On The Brink with Castle Island - Brandon Arvanaghi and Bryce Crawford (Meow) on Bringing DeFi yields to Institutions (EP.291)

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

Meow CEO Brandon Arvanaghi and CTO Bryce Crawford join the show to cover crypto yields and how they make them accessible to corporate treasuries. In this episode:  The origins of the name Bryce and Brandon's backgrounds The purpose of getting access to crypto yields while staying in dollars How Meow manages risks in DeFi protocols Are crypto yields fundamentally mispriced? Where crypto yields ultimately come from? The risk free rate of crypto yields The relationship between fragmented exchange environments and the cost of capital in crypto Why smart contract risk differs between chains and its effect on yields Why yields compressing will be a sign of the institutionalization of crypto The emergence of undercollateralized lending on DeFi, and which protocols the Meow leadership is most excited about Do DeFi yields face the risk from declining subsidies from token issuance Why institutional tooling is still lacking in DeFi The emergence of the crypto scene in Miami Projections for the future of DeFi Visions for the future of Meow Sponsor notes:  Compass Mining is the world's first and largest online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware, hosting, and ASIC reselling. Start mining your own bitcoin by visiting compassmining.io

Hello and welcome back to On the Brink. I'm Nick Carter. This episode is brought to you by Compass Mining. More on them later in the episode. Today we sit down with Brandon R. Vanagi and Bryce Crawford of Meow. Meow is a company that allows corporate treasuries to get access to crypto yields while staying in dollars and not making any on-chain transactions. Full disclosure, we're investors. Now today we talk about where crypto yields actually come from, whether they're sort of correctly priced or not. and what the future may offer in terms of yield compression and what that will mean for the rest of the industry. We also cover the rise of under collateralized lending on defy, and whether defy yields face a critical risk from declining subsidies related to token issuance. Lots covered in here. Let's dive right into it.

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So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Hello and welcome back to On the Brink. I'm sitting here in person with Brandon R. Vernaghi and Bryce. Crawford, the founders of Meow, a Miami business. Shout out Miami. We're backers, full disclosure. Very proud to be supporting these two. How would you describe it? Crypto yield for corporate treasuries business. Is that the short form? That's right, Nick. That's right. So welcome, welcome to the both of you. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much. Thanks, Nick.

So we only have one mic for the guests. So they're going to have to share it. This is a little unusual. Sorry about that. Faces are really close to each other. Yeah. They're both of you fellows are wearing your meow t-shirts, which is great. It's correct.

You're rocking a lot of school spirit. I think I have about 15 of those. Do you need more? I've been handing them out. Who? You know, meow enthusiasts. So actually, we'll start with the name because I remember raising an eyebrow when we first met. And actually in the context, meow, about the name.

So where did the name come from anyway? Yeah. So we don't think the future of this space belongs to the companies named Treasure Block or Block yield. If you name yourself that, pigeonhole yourself. The space is so high entropy that no one knows where it's going to be in a month-to-month basis. So picking a very pointed name like that is not appealing.

You need a name that's happy. It can be anything it needs to be. And Meow, it literally is just a, dopamine releasing name that could be anything it needs to be. Fair enough. So let's talk about your both of you've had some interesting career journeys. So Brandon, maybe we start with you. Tell us a little about your journey in the cryptos space and sort of how it led you to this moment. Yeah, sure. So I was speaking at a security conference back in 2017. I met the Winklewoss twins there. They told me about Gemini. I joined as a very early security engineer. When I was there, I helped write the Gemini

dollar smart contracts and some other very talented engineers. I worked on custody. It went on to become chief security officer of a Bitcoin mining company and started meow back in April of last year with Bryce seeing the insane demand for yield and no one had addressed it for the corporate markets. Yep. I started out at Capital One working on machine learning models for marketing software and like many others became Crypto Curious in 2017. And I was lucky enough to join Brandon at Gemini in 2018 where I worked on the exchange software and the wallet infrastructure. From there, I did a brief stint at Facebook working on Instagram shops and got back into crypto by joining me out with Brandon in February, April. So what convinced you to move back

into the crypto space after your stint at Facebook? Yeah. So I think in 2020, there was a lot of like really exciting developments in crypto. DFI started to get product market fit with the launch of field farming with compound. DM seemed really promising at the time. And I was starting to learn more about that by being inside at Facebook. And, you know, NFTs and a lot of the other developments in the space were really exciting. So it just felt like the right time to make the jump back into the space, you know, based on, on talking to Brandon about some of these opportunities. So tell me about me out. Tell me about what the product is and then who you're specifically be targeting. Yeah, so we're providing corporates with access to defy yields. Defy is a major source

of yield opportunity right now when savings accounts are giving you 0.2%, 0.1%, and nobody wants to manage their own wallet, least of all corporates. What they want is a cash-based way to access the benefits of crypto without having to deal with the crypto, and specifically yields. So we allow corporates deposit via ACH or wire and self-select the D-Fi protocol they want, ranging from 4% to 8% to 12% potential yields. Now, interest compounds daily, they withdraw in dollars again, and they don't have to get their hands dirty with a nonsense of a wallet. That's the product right now, and we have much, much bigger plans, but we're seeing a lot of demand right now, which is great. So it's a cash business ultimately. Your clients can stay fully in dollars.

and not have to deal with that in crypto stuff. Yeah, we do the conversion on the back end. To them, it's all abstracted. They pick what they want. And we outline the risks very clearly of each protocol, whether it's insurance wrapped, whether it's over collateralized, whether, you know, what's going on there?

And they, ACH are wired to us. We handle the conversion to USDC or GUSC or the stable coin. We handle putting it into the protocol. We handle withdrawing it from the protocol. We handle whitel whitel listing. We handle custody. We handle, you know, everything along the way, compliance, et cetera.

for them it's as easy as a bank transfer so on your website you know there's a lot of mentions of compliance so how do you protect your clients i mean you know there's a lot of risk in the defy space i mean just today there is some sort of enormous hack impenetrable hard to understand on salana nothing to do with uh with yields but uh you know it's it's a it's a tough industry how do you gate the product such that nothing bad happens so I think there's very reputable institutional borrowers in the space and there's also more blue chip defy protocols and there's also innovative things you can do with like insurance wrapping now I know that's kind of in its infancy but the short answer is there are riskier defy protocols and there are blue chip ones that we're more

comfortable with and we our job is to vet out you know the bad ones not even present them and of the ones that are considered blue chip or different risk profiles and institutional borrowers outline the risks very, very clearly to our customers. So they can make an informed decision about which protocol they'd like to participate in. At the end of the day, we think these yields are just fundamentally mispriced compared to the legacy finance alternatives. So if you're earning 4% from an institutional borrow in the crypto space, on your cash, in legacy finance, that 4% would be a corporate junk bond, some nonsense like that.

And that is a totally night and day different risk profile. So we're providing access to these markets in a clean, dollar-based way for institutions. They have not gotten involved in these markets because it's way too complex historically. You need to own your own wallet, just things no one wants to deal with. We're the first company, I think, to tailor to the institutions for defy. So when you decompose defy yields, and maybe it would be interesting to talk about a specific protocol, I think there's a lot of skepticism from non-crypto folks about the presence of the yield, because stable coins, for instance, will pay, you know, significant rates,

even though, you know, you might imagine that they're ultimately dollars, so that could be arbitraged away, but stable coins will still have a structurally higher yield than regular old fiat dollars. So what's your best explanation for where? the actual yield derives from in the defy space. Yeah. So I think every yield in the crypto market is kind of interconnected, right? You have to think of this as like there's going to be some base rate or some base yield

driving the entire market. And for the most part, that's the basis between a price of a futures contract in Bitcoin and the spot price of Bitcoin. So commonly Bitcoin futures trade at a premium. So you might have $30,000 Bitcoin. but the futures contract three months out trades at $33,000. And so what arbitrage, you know, market makers will do is sell the future and buy the Bitcoin. And then when the contract expires, net that $3,000 difference.

And so you can think of this as kind of like the risk-free rate within crypto yields. And that bleeds into every other yield opportunity. So when someone's pricing out, like lending out their stable coin on a defy protocol, they're pricing that against what they could get by running this arbitrage. arbitrage in the futures market. And because there's so much demand to use leverage in Bitcoin, because there's so much fragmentation between liquidity, there's like hundreds of Bitcoin exchanges. So this creates a dynamic where there's not a lot of capital efficiency.

There's a lot of demand for leverage. And so there's this need for dollars in the space that just isn't getting underwritten by traditional banks and institutions. That's why the yields are so attractive and so high compared to traditional finance. Would you say that there's a lack, because there's a lack of prime brokers and there's no clearing houses in crypto, you have to collateralize your position on many exchanges. So that's a big part of the reason. Yeah, not only that, like one of the biggest futures markets is the CME, which is cash settled. So you're trying to trade Bitcoin with cash as collateral. And the asset itself is Bitcoin. That's very different than lumber futures. where they actually settle in lumber itself or grain. And so this creates an inefficiency where, hey, if I want to actually like sell these things

and hold these futures, then I'm going to need some extra juice to make it worth it as a market maker. And so you just have a lot of inefficiencies in this market. Like you said, lack of prime brokerages, lack of centralized clearinghouses that make the people actually running the markets demand higher spreads to make it worth their time. When you look at specific D5 protocols and you decompose the yields, how do you think of the risk premium? I mean, if something like AVE is paying you 6%, how do you decompose that into the constituent parts, you know, partly smart contract risk, partly the actual maybe counterparty risk, you know,

how do you think about that? Yeah, I think smart contract risk is pretty huge. There's a reason we see yields a lot lower on Ethereum than other emergent chains like Avalanche or Polygon or Solana. And that's because the smart contracts that have been running on Ethereum have been running there a lot longer with a proven track record of not being exploited than contracts on other chains. Not only that, you also have to consider the amount of time it takes to get your money back. We talked about this liquidity fragmentation. It's really important for market makers and institutional traders to be able to move their money. quickly. And so if you're on another chain and, you know, every exchange accepts USDC on the

Ethereum chain, but hey, they don't accept it on Salana. They don't accept it on Polygon. You have to build in that time to bridge the money back and get it to where it needs to go. And that's going to convey higher premium, you know, for someone to take on the risk of not being able to move liquidity in a timely manner. So when you guys think about the yield space in crypto, do you see it as sort of a temporary aberration that the yields are sort of high for now and as more capital gets comfortable with the space, more traditional institutions are able to lend that would kind of drive down yields? Or is there something specific to the industry that will keep them elevated on a structural basis? I think it's both. I think they will continue to be elevated on structural basis.

I think that level will probably compress over time as the markets get more mature and more people get comfortable with the space. But we have to remember that crypto is not a very liquid market. If you want to sell a lot of Bitcoin or sell a lot of ETH, that's really difficult to do. And the way most yields work or like the way most lending works in the spaces, people collateralize their borrowing with Bitcoin or ETH. And so there is protocol risk and there is lending risk of like, hey, Am I, if I have a bunch of defaults on these loans, am I going to be able to sell the ETH and Bitcoin, I'm holding it as collateral to be able to cover them? You know, we look at March 2020 where there was a flash crash and the Bitmex order book

almost got wiped out. That's that's structural risks that exists. And until liquidity gets better in crypto markets, you know, we're going to see elevated rates to compensate for that. There's also, you know, lack of credit default swaps and other things that can provide insurance and help create more efficiency in yield markets. But overall, the way I look at it is, like, as yields compress, that legitimizes crypto as an asset space.

And I just think the more integrated crypto becomes with our wider global financial markets, like, it's only going to be good because that's just going to encourage more real world assets to come in space to access that cheap liquidity, to access the advantages. of being able to interact with smart contracts versus sending emails and docu signs that's happening in the traditional world right now. So when you talk to your clients, are they, you know, how curious are they about what's happening on the back end in terms of where those yields are derived from? That's a big role that we have is explaining very clearly.

I mean, the biggest role we have is making these protocols, making these institutional borrowers accessible to them. Now, if you're not in the crypto space, you don't know any of these institutional borrowers. You don't know what the hell they're doing behind the scenes. We have to explain from the ground up what these arbitrage opportunities are that their borrowers are taking advantage of, why they're very low risk in many cases. And that is like literally the entirety of our job, more than anything, is explaining that. So we've gotten better and better at explaining that since we launched mid-November. And when they understand it, as well as we're able to explain it, they understand why it's very low risk and mispriced in our opinion.

How do you go about diligenceing either these protocols or institutional borrowers, be that the case? Well, a big part of that comes from our background of Gemini. So we're a team of five X Gemini engineers, including three of the first security engineering hires who were big in helping build the custody offering. So we know how to handle custody ourselves. We work with smart contracts. We've audit at them, et cetera. So we don't just take someone else's word for it. We can do the deep dives ourselves. So yeah, this is just kind of what we do. So I think something that, you know, maybe outsiders don't grasp about the defy space is that the vast majority of all lending is sort of over collateralized or fully collateralized. Tell us why someone would borrow against

an asset if you know why you would engage with one of these over collateralized lending protocols in the first place yeah so i think like if i go to ave right now or compound i think i can borrow usdc at like 3% and i could sell futures contracts for june at like 6% right so if you're an institution if you're like a big institution let's say you hold like a thousand bitcoin you know that's just sitting there. You could put that, like you could wrap that as, wrap that Bitcoin, put it on compound or a, get like a negligible yield for the deposit, but be able to borrow at 3% and make money at 6%. And now all of a sudden you're making 3% on that huge Bitcoin stack. And that's, that's not a small amount of money when you're talking the big numbers that a lot of these

institutional investors have. And then there's also the emergence of this under collateralized borrowing sector in crypto, which is interesting because that's harder to automate. Of course, you can't exactly put credit underwriting on the blockchain. So tell me about the emergence of these protocols and how they work. I mean, how you merge the bearer asset nature of defy with non-filly collateralized lending. Yeah, I think this is probably one of the most exciting things happening in defy right now. is bringing capital markets, bringing under collateralized lending to the space. It is necessarily more centralized because you do have to create this risk function of saying,

all right, you know, what interest rate appropriately compensates for the risk of making this loan? But it's extremely exciting for Defi because it's one of the few applications that can get outside of the ecosystem itself. Like we're talking over collateralized borrowing and lending with compound or AVE. Like right now that's just crypto assets. And that's great. But to expand the industry, we need to like branch into the real world as well. And under collateralized lending is a way of doing that.

So like we have right now like we just actually launched a partnership with them. Maple Finance. They're a leader in the space. They are launched on Ethereum soon to come to Solana. I think they have over 500 million in deposits. And they've expressed, you know, this vision of bringing more and more lending pools on chain that are assessed different risk profiles and different types of borrowers to create much, much more efficiency in capital markets by becoming jurisdictionless, by opening up transparency, by increasing efficiency, you know, not sending emails, not sending letters even in some cases and bringing things on. chain and digitizing, you know, the capital market economy. So that's right. Maple is one of your first partnerships. Tell me about how you got comfortable with them and what that process was like.

Yeah, so we know the team well, and they are kind of the market leader in this emerging space of, you know, under collateralized lending. So when it came down to it, we had to understand the risk profile very, very well how they're vetting their institutional borrowers. And at the end of the it's not that we can give a huge stamp of approval to any one protocol. It's just a function of explaining the risks very, very clearly. And that's what being compliance first is all about. So there are certainly, you know, overcollateralized options are very different risk profile than under collateralized. Institutional borrowers may have different risk profiles than DFI protocols. But so long as we're able to enumerate the risks of all of them and present them in a logical way,

communicate them with our with our customers, they get to self-allocate. And we're seeing a lot of demand for these potential 12%, 13% APY offerings that we have. And one critique I would say maybe of the defy lending space is the idea that partly the returns can be decomposed into sort of actual counterparty risk, but then also subsidies that come from the issuance of tokens for liquidity mining, for instance. Do you, are you concerned about this at all? Are you, the protocols you're engaging with, do these token related issuance subsidies exist? And is that sort of a concern for defy yields if that ceases to be sort of a popular mechanic?

Yeah, I think they do exist with the vast majority of protocols we're either working with now or are looking at working with. with. Certainly numbers in terms of like total value locked and you know total liquidity in the system is subsidized by these tokens. It's not clear exactly where things will shake out when those subsidies or if those subsidies run out. But we I mean in my mind there's always going to be like a market for liquidity and like what we probably just see is like rates rising on the protocols. It'll be more expensive to borrow because you're not getting. compensation in the token to supply liquidity. So depositors will, you know, want higher returns. And that could siphon away some liquidity from defy back to institutional lenders.

But there's these things like it all exists within a system of checks and balances and weights and counterweights. So there's always going to be some market there. This episode is brought to you by Compass Mining. Compass Mining is the world's first and largest online marketplace for Bitcoin Mining Hardware, and ASIC reselling. Bitcoin mining is only getting bigger and so is Compass mining. Compass is adding 280 megawatts worth of hosting capacity next year with more to come. That's over six times Compass's current hosting capacity, meaning more people can mine Bitcoin. With Compass anyone can mine Bitcoin. Start mining your own Bitcoin by visiting compass mining.io today. It seems like

in some senses we're in a state of suspended reality where a lot of liquidity has been enhanced due to the existence of the liquidity mining rewards. It could maybe a regulatory shock could do away with that, but we almost don't know for now which are the self-sustaining protocols that have reached exit velocity because there's this pressure. Yeah, I mean, just off the top of my head, I think Maker is kind of like the poster child for a self-sustainable D-Fi protocol. There are no token emissions, at least for the usage of the protocol. I do believe there are some token emissions for compensation of the team members, but the protocol is very self-sufficient in terms of it's not paying for deposits. And there's over nine and a half billion die

in circulation right now. So I think they're kind of the poster child. I think a lot of other protocols are going to get there over time, you know, right now it's just very competitive. And when you're trying to establish yourself as the leading like deposit token, like CUSD or AUSDC, and like you see, you see those deposit tokens being used on other protocols like Pendle, you know, they're competing for that liquidity and for that rubber stamp. Just like GUSD and USDC and Paxos dollar, we're all competing for the stable coin rubber stamp. Back in 2019, these DFI protocols are competing for that deposit token rubber stamp right now. And whoever wins is going to be much, much bigger than the other ones. So it makes sense to me

that they're subsidizing right now. And it makes sense to me as an investor that you'd want them to subsidize. But yeah, eventually that does have to change you. Right. It's not sustainable forever. So when you talk to your clients, is the reason they're users of the protocol is it because they want exposure to crypto yields or they find the API why attractive in its own right? Or, yeah, what are they telling you in terms of why they become used as the product? I mean, it's both. It's honestly a big gigantic thing here is like no one's figured out a way to do this without a wallet and we're the first to offer it.

I mean, if you're doing it without a wallet traditionally, you're taking some giant leap on the trusting the company, potentially sketchy compliance rails, et cetera. but yeah, I mean, this is a way for people who are vaguely knowledgeable, attracted by the potential yields, to get exposure to these assets in itself like a pick-your-own-adventure kind of way, to literally click, point-and-click, deposit as much as you want and diversify your portfolio. Because just structurally speaking from an infrastructure level, there really aren't a lot of tools to safely interact with something like Defi.

from the perspective of an institution. Yeah, I mean, it requires like, this is pretty low level. It's like that scene in the Steve Jobs movie where he had to like open the watch and like use special tools to like change the time or something. But the ramifications are 10x to that because you're dealing with custody of money. Like you own the money more than you can possibly imagine digitally. You need to handle backups. You need to end up whitelisting, not getting scammed, not getting fished along the way.

I like the concept of, I'm a security engineer, I like the concept of everyone cusseting their own money, but in practice, a lot of times it's better to go with experts, depending on who you are. Yeah, you know, we obviously are active on chain, and I talk to people that run, you know, yield farming funds,

and they'll tell me, yeah, you know, our workflow is Metamask and a ledger. A ledger. Exactly. And there's very little in terms of infrastructure to do permissioning around transactions, to do sort of flexible multisig models in terms of who can access what. Right. There's a little, you know, in terms of knowing the transaction you're about to make, having those checks against various clipboard attacks and, you know,

pasting the wrong address in there. Yeah. Is it surprising to you that we've, come so far and there's so much liquidity in these markets, but the actual toolkit to safely access them is still immature. I mean, I'm mortified more than anything. I don't know what the right answer is. I mean, some of these institutional wallet providers are very good at what they do, but it's still the most low-level complex thing to the average user to handle. And that's why they're going to ledgers and treasers and calling it a day. So, you know, people like us, we want to basically

put up guardrails on this. We want to like, you know, you go to the bowling alley with your kids, you put up the rails on the bowling alley so they can't do something crazy. That's kind of what we want to do. So you can either offload it to us entirely or provide kind of guardrails for you. And that's one of the major benefits here. It's basically outsourcing a security team to help you pick and choose your defy investments. So on a totally alternative topic, you guys are based here in Miami, part of our burgeoning crypto scene here in Miami. Beautiful day. out there. What is what is what is it about Brandon you've been here a while what is it about the

Miami um sort of tech ecosystem that appeals to you and and are you sort of generally bullish on it? I am I remember in 2017 2018 I was messaging you and Nick and saying please move to Miami it's it's going to be the future and you were saying no I don't see a future in Miami. Did I say you're saying I don't like this I like Elizabeth Warren I like Massachusetts I see that. And I'm glad you came around and you see the beauty of the space now. It's just, you know, very happy place, very capitalist society here, which is just great. You know, I think the best example of Miami is Muscle Beach, which we've gone to a few times. Shout out Muscle Beach. Shout out Muscle Beach. Yeah. It's just like weightlifting equipment that anyone's free to use and the invisible hand of the market.

For whatever reason, make sure nothing's stolen. It's free and it gets back in the container every day. day and it's just people working out helping each other it's just good vibes just good vibes here it is a it's a high kind of a high trust society it's incredible i mean i think there's a muscle beach in l.a but i don't think it's anywhere near as nice i've never been yeah yeah it does seem like we're sort of reaching exit velocity um but uh in your mind is the best split still the sort of 50 50 new york miami split is that the one you like the best yeah i think so honestly i mean I am much more aligned with the Miami kind of mentality. There is a really strong fintech scene in New York.

You have to give credit where it's due. And keep in mind, my family's had like a place in Miami for four years. So I really, really like it down here. It's always going to be a big part of what we do with Meow as well. But I think there's no better split in the world than the New York-Miamy split. So some thoughts on the future here, you know, in some senses, we have hundreds of billions of dollars. active in defy. So it feels like we've come a long way. But at the same time, there's, you know, big hacks, exploits every week it feels like. And we're only just, you know, creating actual

genuine maturity transformation, financial primitives, credit, underwriting. Defy to date has been very self-referential and circular. So, you know, and very few institutions are actually participating directly in Defi. So in terms of sort of the future of Defi and the yield space, what do you expect, both from sort of a protocol perspective, whether it ends up localized to Eath, whether we go cross-chain, and then also in terms of the protocols themselves, so what become the true, you know, globalized killer apps? Any projections there? Yeah, I think a lot of the exploits that are happening in the space are happening because of how competitive it is. You know, you talk about, is ETH going to be the winner? Is one of these challenger chains going to be the winner? I think

everyone's trying to ship really, really fast for better or worse, that's creating more vectors for attack on the space. And that's very challenging, I think, when you talk about trying to get institutional money to come in in terms of getting people comfortable with it when, you know, exploits, they make headlines. And people look for a reason, especially Old Guard like Bloomberg, They look for a reason to, you know, rag on crypto. So that is a challenge. It's hard for me to like sit here and pick winners and losers because if I could, I probably wouldn't be sitting here. You know, I'd be running a fund and having a really nice time with that.

But I think there are some really exciting projects in the space. You know, we talked about Maple before with capital markets. I think that's very extensible to defy without having to be a circular economy. You're seeing makers start to onboard real world assets. That's really interesting. I think with payment streams, you're starting to see payroll come on chain with companies like Juno. And it's like when we get that, when we get more and more real world assets coming on, that increases the surface area in terms of what markets defy can address, you know,

getting beyond, you know, the digitally native economy of Bitcoin and Ethereum and Avalanche and Slana and, you know, other L1 reserve assets. anything to add there Brandon yeah no I'm bullish and the nice thing about meiao is we are in the next couple weeks going to make it as easy as one click to do four or five transactions that can put the money into a defy protocol get the insurance policy on it and you know see your dashboard we have these nested transactions that we allow you to basically do in one click like offload to us so if you don't want to think about the flips and tricks needed to do that with your own wallet. You don't want to worry about, you know, a lot of the issues with self-custody,

et cetera. It's much easier with ACH or wire to us right now. Now, by the way, we do support USC deposits as well. So you could also do that and do the one-click as well. So you mentioned insurance. When you think about smart contract insurance, is that a product that you feel to be mature and sufficient? Is that something that you're comfortable? having your clients engage with? Yeah, I think we're comfortable with it. You know, it's ongoing in terms of like figuring out what are the best products in the space, you know, how to interface that with the real world legal implications that exist.

But I think there is really solid development in like Nexus Mutual, Risk Harbor, and Shores of people trying to build insurance underwriting for D5. specifically for smart contract risk. And if we can offer products that have a very strong way to eliminate that or reduce that risk, I think that only increases, you know, defy's appeal to a wide variety of investors. It's interesting that defy itself contains the solution to one of the biggest problems with which is smart contract bugs. Yeah, well, I think it's because the people who are thinking about defy insurance want to work in defy.

They want to work in finance 3.0. They don't want to go work for a traditional insurance company and try to build out and try to convince, you know, the higher up's there to give them budget to hire people to go build out this function. I think we've seen that time and time and again with crypto is people leaving traditional financial institutions after running into walls to try to get these groups spun up. You know, they get relegated to a labs group with budget for three people and nothing ever goes anywhere. There's no serious adoption within these traditional companies. So that's why the innovation is happening on chain. And it's going to continue to happen until other companies in the space kind of wake up and start to actually seriously allocate capital and resources to it as well. Yeah, I know that feeling.

Although I think I was inside the most crypto-friendly financial institution. but certainly it feels like trying to steer a gigantic cruise ship or something. Bear Stearns. So you guys are a pretty exciting vision for Meow. Without giving too much away, tell me what you think this company could look like in five years. Yeah, so yields are actually like we're compounding focus on that for the next six months, seven months. And we want to be the market leader. We feel like we are.

But that's just phase one of the company. We view this as a Web3 version of Brex. So Meow is Web3 Brex. We have kind of the account to earn interest, and we want to also build the operational account next, which is invoicing, paying a contractor, escrow, things you can do in the new financial rails. You can't really do on the previous rails.

And because we're building with that mindset from the ground up, all of our data models are much more scalable, our slope is higher, we're going to lap all the incumbents who are building on a fundamentally different money. They were building on a different money. they were building on a different money. If we start with the assumption that payments are going to be done on low-fee stable coin networks,

which is a very obvious assumption, how can anyone catch up to us on the development side? If we start with that assumption with our data models. So that's the point of the yields is to provide an excellent experience there to earn interest and have your money always be moving. So if you need to pay it, that's another button on our website. So we want to be the full stack on the financial rails of the future. Well, this has been great, guys. Where would you direct listeners to follow you more closely?

Sure, yeah. My Twitter is at Arvanagi. Bryce is at Bryce underscore Meow, I believe. And our Twitter for the company is at JoinMeow. Our company is meow.com. Hope to get.com quite soon. Meow.com. And you can request access there.

We'd love to work with you. If you have any questions, please reach out to us on Twitter or through the website. Meow.com. Thanks for coming on, guys. This has been great. Thank you. Thanks, Dick.