On The Brink with Castle Island - Alex Cutler (Aerodrome) on DeFi's Next Steps (EP.624)

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

Wyatt sits down with Alex Cutler, founder of Aerodrome for another episode in our stablefi series. In this episode:  DEX trading advantages Building on-chain FX DeFi as a backbone

Wyatt from Castle Island here, and on today's episode of On the Brink's Stable Coin-Fi series, I was joined by Alex Cutler, founder of Aerodrome. Aerodrome is a leading decentralized trading protocol operating on Coinbase's native base blockchain. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and hosts may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast.

You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific induce to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion.

This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to, Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people started to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Alex Cutler, co-founder of Aerodrome Finance, thank you for joining the podcast today.

Excited to have you. If it works, would love to kick off with a quick background and hear about your story and journey to crypto. Thanks so much for having me. Very excited to be here. I think my journey, like a lot of folks in crypto, was pretty twisty-turning, very much not a direct path. I started my career working in politics and campaigns, got pretty burned out on that, went and spent some time working in big tech, decided I needed to mix it up and spend some time in the agency and consulting world. And I actually think it's pretty interesting because I was

like many people pulled up in the pandemic, decided to build a gaming PC. I had friends who were very much into crypto and defy at that point, encouraging me to get involved. So I decided I would just start mining some Bitcoin with the PC. And then I took the Bitcoin and I was like, wow, I made something out of seemingly nothing. And what can I do with this? And brought it onto an exchange, then brought it on chain, started yield farming, started playing around with all these different protocols. And I think once you have a taste of the way in which this industry creates so much freedom of opportunity and you can contribute in ways and be rewarded. I was totally hooked. So I ended up quitting my job. Didn't really have a plan other than playing around on chain.

I didn't know what I was going to do. But one thing led to another. I met some other very, very smart guys and became an accidental founder in the space. I love that story. I relate to some degree because I studied political science in college and that was a lot of my interest area and had a similar experience that playing around on chain for me was very freeing in a way to be in a free financial system. When you know about all the entanglement of traditional finance, traditional governance, I found that to be immediately a pretty powerful thing. Yeah, it was weird. There's an old Steve Jobs line about how you can only connect the dots going backwards. And in a strange way, the combination of politics, of technology, of getting exposure to the agency

and consulting world to all these different business models, in some ways was the perfect pedigree to come into this on-chain world because all of this matters. Models matter, incentives matter, community, and there's certainly politics to all of this matter. And obviously, technology matters. So this ended up being a perfect blend of experience, I feel like, diving into a space that is still so, like, raw and unshaped with all those different pieces. And how did you go from being curious on chain to being someone at the forefront of building

crypto products? The thing that I really, really appreciate about the space is that if you just show up and you start contributing, if you just show up and start adding value, and that could be just through on chain actions, of course. You can contribute value to protocols to projects and never even have a public-facing persona. You could just be a wallet participating. But if you do have a public persona, you can participate in all sorts of ways. Initially, I just started as I was learning things. I would write threads about the project or protocol I was learning about. And that was largely an exercise in learning for me in the sense of you only know you understand something. If you can

related back and have people tell you, yep, that is correct. You've understood it correctly. So I started writing these threads about things that I was interested in. And, you know, I think my initial gateway to the ecosystem was the first project that was very passionate about was Curve. And the very, very interesting model that Mitch had built there. And writing threads about that and the writing threads about Solidly, which was Andre Cronet's big project. And before I knew it, somebody who is part of a Dow said, hey, man, could you come help us? And then I start helping a little more on the writing thread side. And then it's, well, now there's five more things that need to be done. Let me help on those things. So I start helping. I start contributing more. And there are just

few spaces where absent a pedigree, job application, all the things that keep people boxed in or on particular lines don't exist here. If you just show up and you start kicking down doors, start adding value. Experiences like mine are definitely on the table because that Dow that I got pulled into just because I was writing some interesting threads. That Dow is the Dow that had the idea initially of Belladrome and that of course evolved into Aerodrome. And it was just a bunch of in the beginning a non-Discord people. None of us knew who each other were. We didn't know each other's work backgrounds, ages.

We didn't know where anybody lived in the world. It was just an alignment of interests. And then us collectively seeing an opportunity and organizing against that opportunity. You make a great point. The free system of finance creates also a free market for a human capital. If I think Callenly should do something and I'm a major Calenly user, I can't just go contribute readily.

You typically can't do so outside of your day job. I think it's a very powerful part of crypto. Is that something that you guys have implemented? And is that something that grounded your origin story with aerodrome? It's actually at the core of our model, which I'm sure we can get into a bit more in time. But the economics of our model are such that every single participant in the system is on equal footing. So we as a team, we don't have any privilege access to any of the revenue that the protocol generates.

We have to do the same thing anybody does each week if we want sort of access. We have to basically participate. We have to add value. And that is no different than a venture fund who comes in and locks up the token. They have the same access to the revenue of producers. They have to contribute value in the exact same way. And that's the same exact thing that any DGEN or user does. If you're just a passionate person who goes out, locks some tokens, and is participating each week,

you are on equal footing with the team. You're on equal footing with coin-based ventures. You're on equal footing with somebody who's taken millions of the coins and locked them up, and somebody who's locked up a few. And your incentives are now aligned organically with those of the protocol. what you contribute into it is rewarded and incentivized the same way as the team. And I think that is the power of the model. It happened in many cases.

But there's one guy I think about a lot who just so happened to at one of the lows in the market, he locked up a ton of arrow because he was interested in the protocol. And in locking up that arrow and voting each week and earning back the rewards, basically the value the protocol is generating, he was able to take time. off of work and what he did with his time off of work was just starting writing really deep research threads on aerodrome and on the Dex marketplace on the industry generally. And these are some of the best threads ever. So, and they've been massively impactful. And it was just we didn't have to hire him. We didn't have to compromise his independence. We didn't have to really do anything. His incentive

alignment was created organically through this economic system. And I think that is absolutely what makes it so powerful. And it is embedded entirely into the model where those who contribute the most are basically rewarded the most. And the downstream effects of that are very powerful. Can you speak a bit more to that economic incentive structure model for those who might be less familiar? So I guess I'll take a step back and talk about Dex's generally in the incentive structures there and the different groups that they are balancing. So a Dex, you'd say, has three primary stakeholder groups. There are traders, and traders fundamentally just want the best execution on their trades. They will trade on any Dex as long as that Dex has the tokens

that they want to trade, and that Dex is giving them the best execution. So that's one group you are controlling for. Who provides the liquidity for that? That is, liquidity providers. Those are the people coming in who are putting up two sides of any given trade. So your Bitcoin and your USDC, so they create the pool through which all those trades will go through. But they're taking on risk in doing this, the idea of impermanent loss, that the values of those change. That can certainly be something that they're basically taking some risk on. So you need to give them the best rewards. So we're trying to give traders the best execution. We're going to do that by giving liquidity. Providity providers the best rewards.

And then that third group is basically token holders. Dexes do need tokens. This is very important. We know that because if you go back in the history, we've seen that you can take a Dex with no token, a Dex with a token, and within a week the Dex with the token, who can basically add a little bit of extra value,

can take half of the whole liquidity from the decks without the token. So token holders are an important part of it. and token holders are basically going to be interested in how much reward can I have for holding the token. And they need to be there to optimize the decks, ensure that the value is flowing to the right liquidity providers. So basically, by aligning the incentives between these three groups of traders, liquidity providers, and token holders, you end up with an economic model that is very, very powerful. One of the big differences is if you go back, And we call this the Dex Triloma, Uniswap, which was really the first pioneer here,

it solved it between two parties. It solved it between traders and liquidity providers. But it was a bit capped because it was only exchanging fees and liquidity between these two parties. Curve was the next big innovation in the sense of we're going to add in a token to ensure you can incentivize liquidity providers beyond just the fee capture. And there's a lot of other reasons tokens are useful. in this context too. But, you know, we're going to send only half of the fees to the token and half to liquidity providers. So in our model, basically, the big breakthrough is that you want to

give 100% of the revenue to the token and give the token basically to liquidity providers. And that is the ultimate state of this deck's troubling. All three parties see their interests aligned. Everyone gets the best version of whatever that activity is that they are doing. And that leads to just a much more efficient model. And trading in crypto's gravitated a lot in this sense, today you've centralized exchanges that are listing assets that they wouldn't have historically in the past. And I think you and I are both aligned that that incentive structure and model has a lot of unlocks. But in 2025, for skeptics, why is Dex trading necessary? And why are Dex is structurally necessary in crypto when you have all this sex trading at the same time. And you'll probably

have traditional brokerages facilitating the training of crypto assets as well. I think you just cannot beat open permissionless markets. And this is actually a trend we're seeing right now. Think about what every centralized exchange has to go through to get new tokens launched on their platforms, trading in their platforms. They need to go through an incredible amount of due diligence overhead. This is legal due diligence. This is regulatory due diligence. This is a degree of due diligence on the teams, on the token supplies. This is engineering work to get it all plugged in. This is comms and marketing work. This is needing to ensure that you are attracting market makers to actually ensure that these markets on the centralized exchanges will bootstrap

effectively. This is why the centralized exchanges are these very large entities, because this is all very time intensive, very expensive work, and it's even at its fastest state, pretty slow. If you think about all of that and you think about the fact that on chain, you can spin up these markets, maybe even a way to think about it is on the centralized exchange, you're spinning them up. And decentralized exchanges, everyone's spinning up. They're being spun up all the time, in real time. And we've seen this not only massive expansion and the number of tokens, but also even the life cycles of tokens collapsing, there's just no way a centralized exchange is going to be able to, through their traditional process, keep up with the on-chain economy in the way

in which all this new activity, all these new tokens can just be organically sort of spun. And I think the trend that you're actually seeing, which is very interesting, is that centralized exchanges are getting increasingly interested in actually integrating with Dex pools, on chain pools, and surfacing those to their customers. Because in the end, if you're trading on Coinbase or Binance or whatever, you don't really care how they get you access to the tokens. You're just going to care that when you go to trade the tokens there. And if it launched yesterday, if the president of the United States is launching a coin, and it is popping off and you go to finance or you go to Coinbase and it's not there to trade,

it means you're not going to trade it there. And that's a loss for you as the customer. That's a loss for them as an exchange business. If they can surface to their customers, everything that's happening on chain while passing off the responsibility, all that due diligence, the building the markets, to that on-chain infrastructure, I think it's the best of both worlds where they're going to be able to service their customers, all those things. they're going to be able to spin up in real time.

And by the way, because we are talking about the ways in which we're going to expand asset classes, the things that are tokenized on chain. There are also just going to be things that I think centralized exchanges are just not going to be interested in taking on the risk of integrating directly into their products, but they will be able to say, okay, well, we're just giving our users access to something that's happening on chain, wash their hands of it. It's much, much easier. So finance has already started doing this. Brian Armstrong has said publicly that they are beginning to integrate Defi. There's a great new product on Coinbase that allows you to borrow against your

Bitcoin. As a Coinbase user, you probably wouldn't even know that that is all happening via D5 protocols on base. And I expect that we'll see more Dex integrations in centralized exchanges because of the things that we're describing here. I think you make excellent points. I also think the visibility into the pools is powerful because, as I think we both know, that there are some incredible antics that happen when it comes to some of the tokens that list on centralized exchanges where you can't see what's happening in the background and you're really just presented with market cap valuation and do you want to buy this token? That's one of the reasons I think people love a deck screener actually was because it made it

so obvious to see these transactions. You can see what looks like a bot. You can see what looks like a real transaction. and you really don't have that, especially today with these centralized exchanges. Yeah, watching the order books on centralized exchanges, especially in tokens with relatively limited liquidity on them, there's a game being played. And the transparency that on-chain pools give you is just not going to be rivaled at all by centralized order books and things like that. Yeah, it makes you question systems of traditional trading when you have this new

alternative of the transparent trading system? Think about even just the market making side of this. If you are going to go and get listed on centralized exchange, the first question they're going to ask you is, do you have a market maker? Is somebody going to be able to come in and ensure that there is some degree of sufficient liquidity on those books so that our customers when they come to trade will be able to trade? Is there going to be somebody who's going to be actively arbitraging these between the on-chain pools and the pools on our exchange? And when you're talking about pools on chain, you don't need to hire anybody to make those markets. You just align the incentives such that everybody from somebody who's a very, very professional

liquidity provider or market maker, they're going to show up and do it as long as they're properly incentivized to do it. But you haven't had to have any centralized interaction with them. And then you can also just have average Joe people. And this is what I was saying when I first got in. One of the early things I did was started to provide liquidity because I had just two tokens and I saw a reward if I put these two tokens together. So even as the biggest newbie, I had access to something and was able to help provide liquidity in the same way that these centralized parties previously were required to do it. And that's the power of access and transparency that the in chain world gives you.

You observe a lot of these trading systems, obviously. what assets are you seeing activity in, or where do you think we are in the life cycle of assets people want to trade in defy? I think we're at a very interesting point. The big thing that has happened is that the regulatory landscape in the United States has changed significantly. And this has a bunch of downstream implications. People are thinking about how they're designing tokens differently. I think one of the big issues in our industry is the fact, that 90% of tokens, in my opinion, are functionally meme coins. You can say it's a governance coin.

You can say it's a utility coin. But if that governance or utility isn't enforced by on-chain, like immutable mechanisms, it's functionally a meme coin. If there's no direct value flow in the form of incentives or other things for participation, it's functionally a meme coin. So I think one thing that I'm very, very interested in, and we've heard this a lot from funds, is that they are functionally done playing games with these tokens that don't actually do anything, that don't actually have any of fundamental surrounding them. So I think we'll see an explosion of more tokens with real actual utility. These are things that do things, that there are fundamental factors associated to these. They can actually be used. And I think that is very exciting,

because tokens should be one of the most powerful tools that we have for like disintermediating businesses, organizations, products, and things like that. And when you just intermediate things, there's more value for the common. So number one is, I think, just more useful, interesting tokens than we've been seeing a ton of new stuff launching on base within that category. The second thing is that I think we will continue to see, of course, a vast majority of trading happen around those top 10 assets. And I think what's exciting for us is that we expect far more of that trading activity to happen on base to consolidate around a few networks.

Because when you're trading these, like we've talked about, fundamentally you care about execution. And ideally, you want to be able to trade between all of them in the same place. So we worked with the Coinbase team to basically make base the best place to trade Bitcoin on chain. And this end is like multi-year incumbency because on-chance. the best place to trade Bitcoin for so long had been on Ethereum Mainnet, because that's where all the liquidity was, on Uniswap, and using WBTC. And it took two weeks for Bayesian to basically make the top venue for trading Bitcoin on chain, base and Airdrom. And I think you could do that for the top 10 trading assets. And then traders increasingly have no reason to leave

that ecosystem, because if they want to move between whichever major is hot and size, and the best place to do it is all on base. They're not going to need to go bridge anywhere else. All the major market makers will just be harbying between coin base and those, which creates even more fees and economic activity. So I think we'll see even more trading around the majors, especially if we see more things get ETFs and we see flows into it. But there are a few other things that I would highlight. One is FX. FX is trillion dollar market. And FX is something where you're not just talking about the speculators, the people who are trading currency for some degree of edge. You're talking about payments processors worldwide. And payments processing is something that, as of right now,

the margins on it at times are just absolutely offensive. If you are taking a trip to Europe, it's an American and you're going to an ATM or buying something, you're paying percentages on that transaction just to take your dollars into euros. Even the best payments platform, like wise, it's a pretty healthy take on that. And right now today, on base, you can go from US dollars to euros at a better rate than any institution in TradFi and FinTech can provide you. And we've onboarded, I think, another 10 new global stables. The goal of the base team is to have a stable representation.

of every major on-chain currency by the end of year, and to onboard those payments providers, because we know we can give them better execution, not in the future, not hypothetically. We can do that today. And I think that's going to be another very, very powerful expansion of what people are trading or using. And then the last piece, I think, is we've talked about for a long time. On-chain markets are just better markets. They're always on.

The settlement is instant. And I think there is no reason why we shouldn't see every asset type. So tokenized, equities, derivatives, real-world assets, on chain. And the compounding effect of all of this. Top 10 digital assets, new emergent digital assets, every single global currency stable coin, and a whole bunch of real-world assets, and it's all happening in one place. What does this add up to? This adds up to the single best marketplace in the world for traders.

of assets, speculators of assets. And that's what we're very, very excited about. And I think that's part of why we have been so bullish on base and Coinbase is because I think they share that vision and they believe it's in their interest to cultivate the world's best market on base. I think you're spot on on both of those two major points. Shout out, Coinbase has done an incredible job in creating a seamless Bitcoin experience off the Bitcoin main chain, which I think is very necessary in crypto. I really want to zoom in on the on-chain FX piece because it's something we're very interested in. I think it could be a killer use case of crypto beyond stable coins being completely honest or called a step two. I've always thought just really deep

defy-fewy pools of different fiat currencies or fiat-backed stable coins is already an incredible use case. We've seen a fantastic batch of innovation around USD stable coins settlement systems that sit on top on and off ramping infrastructure. From my perspective, the limiting factor for these on-chain FX systems is a lack of liquidity for these other currency stable coins and a lack of accompanying infrastructure on the orchestration and on an off-ramp side. How are you guys looking at that or trying to bridge that gap as you build out this initiative? This is where it's a great one-two-punch collaboration, I think, between us and the Coinbase team. So we have the ability very, very easily to scale up liquidity on any type of asset.

And this is one of the superpowers of the Medadex model. And that's what we call Belladrome, Herodrome, they're medidexes. They are probably the best liquidity bootstrapping systems in Define. And the example of that is the CBBT, the Coinbased Bitcoin product that I mentioned. Multiple years of incumbency ended because we were able to bootstrap in a matter of weeks, liquidity to make based on chain hub. So we have the ability to bootstrap basically infinite amounts of liquidity on these global FX pairs. And if you think about people looping those into Barlow Lenn protocols and things like that, liquidity can scale up very, very quick. And the market

rate LP and APRs on these types of pairs would be way lower than what people demand on most tokens. So that's one side of it. And we can nudge and dial that up as we see demand. But where is the demand coming from and how are we solving these other problems like onboarding, offboarding, and things like that? That is where the base team and coin base team is very, very focused. So they are not just trying to onboard good representations of global currencies, but they are trying to onboard the ecosystems around it. So they are working with local payments providers in these countries. They are working with on-rams, off-ramps in these countries to ensure that basically the full stack of usage comes in. But really in our mind, because we know

the activities there, people have entire businesses right now and are paying way more than they should be paying to go between these, to settle between these different assets, just to do the work that they do and provide their customers, the things that their customers need. If you can onboard just a few of these big players, we're talking about organic, non-toxic flows between these assets that are always on there, not subject to market volatility, sufficient to bootstrap a lot more fees and a lot more activity. And if they come in and they say, hey, well, we need to be routing another $2 million a day between these pools, but the liquidity isn't sufficient.

But they tell us those flows are going to come. We, as a voter, we could just vote more emissions to bootstrap more. liquidity so that they can start building those flows. And I do think that has been what's missing. Somebody who is very focused on capable of building the on-chain liquidity, and then somebody who's trying to bring all of the ecosystem around that at the same time to come tap into that liquidity. And if you can do those two things, we know the product is matter. I think it would very quickly flywheel, where more volume means more fees, means more TVL. It really bootstrapping. And now it's actually deep enough that those FX speculators might actually

want to start coming on chain and making those markets on chain as well. So yeah, I think that's the secret sauces. We've had people building pockets of these things, but we haven't had both sides of it coming together in one place to execute. It seems very lucrative for anyone with the assets. personally, we're seeing a ton of volume from U.S. to Mexico using stable coins in the middle, but you can't do it in fashion that goes through an MXN stable coin because there's really no liquidity behind any of these MXN stable coins. I had Etherfews on the podcast recently who are trying to do it, and I hope they'll be successful, but still small markets there. Do you think there will be a traditional finance or mainstream actor that moves into this

opportunity? And then we'll get this inflection point, I think of like a Susquehanna or someone like that who could come in and really move the scale of the liquidity in these markets, and then all of a sudden we have robust on-chain MXN, euros, etc? Or what does the zero-to-one moment look like here? The answer to the question is absolutely. And we've talked to, I think, so many institutions who are starting to go down this path. Regulatory clarity is going to help a lot around the stable bill. But it seems like the major, major players understand the value prop now.

They're moving their very slow apparatuses. They're doing their exploration. So I think there will be that big moment where somebody very, very large comes in. But in the meantime, I think the growth is still going to be incredible just in onboarding almost all the smaller fish in relative terms. And that's going to basically create the proof points to the major players that this is real, this is useful, because there are now businesses putting more and more flows through these. And again, non-toxic flows, this is real organic usage. And if they continue to see that drip, drip, drip, someone's going to come in and win because it's a market.

It's a market to be one. We continue to see more of these consumer-facing apps with crypto in the background. We have the D5 mullet. It's almost like the stable coin mullet now. Do you hope that eventually Aerodrome becomes a venue that people interact with less directly and you become the liquidity venue underpinning FX and underpinning major asset trading. Do you hope to retain a sizable front-end audience, or where do you guys hope to sit on the spectrum? I think about this as like an 80-20 thing.

There's always going to be a need for some degree of a front-end, especially in the way in which we democratize access to all of these things. We said liquidity providers, blockers of the tokens, voting to direct emissions, and certainly two-degree traders. But a Dex is just fundamentally infrastructure. It's essential infrastructure for an on-chain economy. And most of the people who will interact with our infrastructure will have no idea that they are interacting with their infrastructure. They will just be using products like a payments platform, like a social network with an on-chain economy behind it. They will just be getting exposure to major digital assets and they will have no idea how they did it. Again, going back to the

trilemma, they're just going to care about the best execution, the best access to that. So I do think, and this has been a big difference between us and say Uniswap, because I think Uniswap at some point decided that, hey, we want to be the front end. We want to be the entry point. And we're going to put a lot of time and focus into being the front end and the entry point to this ecosystem. And I think the issue with that is just that, think about who else wants to be the front end. Coinbase wants to be the front end. Metamask, lots of people want to be the front end. Robin Hood probably wants to be the front end. And these are consumer application building companies. They've got billions of dollars. Not in their own token. They've got billions of real

dollars to invest in winning this fight. So why would a crypto company say, I'm going to go kick Coinbase's ass here. I'm going to beat Robin Hood versus you focus on ensuring that you will be the deepest, most liquid source of these things. And no matter who builds the front hand, they have to use your liquidity. So I think that is our vision. And the other thing about the front end thing is, let me just look at the explosion of AI agents. Coinbase, Robin Hood and seeing every major stock exchange is going to start getting into digital assets. They're all going to be competing to be the front end of this ecosystem, but you also have crazy new emergent things like natural language AI interfaces that might disrupt all of these.

So why go compete over there? Why not just let them fight it out and ensure that whenever they are doing a swap, if they want to deliver to their customers the best execution, they're going to have to use our rails. So yeah, that is 100% our focus. We know what. win if we always have the deepest liquidity in the active tick. So we should invest all of our R&D, our effort, our economics aligned around that. Let's not go waste a bunch of time and money trying to be a better front end than some amazing front ends. From that perspective, do you look at anyone who can quickly catalyze large-scale liquidity as potential competition? Is that what keeps you up at night? Or do you look at players of that?

regard, who might be, again, large asset managers, large bank type institutions, are they just in a different neck of the woods? If somebody were to genuinely want to compete with us for this liquidity advantage, the interesting thing about the Dex trial on that is just that it's fixed. And because we reward our LPs with our token, and because we generate all this revenue, and we send all of it out to the token as incentives, you can't offer them more than 100% of the productive value of the decks. There's no greater value problem. You can offer liquidity providers than 100% of the productive value, and not just today, but in the future. So we do certainly

think about it a lot, and we do think about other ways in which we can send even more value back to that token as incentives so that the rewards for, again, that active tick liquidity are even higher, but fundamentally, because we went all the way out in this fixed conditions, there is nothing anybody could do that would be giving people more than 100% of the value. So you'd have to do something basically like us, and then somebody would have to look at it and say, well, why is this other person delivery 100% of the productive value back going to beat the network effects of the other team that's doing this already has the liquidity as people building on it, and all this stuff. So that's what gives us comfort is we took a big risk, I think,

betting that way. We didn't raise any money. We didn't sell any tokens. We didn't even give team liquid vesting allocations of our tokens. We just bet on the token is useful and we will bet our lives on the token being useful. And that bet's paid off. But there's really nothing in the Dex Trilemma that you can do that is more than giving 100% of the current and future capitalized value. you're giving anyone who contributes, regardless of who they are, the best value proposition inherently. And that's what we reward our liquidity providers with is the token that represents that. To close out, I wanted to ask you, what keeps you up at night operating in the spaces you do in the industry? I think for a long time, especially for me coming into the industry when I did and Belladrome launching in 2022,

the biggest thing that kept us up at night was just the legal and regulatory overhead. Don't get me wrong. I think that there is just a ton of nasty shit in this industry. And I think we need rules. And I think we need people enforcing those rules. And I am hopeful that we'll see real sensible legislation that doesn't treat this industry as the same as a million other industries that have come before that treats it as a new emergent technology. But the scariest part of building was that we did everything right, or at least as insofar. as we could determine what was right, what was legal. You could ask 100 lawyers the same question, and they say, well, we think you should do this, but we don't know if an oversellous regulator is going to show up tomorrow and say, based on the 1910, whatever act, we actually think this thing is not legal and we're going to ruin your life. So the biggest thing that's

kept me up at night has definitely diminished a lot post-election. And that, I think, is a very good thing. I think the other things that keep me up, right now it's macro just because, hey, guys, we can believe in the vision of the space. We can believe that we're inevitable, but unfortunately, we're still furthest out on the risk curve. And if every major asset class is going to get the shit kicked out of it, we're going to feel that even more. But other than those two things, I think just the vision of, hey, what this technology allows us to do is to build, institutional level, products and services, free of intermediaries. It allows us to do that in a way that creates all the surplus value that can be returned to the commons.

In the end, the history of technology is that the best product wins. I have no fear that this industry, the technology, the things that we were building will win. It's just all of the roller coaster of that journey to that mass adoption place. That's probably a bit painful. Lots to be excited about, but to your point, we are still tethered to the platform risk of humanity. Yes, unfortunately. Well, Alex, thank you for joining. Really enjoyed our conversation.

I hope to have you back sometime soon. Likewise. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On the Brink-Bronk-podcast.com or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening.