On The Brink with Castle Island - Ben Ward & Steven Pack (RockSolid) on DeFi Vaults (EP.671)

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

Wyatt sits down with Ben Ward and Steven Pack of RockSolid. In this episode: What are DeFi vaults? What is RockSolid? Lido vs Rocket Pool Creating effective unified efforts in decentralized communities A look at the wider landscape of DeFi yield How do you measure protocol success? Strengthening the broader Ethereum ecosystem

Today, I sat down with Ben Ward and Steve Pack, founders of Rock Solid Protocol. Rock Solid is a defy application that enables users to deposit into vaults and earn yield on assets, with the target focus on Rocket Pool's RE than other Ethereum ecosystem assets. Castle Island is an investor in Rock Solid, and it was a pleasure to discuss what lies ahead for the protocol with Ben and Steve. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them were the guests on this. podcasts are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures.

Guest and host 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 inducement 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 general 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 into 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. Bitcoin. Ben and Steve, pleasure to have you guys on our first time doing the podcast together. So I appreciate you joining.

Tars you to be here. Awesome to be here. I want to kick off. Congratulations, you guys raised $3 million, announced it recently. We laden and excited to partner with you guys. Can you speak to what is Rock Solid and why does it exist? What's the origin? Rock Solid is a single click experienced to access the best to defy and earn rewards on your

crypto assets. The most common way this is referred to is the Liquid Vault, so a Liquid Vault platform. And yeah, we're launching now and with the Rocket Pool Protocol. So we're the official liquid vault for Rockapool. Yeah, that's really the origin story, actually. To understand sort of where Rock Solid volts came from is really Rockapool. So I was a Rockapool node operator. For those who don't know, Rockapult's a decentralized liquid staking protocol.

So people stake ETH and they get a token in return and then node operators come along. They contribute to meath, and they run the validators for Ethereum. And I'm an Ethereum, I don't know if I'd say Maxi, but definitely a, Supporter. A supporter, yeah, strong supporter. One of the really crucial things is that Ethereum's this credibly neutral decentralized L1. And the only way that happens is when you have a distribution of stake. So you know that like a single part of your entity can't rewrite history.

And Rockabtall is a huge part of that. And that's part of what got me into it. Also, it's better economics as a node operator. And so, you know, I was part of this community. And by the way, go join the Rockapult Discord. it's insanity in a good way. And so, yeah, I was running a node for Rockapult. And I really got the feeling that, like,

Rocket Pool was for a while there, losing against Lido. And, you know, if you might remember a few years ago, Lido was getting up to this 33% of stake, and that was a big deal. And so I kind of started to look at what would be better, like, how should we compete against Lido? And, you know, I was really at the time focused on APR. Like, that was one difference.

There was a slightly lower APR. And that's when I got talking about this. So we were working together. and, you know, we really just started to dig in, like, what drives the LST market. And what we actually found was it wasn't so much the APR. It was actually more about the utility of LSTs in DFI. Because the core of a lot of DFI out there is really the base return is almost the staking rewards on Ethereum.

And so that's where it starts. And, you know, then it's composed and built upon and leverage and whatever else. But that's where it starts. And so that's where Ben and I started to really understand. that actually it's the defy integration and the utility of an LST that drives it. And so we started to explore that space much more. And that led us to look at things like Eith and Eithify and look at what Lido did. And what we realized is that that's what Rockapool was missing. It didn't have that sort of like the level of integration or these sort of single click experience or it's like, I'm an REA holder.

What can I do with this? Like where can I put this to earn better returns? And just to make it super clear, like literally you could watch every day on the Rockpool Discord, someone come in and say, I just learned about the project. I love it. I love what you guys are doing. What can I do with this in Defi? And our answer as a community was, oh, there's this spreadsheet called RPL Defi, like, go take a look. So it was kind of like, okay, we can do better. We can do better than that. That's where this journey started. Yeah, I think for people listening who might be familiar, might be less familiar with some of these defy markets, it's like a pretty compelling offering because what you can essentially do with these LSTR liquid staking token assets is you can

own an Ethereum liquid staking token which earns a native yield of a few percent, and then you can borrow, let's say, USDC off of it, and so you maintain the underlying eth exposure, you're earning yield on your eth, which almost offsets your borrow rate for the USDC, so it's very attractive, naturally. I'm curious how you guys see the landscape of offerings for, let's say, Lido, what were you able to do with Lido tokens? Is that that instance I just mentioned and what is most important to people who are these liquid-staking token holders or to yield token holders in general? Yeah, I think the most important thing is, as Steve said, it's about integrations. It's about what you can do with the token. And as you just said, why, like the whole value prop

there is having this thing that you can then go and take and do other stuff with in other places. And if you can't do that other stuff in other places, then that LST product kind of isn't serving its core use case. And so really having that asset being integrated in lots of places, different defy protocols that you can use it on, borrow land, leverage, all this sort of stuff. I guess a new kind of wave of these cases that emerged about 12 months ago or 18 months ago with these like points campaigns and liquidity and incentive farming. And so it's, oh, new like hyped L1 is launching. or new Hyped DL2 is launching.

You know, they offer these points and incentives to deposit assets to see liquidity in their ecosystem. As an LST holder, you want the LSC that you're holding being incentivized in that ecosystem. And what we saw was that often it was kind of Lido's state teeth and maybe etherifies Eeth and naked Eath, wrapped ETH. And that was kind of it that was being accepted in these campaigns because they were the biggest and they were doing the best BD, frankly. And so what we wanted to see was we love the Rock of a couple. community. We think Areth is a great asset. It's the most credibly neutral. It's the most decentralized

of all the LSTs. And so we wanted to see Arreth kind of participating in that party, if that makes sense. You touched on a little bit, but I was curious why, in your view, Lido was the one that got this head start when it came to integrations and when it came to having these markets exist elsewhere. Interestingly, I think it's a cultural thing. Having been in Rockapool for a while, it is a group of very motivated, very smart, very like Ethereum-aligned people that actually came together and formed this Dow and operated like one of the very few DAOs that actually operates like a DAO. Things are voted on according to whether you are staking the token. And there is a lot of focus and energy on the technology, on the decentralization, on supporting Ethereum. I don't think the core team would mind saying this.

like there's not the same energy on the core team or the doubt. It just wasn't the culture of the community. And that's what makes it actually very strong in some ways because you know that that's what the focus is. It's being a decentralized LST. But ultimately, I think we've learned as a community that this defy layer is critical, right? Like your asset needs to be integrated everywhere. And for that, you need some BD. So, yeah, concentrating, pooling your assets in a place where you can enable a team like ours and our partners to go and strike deals and improve integration, you know, that's what's needed. So I think it was just a focus thing, a culture and a focus early on, but nothing that can't actually quickly be rectified. Maybe the other thing I'd add to that is

Rockapool is one of these OG projects, as Steve said, that really does live and breed decentralization and lives the values that we're all supposed to care about. But also as a result of that, like, And because they're an old, a vintage of project, they kind of emerged before this, like, absolute mega raise, like money bazooka style VC funded sort of project started in that kind of later vintage.

And so what that means is, and I think of a project like Etherfire, for example, and I think Etherfire are great. They're doing great work, but they have a money bazooka that they can spray around and sort of provide incentives to get their asset integrated.

Rockapool doesn't have that because it's just sort of fundamentally a different model. So, yeah, I think that really does make a difference when it comes to integrations. So you have this almost $3 billion pool of not heavily utilized underlying theorem. It's Aries. But how do you guys interact or exist in the context of that community? To your point, Steve, how do you insert yourselves? Do you become like an external BD arm or what's your role in your view?

That's a really interesting one. There's no like official thing, right? like that's one of the beauties of crypto. Like, we can't force people to deposit their R-Earth into their vault, but we can show a future that's possible. We're kind of known in the community anyway, just as being nerd operators, like, I've been part of just personally a bunch of tokenomics discussions

have met a lot of the community in person at events, et cetera. So it helps, that helps, right? But yeah, they're kind of like, we're there as not official in terms of the protocol. There's nothing in the protocol that makes our vault special. But yeah, we do have the endorsement of the core team that like this is the vault for R-Eath. We have the pitch, right? And the pitch is that you can deposit your R-Eath here. And we in partnership with our partners, we have two great cardals, by the way,

Lagoon finance for our smart contract architecture and Trulipa Capital as our asset manager, also known as curator. We together can take this RETH and both deploy it in the best risk-optimized way. that exists today. So looking at what exists on main net, on L2s today, for these things we talked about, borrow land opportunities, incentive campaigns, you know, could be liquidity provisioning, leverage looping, and doing that in a way that's responsive to funding rates to like as incentives move that, you know, we move with the market. So there's the sort of pitch of like how we can deploy assets today, but also that if you value what we're talking about of seeing REs better integrated to make it stronger, put your R-Eth here as a way to support the ecosystem because we're

going to be out there, we already are out there, negotiating to have REs integrated. Like, you want R-Eath? New chain, new protocol? Like, yeah, create a full for it, create incentives for it. And here it is. It's really just messaging, you know, the community that we think this is the best place to put your R-Ease. Yeah, no, I like the messaging.

It's interesting that you guys have spent this time with the community, you've got to know people a little bit. I think in terms of traditional finance, if you have a pension fund, you have a general idea of where the capital comes from. You could say the same thing about an endowment. You've, again, $3 billion of REath. Like, who are these people? Where is it coming from? How would you characterize them? It's a funny question because again, due to the sort of truly decentralized nature of the sort of rockapult community in the RIC community, it's not actually easy to answer that question. I mean, you know, you can do on chain analytics and you can see what wallet addresses the Athe is sitting in. And there's, you know, bunch of exchanges, a bunch of defy protocols, but there's also a lot of undoxed wallets, probably liquid funds, probably early Ethereum people, but it's not clear like how to, you know, with other assets it's possible to pick up the phone and talk to the LidoCorp team and say, hey, okay, put us in touch with, you know, the top 20 state deep holders. It's kind of not

possible with Rocket Pool because it is this anonymous, decentralized community, which is cool, cool for all the reasons that we said because it is actually living the values that we're all supposed to believe in. It makes the sort of BD and go-to-market challenge a little bit harder, but that's why we're trying to sort of demonstrate to the community and to the protocol. Like this is the value that we're bringing to Areth. And so we just need to win those customers, so to speak, organically by having a good product, which is kind of what a business should be. Instead of a lot of the shenanigans that you see in crypto around, you know, incentives

and private TVL deals and stuff like that, like we're just putting a product out to the market. and engaging the community. And I mean, I think having the endorsement of the core team helps with that, having the distribution. You know, one thing I guess we haven't explicitly mentioned yet is that we're integrated into the rocket pool front end. We're integrated into the rockerpool staking flow. So there'll be opportunities for organic customer acquisition that way.

So, yeah, they're kind of the go-to-market pillars we're leaning on. It's actually terrifying as a product guy, right? Like, first-time founder, it's like build it and they will come. Second-time founder, it's like, what is the exact problem for the exact, the exact customer I'm going to solve and solve that. You ask me what our ideal customer profile is. They're like, they're there, right? There's $3 billion over there.

And we do, we have some insights. But just a big, funny anecdote, like there was a time when Arreth was at risk of being delisted, I think it was as collateral for Dye, so like being delisted from Maker. And someone just posted this in one of the many channels on the Rockapult Discord. And like, it was 20 million, Arreth was minted like five minutes later. So it's like, it's out there. To your point, it wouldn't exist if that wasn't the ethos, right? Like, that's what's attracted this community.

It's like a vibrant discord or subreddit, except in terms of capital and people have been attracted to it because they eat those. Yeah. I think there's a bunch of Ethereum OGs in there as well. You know, people like ICO, you value the values there. And are those people, or say the community in general, are they supportive of what you guys are doing? So far, yes.

I don't doubt there will be a few folks in the community who will point out, oh, hold on, there are some centralized aspects to this. Like when there's a new strategy proposed, for example, like should the vault deploy to Ari's? Like, that's not something that's Dow driven, right? That's something that's, you know, driven internally. There'll be folks who's like, no, I only do full decentralization maxi. And that's great, but that's, I think, you know, the minority. For most people they can see, like Ari is the absolute decentralized course.

core, like to remain strong, it needs this defy layer, and actually that defy fire layer is more efficiently run with some tradeoffs. Like, still a smart contract, you can look at the code, you can see the fees are transparent, the wallet addresses are transparent, you can see how everything is deployed, but there are some centralization aspects in terms of the strategy. And changing gears a little bit, let's talk about the vaults and the vaults you guys have, and maybe vaults more generally. I guess to start the term, gets thrown a lot. It's one of those ones in Defi that it feels like it can almost describe many things because of how frequently you guys use it or not you guys, people use it. So in your guys

words, what is a vault in the context of what you guys are doing? And what does your strategy offer? What does it do? I would say like just from first principles basis, a vault. And I agree with you actually, why, but people use the term vault in a variety of different ways. And it means different things to different people. But what it means to us simply is a smart contract that wraps around strategies. The vault handles accounting, NAV calculation, and asset deployment, but it's a way to abstract away defy complexity.

It provides a single-click experience for users to deposit an asset, and then the vault architecture can deploy that into any arbitrary number of sort of underlying defy strategies. Now, what that means from like a user perspective is that I as a user don't need to go around hunting for opportunities to deploy my asset in Defi, I don't need to be managing my positions, monitoring my positions, monitoring funding rates, all this sort of stuff, checking that exploits aren't occurring. I'm deferring that to the vault and the operators of the vault, and I'm, as a result,

sort of passively earning a return on my assets that I've deployed. And I think why this is an important primitive is because if we believe this future that DeFi is supposedly building towards, which is the financial plumbing for the whole world and replacing the existing Tradfire ecosystem, there has to be simplicity and there has to be a better user experience. Like right now, defy is hard, defy is complex,

there's exploits all the time. As at the time we're recording, there was this package manager exploit not that long ago. And like, if you're not on crypto Twitter 24-7, if you're not technical, if you don't know what you're signing, it's very possible for you to lose all your money

and either you lose your money and never come back or you become very disgruntled. And so, yeah, to reach normies and to be the plumbing of the global financial system, all this complexity and risk has to be abstracted away. And vaults are a really interesting architecture of wrapping a smart contract around that and just providing a really simple, single-click user experience to people. Well, I think it's a very powerful thing because anyone can really create a vault strategy, obviously so long as they take on security hygiene, social norms,

and do so in a responsible way and anyone can deposit versus I've always thought one of the tragedies of our financial system is inherently the best investment products are not accessible to the wide mass of people. You can't get into the best venture funds. You can't get into the best hedge funds. You see assets offered to you by brokerages and different places where you can trade via an exchange model. But it's a beautiful thing that permissionless fault or permissionless strategy that anyone has access to. too. And actually it's a good point. I mean, the thing I'd add to that as well is, and actually I just talk about this at East Denver earlier in the year, is that, you know, one thing I learned up to being a founder in Defi, and maybe this reflects on my naivity before, but like, once I was on the inside, you realize that so much of this TVL and so much of this BD is just kind of backroom deals, right?

As a sort of naive user, an optimistic user, perhaps you could say, logging on and seeing, oh, wow, there's a billion dollars of TVL in this protocol. Like, oh, wow, it's with like a ton of people using it. If you broke that down under like who owns that TVL, it's maybe like 10 liquid funds that are being paid to be there and there's 50 million of retail deposits in there. And so, you know, I call this like the sort of dirty secret of defies that a lot of this is not decentralized. It's all kind of mercenary capital. But why I bring that up is on this like access point that you just talked about wide is that again, as a naive retail user, like you're not getting access to these deals that these liquid funds and whales essentially

getting paid and bribe to be in these protocols. We're trying to democratise that. And by having this pool of capital in our vault, as Steve said, we're doing these BD deals and negotiating with new chains and things like that and saying, hey, if you want this, we've got 50 million of RETH TVL, for example. It's like collective bargaining. Yeah, exactly. There's kind of two parts to that. Like, that part I love, actually, because like when you first kind of feel back to curtain and you realize what's happening, it's like, oh, that's not the way this was meant to be. So, you know, we love being able to bring, especially to the Rockapoo community, like access to those incentives. Also, you know, you said, well, like, oh, it's kind of cool in crypto that people, there's less

gatekeeping, right? But there's also risk, to say with that. So, you know, one product I like, defy saver, has access to a bunch of just defy strategies that are out there. Even there, right, I'm just looking through at some of the strategies we'll launch with. One thing we do is leverage looping on R6. And so that's one thing that, like, is great for a protocol. For those who don't know, like you deposit R-Eath on AVE, borrow some ETH, you can mince some more over that, deposit that. And as long as the borrow weight is less than what you're getting from the LST, you make a bit of money. So if you leverage it, you make more. Now, those rates can change, right? And it can go negative. And that happened recently. And so if you're not, like, monitoring that,

you start losing money. And then your positions can also start getting liquidated. So it's great that in crypto, you can do that, we think, like the people who have access to crypto and want to do it. like it's very easy just to lose your money that way. And that's just one strategy, right? And it goes for all of them, like, LPNWP into a uniswap pool. Like, there's impermanent loss, like we're just directionally the thing moved against you. Like, you might be earning fees, but you lost your capital. So these things are accessible, but if you really want to fully embrace defy, you kind of have to become a, like a mini hedge fund, you know, with your monitoring and risk allocation and all that stuff. And again, that's part of what you try to bring to a liquid vault.

It's like the systems happen on the back end. We have professional partners that help us. So you, you deposit, you just get it. You just get the benefit. But you don't have to have all the operational overhead. Do you think over time most or a lot of the capital in Defy in crypto gravitates towards these vault strategies versus individual yield seeking for these reasons that you guys highlight? I do.

I think that's why vaults have kind of had their moment. I even just saw one recently. I just like one minor example. It was a tokenized leverage looping strategy. And it was like, click a button and you can do leverage looping. And then it just has a big red boxes, but you need to go and monitor funding rates every day on Arveh. And if they go negative, then you should like unwind.

Come back here and unwind really quickly or break. And it's like, that is not the user experience that anybody is looking for. So like in terms of simplicity, absolutely. in terms of being able to cool capital and use that, like you said, for collective bargaining, absolutely. It's just kind of a nice packaging almost of both user experience and underlying technology. Actually, Ben, is it worth talking about the DATS thing here as well? I was just about to say that, actually, you read my mind, is that, yeah, why you said, like, is the majority of TVL going to be in these products? I mean, I think even a question that's

like above that one, a first order question is like, where is the TVL going to come from? And I think what we're seeing right now is this flow, this flood of institutional capital coming on chain. And, you know, right now in this moment, that's being driven by DATs, these digital asset treasury companies. I've never heard of those. What are they? That's a whole other topic in rabbit hole that maybe we don't want to go down. But they are driving a lot of TVL on chain right now. And the next wave of capital, if they live up to their promise, is stable coins. Put all this together and it's trillions and trillions of dollars of capital.

But if we talk about like DAT specifically, all this kind of institutional capital specifically, these institutions aren't going to be on chain like, yeah, monitoring all these positions, and they've got, you know, risk appetites. They've got, you know, levels of technical competence. And frankly, for DAT specifically, you know, publicly listed companies, they've got reporting requirements, accounting standards to comply with blah, blah, blah, blah. So actually, Volts, I think, a really well placed to serve these institutional-style customers because they're fully bespoke, fully customizable. Strategies can be tailored depending on the risk capital of the fund. You can wrap like legal wrappers and accounting structures around them to satisfy any like reporting and

regulatory requirements. So yeah, I think the majority of TVL on chain will be in these vaults, but I think actually it'll be driven by the weight of capital that's coming from institutions because this product is so well suited for them. I find it's so funny that you get these debts or digital asset Treasury companies that have their assets, it's supplying TVL to Defi and Defi VALs now, because I feel like for so long you've heard the argument of, oh, smart contracts are risky, vaults are risky, so users shouldn't directly interact. Alternatively, what you clearly need to do is invest in a biotech equity wrapper phantom stock so that the underlying ETH can then be deposited into these strategies.

Indeed, why? preaching to the converter. It's a remarkable timeline. Yeah, exactly. So you have those participants. So can anyone deposit into these vaults or who can use them? Yeah, anyone can deposit. Anyone can interact directly with the smart contract. But using our front end, we block sanctioned jurisdictions and it's not available to residents in the UK, US, Singapore and Australia. But outside of that, any user can deposit assets into the vault, like be those institutions, retail, it's an accessible product. And how does the rock solid protocol or any other

vault provider make money in these arrangements? Yeah, the vault business role is really simple. There's a service fee in TradFi, that would be like an AUM fee. So for the R8th vault, it's 1%. And there's a 10% fee on performance. One of the nice things, just using smart contracts for these things, you can encode the rules, right?

And people can see the rules. And so one of the nice things with the performance fee is it's only earned on the way up. and it's kind of like recorded at a high watermark. So if the vault loses value for any reason and then catches back up, there's no fee there. It's just on net new performance. So yeah, 1% service fee, 10% performance fee.

Broadly, as you guys are building the protocol, how do you measure success or what are you looking for? Yeah, I gotta say for me as a leader, like TVL is just a beautiful metric. It's something we can rally all the teams around to clear one for BD folks who are helping us get new. protocols on board to launch their own volts. It's good too for like product, right, engineering to be focused on like what is the things we're doing to drive TVL. Number go up. Number go up, right? And it's just directly like it means that we're building the products that people want. So very

much TVL. But I think like you can be blinded with, you know, think about like what is driving the TVL. Like why is this good? And to take the Ari's example, you know, we were talking about how many new incentives did we negotiate on behalf of the rocket pool protocol, right? Like how many new integrations happened because there was concentrated pool of liquidity in this vault? Those are things that we're already tracking, you know, that feed, that TVL number. But I think like that's how we know that we're helping our customers be, you know, when I say our customers like the protocol, right, be successful by helping their token holders be successful. Where do you guys see opportunity moving forward and with that in mind, where do you hope to be in the help for the protocol to be

in a few years' time? I mean, our immediate plan and our immediate objective is to build a similar product for other protocols. So, you know, we're launching with Rocket Pool. Once this podcast is published, we'll be live. And yeah, we'll see how well that product is going. And, you know, we're expecting it to be embraced by the Rockapool community. And at that point, we'll have a proof point that we can point to and say, look at how we were able to build this product, which helped the Rockapool community, generated rewards for their users. And from the perspective of Rocketpool, there was no lift required. Like the Rock Solid team was able to kind of do all the work and integrate this thing for them.

So, yeah, it's building this product for other protocols out there and sort of helping them and helping their asset holders. And then the other kind of, I guess, leg of this is that institutional customer base that we sort of talked about earlier. As I said, like, I think Voltz are really well played. place to serve this wave of institutional capital that's coming online. And the key to winning that customer base, I think, is three things. One, there has to be some lindiness and some proof points in the market already, which we now have with Rockapool. There has to be, I think, a really high touch sort of integration and support model and a really custom-tailored set of strategies and architectures, policies, rules, controls that suit that type of customer base. And a

the third thing there has to be qualified custodian integration because a lot of these types of customers, you know, they need to keep their assets in QCs because of, you know, their sort of corporate governance reasons. And so having something that like natively plugs into that will be able to serve those customer needs. And so yeah, I think like going after that institutional customer base, that's where the wave of capital, I think, is going to come from in defy. We're sort of actively pursuing that now as well. Yeah, I think serving more protocols, anywhere there's a stable coin balance, anywhere there's a ERC20 balance, anywhere that DATs are holding assets that could be better served, like we want to be there, be that

in wallets, custodians, exchanges, etc. I think like when I look a bit further forward and even like, you know, we've talked about how Rockapool got started as an OG Ethereum project, one thing that's happened recently, I think you said while like the timeline, right, like we've gone from an actively hostile administration in the US, for example, to the Treasury Secretary talking about. out that stable coins are a great way to kind of sell US treasuries to the world, right? Like, the world is very different now. And, you know, stable coins have done a great job of helping people in, for example, hyperinflating currency economies to protect the savings. And that's just

like this beautiful example of permissionless systems and how people can really benefit from this. And for the longest time, people have been quite happy to earn zero percent on those balances because the bigger problem they're dealing with is inflation, right? And I think as the industry grows and as things like vaults and rock solid vaults become integrated everywhere, I don't think people need to accept zero percent interest or like half of the underlying, you know, treasury bill interest. Like I think we'll start to see more and more that rock solid vaults, for example, are just there wherever you are, where your balances are held and you can just opt in to start earning additional rewards. Yeah, I'd love to see that everywhere.

Yeah, I think that the end state is volts power everything, defy powers everything, and volts abstract away that defy, and just become this plumbing that is everywhere. And so, yeah, we're looking forward to that future. I mean, they're not that different structurally from like an ETF or some kind of index product, right? Yeah, at some level, like those products do abstract complexity and give a single interface.

Yeah, so there's definitely a good comparison there. Well, guys, thanks for coming on and chatting. I congratulations on all the progress. I'm excited for what's ahead. Yeah, now it's exciting times. Appreciate you being bored, Wyatt, and having us on today. Go deposit. Yeah, cool.

Have a good one. 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 dashpodcast.com or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening.