitcoin. I don't, I don't self-custody my Bitcoin anymore. Not worth the risk for me. For me, the risk of, of losing the ledger, like, that's not worth it to me.

So I actually don't self-custody most of my Bitcoin, I will say. Other people would disagree with me. Other people live in, you know, tyrannitarian state or a authoritarian regime. And they would totally disagree with me. They'd say it's more of a risk to hold your capital in the system. So, yeah, I don't know. I actually don't think that the whole goal of all of this was to self-custody all of your stuff. And I look at what Venice is doing, right?

Like Eric Voorhees in Venice. And I really like what they're doing. They're not saying every single person in the world should use Venice, right? There will still be people in the world who use Anthropic and OpenAAAA. But they're giving people a way to opt out of those. And I like that. And I like that. Right.

So you think it's more of a like, you know, having the tools to have the ability to opt out is better than like having none of the tools to opt out. And having that option to opt out is actually a net positive. people will still use the non-self custody, the hosted wallets, and we'll use wild gardens like Anthropic

or Open AI or any of the walled gardens, but we have that ability to opt out if we want to, if we want to use some sovereign way to hold our coins, we can do that. If we want to use a private AI, we can do that, but we have the options for both.

In a world of centralizing forces, crypto gives you the ability to live a self-sovereign life. That does not mean all seven or eight billion people in the world have to live a self-sovereign life. That's how I feel. It also gives you other stuff. Look at what Robin Hood is doing

with Robin Hood chain and the app. Like, they didn't launch, you know, they didn't launch like a huge prime brokerage team and go hire 200 people to do lending and borrowing. They just plugged in Morpho. And I think Maple too. So it does, like it's, I almost think of it as just an extension of fintech.

in some ways. Like, okay, let's say you used to have a, you used to have 10,000 people building, lending and borrowing. Then FinTech reduced that to, you could now run a lend borrow company with only 1,000 people. Now you can run a lend borrow company

with only 100 people. And it's just an extension of making finance much, much, much more efficient. So, and that's the area where I think that people maybe, you know, I forget how long your podcast, I think it's been around longer. I think it's like the first crypto podcast. Like, at least the first one I ever listened to,

2014, 15? 13, yeah, 13 years going on 13. Yeah, 2013. Most of the people who listened to your show originally, they do not like seeing, you know, that you can open your Charles Schwab account and buy Bitcoin. They do not like seeing Bitcoin inside of BlackRock. They do not like seeing morpho integrated into Robin Hood.

But newsflash for them is that none of these things would be able to exist for a long amount of time if all the things that give themselves sovereignty wouldn't be able to exist. if they weren't generating revenue and making money. And the only reason that a lot of the self-sovereign things existed in the first place is because venture capitalists funded it. And venture capitalists won't fund it for a long time if they're not making money. And so that's why like this whole thing, you know, blockworks gets kind of crap because

we're, um, we talk about this return to fundamentals a lot and revenue and like, why do we need to generate all this revenue? It's so that we can actually have these systems that work well because the venture capitalists funded the original self-sovereign systems, even if people don't want to admit. that. Yeah, that's a good point. This episode is brought to you by Lido. As Ethereum Staking continues to evolve, more teams building staking products are running into a familiar challenge. On one hand, pooled liquid staking gives you liquidity and access to defy, but can limit customization. And on the other, bespoke staking setups offer more control over things like pricing, performance, and operator

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And then I believe in 2020 or 2021, you launched the news. arm, which then became one of the largest news organizations in crypto and certainly one of the most reputable ones. Then at the same time doing events with permission lists and digital assets summit. There might have been some other ones in there. I probably forgot about, but lots of different sort of like verticals to the business and then launched the data arm and recently acquired Massari, a company that was founded just around the same time as Blockworks, but, you know, had raised at just astronomical valuations,

you ended up buying for, you know, huge discounts from, from those, from those times. But now it seems like Blockworks has kind of stripped down to becoming, you know, a data company with a very strong media and events business. I'd love to get your take on, like, you know, what, what that arc sort of looks like from the perspective. of you as an entrepreneur, you know, was all that intentional, were there some mistakes around a long way, which ones were the most sort of salient? And is this, is this like Blockworks's final form or like what's the, you know, what's the sort of like next thing that you're looking at as ways of the business ago? Yeah, yeah. So this is Blockworks, we started the business December

of 2017. And you were intimately familiar with some of the early years. For those who don't know, we sold some ads on Seb's podcast back in the day. But I think the way that things have evolved maybe doesn't look that normal to an outsider. The way it looks internally feels kind of just like what we thought the business would evolve to. So the whole vision for the company was that eventually crypto would become this institutional asset class. And as that happens, there would need to be way better information for the asset class. So super simple thesis. Crypto would institutionalize.

there would need to be better information around the asset class and around the technology. And so back, there's two ways to go build an information platform. You can either start with what I'd call the bottom of the funnel, like the product layer, which is like data and products and stuff like that. And that's probably a better, that's actually definitely the most valuable part of it. The problem was back in 2017, you remember this, there was no market for it. There was no, there were no institutions. There were no companies doing things on chain.

like there was just a a jaguar pilot on iota like there was no there was no real stuff happening on chain and so you know you look at a lot of the companies for example like masari who went and raised on this vision it was just they actually had the vision right like selkis

missari selkis i tip my cap to him he had everything right he was just too early he was just a little bit too early and so there's the other layer of the funnel though which is was was really really, really, really important for blockwork starting off, which is the meet, the, the top of the funnel information. This is what I call like soft information. It's building an audience. It's building a

relationship with your customers. It's kind of the marketing layer. It's, um, and for us, what what would that look like was podcast, newsletters, conferences and eventually a news business, which we ran for a couple of years and then shut down. That layer, so we scaled, we bootstrapped. First off, the nice thing about media is you can bootstrap it. So I don't know if you ever raise money for Epicenter, but like, you don't really need a lot of money. to go start a podcast. You don't really need a lot of money or any money to go start a conference. And they can generate loads of cash flow. So we scaled the, um, the media and events business from zero to 25 million in revenue without ever raising an institutional round of venture money.

When in 2022, the industry evolved and there was this really strong need for the data. So people are customers who had listened to the podcast, attended our events, started saying, hey guys, there's no good data. Can someone build the data? And we said, look, we don't need to build the data. You have the block and you have Masari and you have all these other businesses. And they said, the data is not good enough. We need better data. And so that's why we got into the data space. And yeah, we've been building that. And it's scaled drastically. We're up, you know, our ARR is up 110% this year. And, yeah, I think the thing that we got wrong was we thought the, we thought we originally thought the investor would be the customer. So we thought Pantara and multi-coin and 2-Sigma and Susquehanna would be the dream customer.

Turns out that the businesses running, moving on-chain are the real customers. You have these legacy web 2 systems, QuickBooks and Intuit and SAP and Oracle and HubSpot and Salesforce. None of that mirrors over to, you know, when companies run on-chain. They're all their systems break down. And so we have the underlying data layer and then we build products on top to service them. Yeah, what's kind of, and you were talking about Masari and Selkis. Also, Ryan also had this like massive audience and distribution. I think he even understood that you need to build the audience before you went and built the product.

Isn't that the way things are going though? Like isn't I do believe, you know, if you look at the, I think it's like a Gallup chart of trust in institutions. I mean, and every single year it goes down, I think trust in institutions is at an all-time low for America. It's at like 36% we trust. Yeah. You know, the government and institutions way less. This also means that we trust companies way less.

So like think about the brand that like a Procter & Gamble or like a Coca-Cola used to command. It doesn't work like that anymore. And so, but people still need to trust something. So who do they trust? I think people trust people over brands now. And that's why, like, part of our strategy is we have a lot of people internally at Blockworks with these huge

followings and we incentivize that we actually we pay people to grow their Twitter followings which would seem super weird to a company 10 years ago yeah it was actually maybe even antithetical right like 10 years ago or 15 years ago you you probably couldn't have your own Twitter following or yeah the company I was at before Blockworks was a company called Cysense and I started posting on LinkedIn in 2016 about Back then it was just like blockchain and Bitcoin. And they were like, don't post on LinkedIn. Like you, like the company account is the, is the view of the company.

Like, we don't want you to represent the view of the company. And think about how different that is just 10 years later. And by the way, that trend is early days. We're early days of that trend. And I think people follow people not brands. And I think if you're a company today and a startup, you should be thinking about how do you empower your people to build their own brands. And look, there's a risk.

like the amount of job offers our employees get is probably 10x higher than another company. But yeah, I think it's well worth the risk here. It's just like, you know, 10, 15 years ago, we started seeing this trend of like, you know, bring your own device to work, right? Like bring your own laptop or bring your own, and now it's like bring your own audience. Bring your own brand. Bring your own brand. Bring your own brand. Yeah, yeah. No, I heard you talking about about this on another show.

And, you know, like media and events businesses are, I think, raising money for those types of businesses is hard because those types of revenues are not like seen as high multiple revenues. And so it's hard to raise money on media and events businesses. Like we never raised money and never expected to because we never thought we could raise money. But there's a sort of like a trend that's shifting where lots of like really big media businesses and media brands are being acquired. Like TBPN was bought by OpenAI and like, you know, some of the early guys, I know you guys looked up to, like Morning Brew were acquired years ago and, you know, the hustle and like Robin Hood's acquiring media businesses. And I wonder if now, you know, within the investment community and venture, there will be a shift, right?

Not necessarily funding media businesses directly, but definitely seeing those as being more value, more high value. Or if you have a founder with a large audience, if those value, it. like the products that they raise for will, will, um, garner higher valuations. Is that, is that a trend that you expect to see in the next couple of years? I don't think media businesses will do well. Like look at, look at crypto media. I mean, nearly all of them are defunct or shut down. Um, and I'm talking like news specifically.

What I do think will continue is, um, uh, businesses, software and software and AI companies continuing to go direct to their customers, right? So you used to have this, um, this third party that you had to go to go to. to get in front of your customers. You had to pay for ad dollars. You had to pay for sponsorships. You had to pay for, you know, you just, you had to like go to the, go to the press. And that stuff matters less and less than it, I mean, it matters less than it ever has. And so I think you will continue to see a lot of companies just going direct. That is the overarching theme, I'd say, is going direct to your customers. One of the ways to do that, and this is what Blockworks has done, is to actually

own a mini media and events business internally. So we've never spent a dollar sponsoring another person's event. We've never spent a dollar advertising on a podcast. And the reason for that is because it's actually much more effective and cheaper and way higher ROI for us to go actually hire a podcast host internally. And to go actually have a, we have a three person events team. The events, by the way, three person events team? No, three person events team. So, and the events Let's do it. So the Digital Assets Summit is organized by three people? There are three people.

Jesus. Okay. That's, that's impressive. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're amazing.

Bennett, Kate Carolyn. That's it. That's the team. And, you know, the events, by the way,

generate eight figures of revenue. So we're able to take what is like theoretically low multiple revenue, which now is changing because Mark Andreessen tweeted out that events should command a high multiple because of AI, but we'll ignore that for a second. Theoretically low, low multiple revenue. And we're able to take all that revenue and we're able to take the cash flow because the margins are quite good.

So we're able to take the cash flow from the events and then event essentially invest it into product and data. So we're turning low multiple cash flow into really high multiple cash flow. And, oh, by the way, we have 3,000 people who attend DAS, some percentage of them, are our ideal dream ICPs. So our sales team is able to get in front of them at the conference. And, you know, each dash should generate at least $10 million of ARR for us in pipeline. Now, not all that closes, obviously.

But yeah, I think it's a model that a lot of other people will adopt. And by the way, we didn't create it. Like look at a company like HubSpot. HubSpot is owns a, you mentioned the hustle. My first million is the podcast, was the main podcast. of the hustle, it's owned by HubSpot. HubSpot now today, I think, owns the second or third largest tech podcast network in the world. It drives about 20% of HubSpot's new leads every quarter are driven by their media business. So I think this is, I do think this is a big

trend, but it's different, right? It's a cultural change internally. Like, what's your advice to, you know, new founders? Like, would you advise founders that say like have a good product idea to like first go and build an audience and trying to sell that product to the audience I mean like it's like it's sort of like a chicken and egg thing right like you can either like have a good product idea and no audience let's say you're sort of sitting on one or one extreme or another or you have an audience but no product idea like would you need one to sort of start the other and what would be your advice to a founder

that doesn't have an audience that doesn't have distribution that wants to go and stuff like should they go and build an audience on a specific sort of like vertical or narrative like you know sort of content uh vertical before they like really start building and trying to sell their product for 95% of founders it is extremely rewarding and beneficial to build your own audience there's 5% maybe who don't need it maybe they're if your credentials are so unbelievable that you can go raise around and get a bunch of customers just on the back of your credentials I think about someone like the guy who started Sierra. I'm forgetting his name.

Brett Taylor, right? He was president of OpenAI. Like, you know, CEO of Salesforce, like, co-CEO of Salesforce. That guy doesn't need to go build a following on Sierra on Twitter. By the way, he still does go post on Twitter all the time. So, you know, maybe you're a PhD from Stanford. Sure, you can go raise on the back of that. Go get customers on the back of that.

But for most other founders, it is actually an amazing time. It's best time in history to go build a country. company, it's both never been easier to build good products and it's never been easier to go build an audience. And that's, I think, the beautiful thing in that, that's something I think that people get wrong is they treat it as these, that they're mutually exclusive. It's like, should I be like a product focus founder or should I like go build an audience? It's like, you can do both, my friend, you can do both. And so it doesn't take that much time to go build an audience. You just have to understand the craft and understand the art. And the,

The thing to do here is go study people who have built a good following. Pick, I'd call it two niches, position yourself at the center of both of those niches, become the only person on Twitter posting about that intersection of the two niches. And boom, you'll get an audience right there. That's interesting. So it's interesting that you think that it's easier, it's never been easier to build an audience. I guess I see what you're saying from the perspective of like, you know, there's like all of these sort of platforms that one can build an audience on.

But it's also, there's so much competition, right? You're competing for the, for attention against, you know, all the people on Twitter, you know, YouTube, TikTok, like, whatever, like social media network that you want to, like, sort of focus on because there's so many people out there vying for the, for, for your attention with, like, dumb videos of whatever and, like, every other piece of content out there, that I, I think it's, a lot of people see it as much harder than maybe it actually is if you kind of like hone in the craft. Yeah, but but the, so two things.

One is the reward is much greater than it's ever been. But also, I mean, okay, so let's say 10, let's take Twitter. 10 years ago on Twitter, there were way less people. So naturally it's way easier to grow an audience because you're competing against, you're, you're maybe competing against less people. But you're also, the mark, the number of people on Twitter is also way lower. So in a, in a sense, it's, there was less people that you could, you could reach. let's say you're one in 500.

I don't know how many people are on Twitter. Let's say back then you're one of 100 million. Now you're one of 500 million. And sure, it's much harder to maybe reach all 500 million, but maybe the odds of still reaching 1,000 people are still, oddly enough, the exact same as they've ever been, if that makes sense. Yeah, I see what you said.

Yeah, there's a larger pie, and so therefore you can, like, garner a piece of that pie that's like proportionally, is small but like is large for you right exactly exactly no that's that's interesting and by the way it is only twitter it is the the only platform that you need to care about is twitter it your company what do you think so your company can figure out i mean look if you're there are exceptions to the rule if you are like lincoln has been extraordinary for us from a sales perspective LinkedIn is actually quite powerful um and if you're a d-to-c founder i'm sure ticot is also quite powerful obviously but if you want to be

I'd say it like the center of the industry and I mean candidly like for fundraising there is no better and you know I think most people here listen to are in crypto like there is no still no better platform than Twitter in the world

it is just right okay it's got for crypto for crypto and AI yeah Twitter is the Bitcoin of social networks Twitter's got the Lindby it's done so much wrong it has done so much wrong and it just still continues to grow. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I think if you're talking about crypto and possibly AI,

then yeah, Twitter is a place to do it. Other verticals maybe might be LinkedIn. And if you're like BDC, it could be it could be like other places like Instagram or TikTok. No, those are those are cool insights. I think you know my I mean personally, I've always found it difficult to like I love getting on a mic and talking to people I've always found it difficult to like engage and like I've never I don't feel like I've cracked that you know that art that you're talking about of like being able to like craft tweets that like people are that that are going to like hit the algorithm and like and do that consistently enough to like build up your following in your audience like it's just it's just not not something I've felt comfortable with to do consistently

so yeah I'm always very admire I always admire I always admire people who do it. If you really wanted to, and it was important enough to you, you would figure it out. And if you didn't figure it out yourself, you can hire a, you know, who gets it, a 23-year-old who lives, who, you know, perpetually online and what is it? Terminally online. And, you know, I know many people, I know many, many, many founders who essentially have a 23 or 24, you know, it's like Peter Thiel's blood boy. Like, I have a lot of friends who have a 23-year-old, you know, Twitter boy, basically, like, being like, no, no, no, don't tweet this, tweet this, capitalize this, don't capitalize this. You put a period here, take out the period.

Like, Algo just updated, you know, 18 second videos, not 38 second videos. You would be shocked at how many founders in AI and tech and crypto have a Twitter boy. I didn't know. I didn't know that. And I don't want to know what Peter Thiel's Blood Boy is. Look it up. Actually, don't look it up. Yeah, okay. What?

But anybody who wants to, then you go look at it at. Yeah. So, I mean, like, how did this, how did this Misari acquisition happen? You know, what's the story behind that? Masari, I think, had, again, like, Ryan had one of the best visions of that. Ryan, to this day, is maybe the best analyst that crypto has ever had. He started as an analyst, right? He uncovered Mount Cox.

He's, you know, his annual theses were like the must read of the year, I'd say. And so he had the right vision, disclosed. and ratings and transparency and Edgar on line he had all of that right and so we've I think we've always you know for a while when we had the media and events business we admired them and thought you know we actually did a lot of work together we admired them and then when we got into data they were our biggest competitor um you know we've been for about two years now recording all of our sales calls or at least most of them and uh missari by far was our biggest competitor on sales calls 47% of all sales deals that we went against, we competed against Masari. So it's almost half of our deals we

competed against Masari on. And so I think there's always been a natural fit there. They do so much of what we do as well. The main different, though, is that Blockworks, you know, Masari already existed and they've been building a data platform for years. Masari went broad with their data. So Masari has unbelievable breadth across their data. They have 40,000 assets, every chain, every exchange, they have so much data breath. Blockworks to own our niche. We had to break into data somehow. If we just copied Masari, we wouldn't do well.

So we went deep. We have the most data depth. So you can go on our website. You will find more AVE data than anyone in the world. You will find more data on vaults than anyone in the world. You will find more data on Salonan than anyone in the world. So that's what we really focus on is depth. So, you know, Seth, I've used most, I've used most,

I've used both products, and I think that really perfectly exemplifies, like, each is individual strong points. They accomplished. So you could go to Massari, and you could literally type in anything in crypto, and you would get a page or an answer. Blockworks, that did, that was not the case. Like, you might type in, like, an exchange or a chain, and, like, we might have zero results on it. But if you pull up something that we had, we would have, we would cover that asset better than anyone in the world. And that's how we built the brand and data. People knew us as going really, really deep.

Now that we started, about a year and a half ago, two years ago, we started servicing the biggest customers became the businesses running things on chain. So this could be an exchange, it could be a regulator, it could be a financial institution, it could be an app, it could be a chain, an L1 and L2. They needed both depth and breath. So at that point, it becomes a build versus buy conversation. Do you build it or do you buy it? Masari had these amazing enterprise customers, and they had amazing APIs, and they had amazing people.

They had really, really, really good engineering and product talent, amongst many other people at the company as well. And so at a certain point, it just became a natural fit, right? There's a, I think if you zoom out from just the Masari deal, Seb, there's a, the plate, I mean, I don't know if you agree or disagree, but like, you know, been doing this for a long time. places at uh you've been in this 13 years which is wildly impressive the industry is at this line in the sand moment where it is becoming a game of haves and have nots and really what that means is you have a decision as a founder do i consolidate or do i get consolidated there there is no in between anymore for the last several years you could kind of just run your business happy go lucky raise a little venture maybe we bootstrap it maybe we do it at like you

you know, run a small business, 10 million in revenue, like, sure, all is good. You can no, you can no longer do that anymore. If you are running like a happy go lucky, like, yeah, well, you know, raise a little venture, run it at like 10 million revenue, you will, you will go out of business eventually. And so I think as a founder, you have to decide, do we want to get consolidated or do we want to, which means sell and, you know, you get to make some money, that's great. Or do you want to be the consolidator, which means go raise a large amount of venture money. money usually and go consolidate the market and do and roll up the roll up the

market and verticalize your whatever whatever area you are owning go verticalize that and so we decide Mike and I decided we want to be the consolidator not the consolidated and so yeah Masari was the first natural fit there but yeah probably won't be the last hmm and and so the the two products still exist as separate like products websites are they going to they will have been solidated Yeah, they will eventually come together. Yeah, exactly. So even if, you know, we have these new landing pages as of last week, you go to the website, you go to products, you go to API. That is actually the Masari API. So if you go to Blockworks. Blockworks.com, then you, at the top menu, you go to products, then you go to API. That is the Masari API. You go to the monitoring product. That is actually Masari's monitoring product. And it's totally skinned as Masari still. So if you buy that product, you will see a Masari product. Eventually, and we're, we're printing at this internally, it'll all turn into blockworks. That must be like a huge engineering left.

It is the biggest endeavor the company has ever taken on. What's the biggest challenge there? Is it just like migrating the infra? Is it the merging? Is it the product side? Like what's the biggest? You know, imagine you, I don't know where you live or, you know, what your living situation is. But imagine, you know, you live in an apartment building and you buy the apartment

next to you. And you're like, we'll just knock down the walls, combine these things. Yeah, well, now you have two kitchens. Now your bathrooms are connected. Now you're, you know, you've got a bedroom in your living room. It's very similar to this. So you're like, we'll just slap these products together and put it all inside of each other and bada bing, bada boom, and you're good. It doesn't work like that. So, you know, we're paying for two CRMs right now. We're paying for two data indexers. We're paying for two data warehouses. We have Snowflake and Clickhouse. We have, Masari was a sales force shop.

Blockworks is a HubSpot shop. We don't need two CRM. The list goes on and for every single thing. And by the way, that applies to roles too. Sorry, I had a head of sales. We have a head of sales. Like, you know, there's so much to figure out. But look, we have really good board who has been really helpful here.

We have really good advisors. We have really good people internally too. Like the Masari people are world class incredible. We've respected them. for so many years, like, they've been a natural fit into Blockworks, too. And how long is this transition going to take, you know, like, until, so everything gets... I would guess the business will be fully integrated by end of year. Wow, that's, like, pretty fast.

And how many employees do you have and that they have? The combined entity has 80 people. Okay, that's it. All right. Yeah. All right. I thought, I thought double. At the beginning of the year did a big layoff.

They had somewhere around 150 people, brought it down to 8.5. And then we brought over 11, 11 people. Got it. Okay. So you've already kind of like cut some of the staff and like. Yeah. But, you know, this is the cold, hard truth of these acquisitions is like, you know, we don't need two heads of finance, for example.

So, yeah, that's just, I think the nature. of these things. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. It's such a, I mean, I saw this, I saw this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, what is it? Ninja turtles, you know, where they're like, they've, they've, the, the rat, I forget the rat's name, but, like, he's holding the little baby turtles.

And then later, like, the, the turtles I'm growing up and they're holding the rat who's kind of, it's, it's like, it very much, like, sort of felt like that kind of moment. Master's, um, yeah. Master Splinter, right, yeah, I've got to forget. Yeah, no, it's very, very impressive and which you guys have built as a business and, like, are continuing to grow. So what do you think Blockworks goes from here? Like, once Misari is, like, fully integrated and you have the depth and the breadth, what's next,

like, what's the next logical step for a data product? Yeah, so, I mean, how does AI fit into all of this as well? I think, like, that's a huge thing we haven't talked about it. It's like AI, and, you know, I know you've talked a lot about this on Twitter and on the podcast, too. Yeah. the whole thesis of the business is that capital markets are going to move on chain. And by the way, will crypto gaming happen? Will NFTs come back?

Like maybe, sure, we're not that focused on it. We think that even if all we're doing here is just we get digital gold with Bitcoin and all of capital markets move on chain, that is an amazing opportunity. So the whole business is based around capital markets moving on chain. There are two sides of the platform. So we basically have this flywheel where you have one side, you have, issuers of on-chain assets. So these are, today it's tokens, but quickly becoming tokenization and RWAs and stablecoins and on-chain equities. You have issuers of on-chain assets.

And then on the other side of the platform, you have underwriters of those assets. So you have the actual investors, but you also have exchanges that need to list these assets. You have custodians that need to custody these assets. You have brokerages that need to allow you to trade these assets. And so we basically sit. We get paid both sides of those are our customers. So the issuers need to, they need ratings, they need disclosures, they need to present their information to the market, they need investor relations. That's one side of our business.

This is like investor relations, ratings, disclosures. That data then flows through blockworks out the other end through APIs and MCP and a software platform into the enterprises. So these would be the exchanges and brokerages and financials. institutions and banks and regulators, AI companies as well, they need to consume all that information so that their customers and themselves can underwrite those assets. And there's this beautiful, really, really, really simple flywheel that exists here. The more issuers we have on the platform, the more data there is. The more data we have, the more enterprises get onboarded,

and the more investors consume the data. The more enterprises who get onboarded, the more investors consume the data, the more incentivizes the issuers to join Blockworks as a customer, which then feeds more data, feeds more investors, more incentive, more issuers, more data, and so on and so forth. And so I'd say in the last several months, this year we've really hit escape velocity. Like, you know, revenue went from a couple of years ago, you know, on the recurring revenue data side of things, it was 200K, then 2 million, then, you know, seven million and then now we're you know into the eight figures of of recurring revenue ARR and so you know and on top of that we have the whole we have the

you know still we still do have some advertising business we have the events business but the entire focus is scaling this two-sided you could call it a marketplace and eventually we will we will compete with the S&Ps and Moody's of the world like we you know S&P I don't think people realize is a hundred and twenty billion dollar business Moody's is an 80 billion dollar business moody's does eight billion billion in revenue. S&P does 14 billion in revenue. These are gargantuan businesses. And so, but they're built for the off-chain world. And so as capital moves on chain, we will, we will compete with them. I want to touch on something that Mike posted recently. And I think you've

also, I think you both, you both have sort of similar takes here is that we need to stop doing equity token deals. So like value in crypto needs to be fully on tokens. And, and, you know, And essentially, you know, as investors, whether institutional or retail, there should be like one thing that's where people can sort of buy into the value and that's the tokens. Can you kind of explain what that thesis is? And sort of like maybe that also brings us into the next point, which is the token transparency framework and the token transparency alliance. But like what's the underlying idea here that, you know, like one thing should represent the value of the project or the company? Yeah, there's there's a core belief. that if tokens internally a block works is that if tokens don't work what do we all kind of what do we

all do in here in a sense and so I think all one of our things that we've been so focused on is fixing tokens I think there are I think that the idea of a token is a beautiful idea this global permissionless thing that can be used to incentivize your users and used uh you know almost algorithmically instead of just like this thing that gets issued by this Delaware C Corp. The idea of a token is a beautiful idea. The idea of having two assets that investors can invest in. And one kind of like hint, hint, wink wink, wink, wink represents the value of the business. And one, and you know, you kind of sell it to retail and like, but the retail doesn't really get anything. And then the others, like you sell it to VCs and it's like, hey, nudge,

like that this is the thing that's actually going to go up. it's like, obviously this is a broken market. And by the way, you don't have to listen to Mike or me or Blockworks. Look at the token market. It's down only. So something is clearly fundamentally broken. By the way, there's other things that are structurally wrong with the token market. A lot of the backdoor deals that happen with like the TVL deals are really bad for the token market.

The exchange listing deals are really bad for the token market. So it's not just the token equity split. Maybe explain those for those who are not familiar with kind of like back to the token. door deals. Yeah. So, um, here's a really, so all the TVL that you see in crypto is, um, sorry, shouldn't say all near a lot of the TVL that you see in crypto and nearly all of the early stage TVL that you see in crypto is incentivized TVL. So what actually happens, let's say you're building a, um, let's say you're building a lend borrow platform. You need to do two things. You need to show to the market that you're successful. So you need, you know, the metrics on blockworks to say that your

TVL went from 100 million to a billion and DeFi Lama and Dune and token terminal, you need all these data sites to show that you're doing well. You also need to raise some money, right, to go fund the team and marketing and all that stuff. So what do you do? You go to a VC and you say, hey, VC, we're raising $5 million at a $50 million post. VC says, great, we're interested. But we want a little cherry on top. We will give you guys, we will, you know, we've got this big asset management firm.

we'll put $50 million into your protocol to bootstrap the liquidity for the first year. But on the side, kind of outside of this whole, you know, series A fundraise that you're doing, you have to give us 3% of your tokens. So what you're doing here is you're creating a huge cell wall that retail doesn't actually know about. So if you go, so this is, so by the way, so then you get to show on, you know, Blockworks, and diva Lama and token terminal and all these sites, that your TV, this is why the TVL starts growing so quickly. So you go from 10 million TVL to 100 million TVL, a billion TVL, but on the side, the TVL is really coming from just a couple of players who are getting your tokens in exchange

for depositing TVL into the platform. So what happens at a year when your TVL deal ends, or at two years when your TVL deal ends, you dump the tokens. The other thing that happens, is along the way, you have to list your token. You got to get to get some. liquidity for the token so you go to so you so you've already given five percent of your tokens to the venture firm you've done the you've done the fundraise but then you give five percent of your tokens on the side for tvl deals well then you also go to the exchanges you know finance all the rest they say hey we need some more tokens we need some tokens to give to our our users and we need some tokens ourselves to list your asset boom another cell wall so there's almost this perma cell wall

that happens um and it just it's just it's It's, yeah, retail gets rinsed over and over and over again. And, you know, even for me, like, I am, I am the dream customer of a, of a token, like, for a token. Like, I am the dream buyer. Like, I live in crypto. I should want, I believe in these founders. I only own four tokens right now. Like, why do I, who loves this industry more than anything?

I only own four tokens. That's crazy. So something's fundamentally broken. And I think that's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a, a structural thing, but also, But it's a transparency thing, too, and not to ramble for too long, but this is why we have the token transparency framework. Like, the TVL deals in and of themselves are not the problem. It's that the market doesn't know that these TVL deals exist.

I mean, do you think that this is like also fundamentally, like we just saw the SpaceX IPO and, you know, there was like a bunch of changes made like NASDAX listing rules. And, you know, those are known to the public. But like most people don't know. about them and then there's like all these unlocks and like most of the retail investors don't know about it. They just fed like this media story that like this is going to be, you know, and all their favorite influencers telling them this is this is the next like 100 trillion dollar

stock right. Like it this also exists in traditional finance and traditional finance has lots of rules, regulations, scrutiny, regulatory scrutiny. Is this just like just sort of like a story that's as old as financial markets where where, you know, those that have the information get richer and those that don't, like, end up losing money? No, I disagree. I fundamentally disagree with that. I think that there's a, there's the difference, right? There's a, there's a core difference. So, okay. When I got into crypto, I thought that crypto would eventually look more like finance. I was wrong. Finance is starting to look more like crypto. And that is a really, really, really fascinating dynamic. What is Palantir? It's a meme stock. What is space? It's a meme stock. What is the game that Elon is playing with SpaceX? It's a low-float high-fd-vee-token.

It's why I did not touch that thing with a 10-foot pole. I was like, I've seen this game 100 times. Things are going to go down. Eventually, I'm a buyer of SpaceX, but not at, you know, not at these low-float, high-fd-v pre-unlocked prices. The difference here is that legally, SpaceX had to disclose everything. So sure, retail might not have researched this stuff. And yes, Elon's the best marketer.

salesperson in the history of the world, but there was a thousand page SpaceX S1 that went live. How crazy is it that there's a thousand page SpaceX S1 that went live when they IPOed? When a token goes live, there's nothing. There's literally just a pie chart that shows what percentage of the team owns what. That's all you get as retail. So if retail wanted to, they could find those answers. That's the best we're going to get, by the way. That's all you need.

You'll always have media games. You'll always have showboaters who go on CNBC. I actually don't care about that game. Elon should the best, yeah, salespeople and marketers will continue winning. But there has to be some transparency brought to the token markets. And again, I don't care that, you know, Len Barrow protocol is doing TVL deals. I actually don't. I think it's smart.

I care that retail has no visibility into those deals. All right. So let's then, I think this is a great, great time. to talk about token transparency framework and the token transparency alliance that is being led by blockwork. So what is this project and what like, I mean, is the is the is the goal here for this to inform regulation? Like, you know, would you guys sort of like try to push a regulatory framework that is based on this framework for the industry to adopt it? Or does the industry need to sort of like adopt what it already exists within the existing or like SEC rules or do we need something in the middle? Yeah.

There's two questions in there. No, no, no. So token transparency framework is a standardized open source disclosure's framework. The goal is to bring trust back to on-chain markets and trust back to tokens. Right now, crypto tokens lack this shared disclosure standard. And so it's what we talked about. Token holders and exchanges and funds, they're kind of forced to piece together like all this material information from scattered incomplete sources, like a tweet from the T-Ewen from the team with a pie chart.

And so the goal of the TTF is to just give the industry standardized disclosures with very consistent completion states. So we're not saying, you know, X protocol got a 97 out of 100. We are saying, you know, they had four things that were incomplete here. Buy or beware. So you have a B1 filing, which is kind of like the equivalent of the S1 for crypto. We talked about the SpaceX S1. The S1 is what you file when you go public.

So we have a B1, which is. is a one-time disclosure, which is filed pre-launch or post-launch around your token. So it's kind of like the TGE filing. Then you have a B-2, which is like a 10-Q, 10-K, right? It's a continuously updated filing for post-ICO teams, post-launches, filed like every six months. Totally free to participate in both of these. The data is then sent out to the exchanges and to investors

and integrated into a bunch of teams, listing processes, all that kind of stuff. on the regulatory side, we don't have to push a message. It's called the Clarity Act, right? So the Clarity Act is already doing, it's completely aligned with Clarity. And even if Clarity doesn't pass, we're recording this July 21st. So I don't know if clarity's going to pass or not. I'd put the odds at 50-50 today, maybe 60-40 that it will pass. There's also Reg Crypto from the SEC. So if Clarity passes, Reg Crypto will just get folded into clarity and disclosures are going to be mandatory. So there's going to be, be thousands of teams overnight that are forced to do disclosures and we can help them with that if clarity doesn't pass reg crypto and you know chairman atkins will still push forward with red crypto which is also going to push forward disclosures one way or another like it or not the industry is going to be forced to do disclosures and we're we're you know we have the leading disclosures platform in the industry and it's free to file and we're here to help what what's the timeline on both of these uh u.s regular

story frameworks? So the, you know, there's a recess that starts August 7th. So, you know, it's July 21st. So I'd say we have two weeks, two and a half weeks to get this thing done. If it doesn't happen by the recess, you know, obviously it can still happen. But then we head into the midterms in the U.S. And I don't think that, you know, crypto market structure is going to be a hot topic in the midterms.

I think that AI and data centers will be the hot topic that voters care about. and so I don't, I think the clarity, I think unfortunately clarity will stall out if it doesn't get pushed forward by August 7th. But look, I'm optimistic. Like, we're, I don't know when this episode is going to get released, but uh, Polly Market says, you know, 30 or 40% chance that it passes. Like, I, I, I think that's a buy. Like, I'd go along that market right now. I think it's probably 50 or 60%. Hmm. And so, so when a team files their, their B1 or their, what's the other one, B2, Is there any sort of audit of this? And what's the, what's the sort of penalty for not filing accurately or sort of lying on this? Or is it just sort of the reputational damage of like having lied on one of these things? Or like, is there sort of further action that investors can take, you know, if a team does not, is not honest in their filings?

Right now it's just market dynamics. The market will punish you if you start to lie with this stuff. eventually this needs to become more like an S-1 where it is illegal you will go to jail if you lie in your S-1 right it is securities fraud so we're working you know spending a lot of time in D.C. to see what we can do there

but so there is there is an alliance right also of like exchanges that are that are part of this is there some sort of pack there where or sort of guidelines where if let's say teams sort of

lies on on these filings that they will delist them or stop doing business with them or yeah yeah exactly so most of the several of the big exchanges so this transparency alliance we went live with an an alliance called the transparency alliance so inside of the as members of the transparency alliance you have um coinbase crackin binance us anchorage um you know wisdom tree paksos bit wise vanac bit BitGo, Falcon X, Moon Pay, copper, the list goes on. Everybody. And other changes, right? Gate I.O., buy bit, mexy.

You know, many, many, many good teams. They, to be, as part of the Transparency Alliance, you have to do something to support the token transparency framework. So there's a lot of stuff that is in public that, you know, I can't fully talk about. But I'd say many of the exchanges have, are incorporating the TTF into their listings processes. So they will start saying,

look, this team isn't on the TTF. Like, now we're going to punt on listing it. Okay, this team did a fully complete TTF. Like, let's prioritize the listing. Does the framework include disclosers relative to kind of KOLs and marketing? Is that also part of it where you have to disclose who your KOLs are? So if you go onto the website, so here there's basically, there's 12 different criteria here. So you have the known team, like, the known team, like who is the team?

You have the Dow structure. You have the primary foundation. You have the primary Devco. You have the token supply and allocation. So like the initial allocation, the air drop process. You have transactions and market structure. So we don't do KOL stuff right now, but we do market maker agreements. And we do Dex agreements.

So centralized exchange agreements. And we do Dex agreements. And then we do financial disclosures. So prior token sales and fundraising, prior exploits and material risk factors. regulation technology token on token economics okay interesting yeah i i think in europe i'm not like super up to date on this but i think the regulatory like the meika framework oh you know what has a bunch of disclosures you need like a bunch of disclosures of like who your kols are and like you you can't sort of promote uh tokens and things like that i'm entirely sure maybe maybe someone will

no no you you so if you so if you look at the b1 we don't do kowls if you look at a B2 though like you go on our website and look at the aerodrome filing for example you the B2 does have does have KOL marketing activities so under token allocation there's initial allocation insider vesting token advisory billings unissued and operational wallets and actually number 10 10 of 18 is kOL marketing activities so right you know we need you to just quote unquote disclose on ongoing KOL influence relationships that partially or fully receive tokens for payment do not need to disclose KOL influencers that do not

receive tokens for payment, use lettered subitems. So, okay. Yeah, so the website is blockworks.com slash token dash transparency. People can check that out. There's already something like 65 disclosures here and I think it's a very

cool initiative. I think like more teams should opt in to do this because I do think it creates like a bunch of like just a lot of transparency and kind of trust. But then then, you know, I think the logical sort of outcome here is there needs to be enforcement if an enforcement could be, yeah, of course, like the exchanges that are part of the alliance dropping this or, you know, having some sort of like, you know, negative outcome for the projects that lie or are not fully transparent. And then at some point, like regulatory, like legal consequences, for sure, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Super cool.

I'd love to get your thoughts on like where we are right now. Like where's the market? I saw you tweet this thing, which I thought was interesting, which you're saying that this month is set to have like as little VC deals as November 2020. And so the people are speculating whether or not this is the bottom, whether things can go down from here. Yeah, I'd love to get your thoughts on where you think we're on the cycle. Yeah. I mean, to quote, I think it was Baron Rothschild, right? You know, the time to buy is when there's blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own. And then I think, you know, Buffett may have adapted that in some way. That's where we're at today. There's blood in the streets and the blood is your own. Like not, you know, it's not like a, there's no companies that are well funded. Everyone's tokens are down and they're not well funded. Investors aren't able to raise funds. We just had our lowest venture deals quarter since or month. since 2020, six years ago, there's blood in the streets. Here's the good news.

The market's bottomed. The market has bottomed. And look, we could always, you know, AI rolls over, stock market implodes. Crypto could always go a little lower. Sure. But I think today is like a will be seen as a generational buying opportunity for crypto tokens. And I think that includes tokens too, by the way. Like I'm a firm believer that these tokens will come back with or without clarity.

So imagine we get clarity. clarity i spoke with a hedge fund in new york about a 10 billion dollar fund they have 300 million allocated to crypto tokens if clarity passes that 300 million dollars to buy crypto tokens if clarity passes so there's as one fund in new york so the amount of funds who are on the sidelines waiting for clarity is i think way more than people realize and it's very similar to stable coins like think about the mainstream stablecoin adoption enterprises doing stable coins pre-jointed genius. There was no one. It was like Circle and Tether where the stable coin companies, now everyone's a stable coin company. Now everyone's board is forcing them to be a stable coin

company. So that will happen just at a much even larger scale once clarity passes. And if we don't get clarity, we're, you know, Chairman Atkins is still going to push forward and do reg crypto, which is almost even better than clarity. So, um, yeah, I think I'm, yeah, I'm, I just started buying tokens. I just started buying crypto for the first time in like two years. I'm, I'm, very bullish. When you say, like, the tokens will go up. I mean, I think one of the things that has been sort of characteristic of the last year, 18 months, is that, you know, in the last sort of run up, you know, Bitcoin did well, hyperliquit did well, like a few tokens did well, but then a vast majority of the other tokens that did not have, you know, the fundamentals, if you will,

did not do well. Tocons and projects will need to show fundamental value for them to do well. Will they not? I think tokens that have fundamentals will do better than tokens that don't have fundamentals. Yeah, I think the think about the investor, use this hedge fund, for example. The thing that they are looking at is hyperliquid. They like hype a lot because hype. It makes sense to them. There's revenues.

There's not, by the way, there's not, hyperliquid was the thing that really drove home, dual split between equity and a token because it's working so well. And the team chronically undersells over delivers. And so, yeah, I think the tokens that have fundamentals will do better than the tokens that don't have fundamentals. And by fundamentals, I just mean, like, this shouldn't be a new thing. It's like, yeah, they have a real business. They have revenue and they have users and they have customers. They have a good business. You're hurry to hear, folks.

Businesses will do, businesses will do well. There you go. Nailed it. Cool. Jason, thanks so much for joining me again on Epicenter. Yeah. And also just, I just want to say just how fundamentally, like, what a great, what, how great it's been to, like, watch you guys grow from, you know, this small team of salespeople, build, selling podcast ads and producing, you know, lots of, lots of podcasts that you guys have eclipsed since then. And, yeah, you know, keep going. Keep going. Keep building this thing for the next, for the next 20 years. The feeling is mutual, my friend. Thank you for all the support. And then, uh,

Onwards, onwards.