On The Brink with Castle Island - Guy Young (Ethena) on Digital Financial Markets (EP.737)

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

Wyatt sits down with Guy Young, founder of Ethena, for Guy's third appearance on the pod. In this episode: What has driven Ethena's success and durability? Where is there demand for other yield assets? Where is capital coming from? Is full onchain portfolio construction possible today? Why tokenize financial products at all? Who are the eventual winners? How is Ethena positioning to an evolving onchain yield landscape?

On today's episode, I sat down with Guy Young, founder of Athena. Athena is the issuer of USDA, a leading tokenized dollar product that generates yield by a delta-neutral hedging and staking. Athena has emerged over the past two and a half years as a pioneer in issuing a durable financial asset on a blockchain. This was Guy's third time on the podcast, and we discussed the state of capital markets on blockchains, how market behaviors have changed over the course of Athena's existence, and where Athenian's Athena is focused in the backdrop of an increasingly mature market structure. Castle Island is an investor in Athena, and we remain exceptionally excited about everything Guy and the Athena team continue to build. 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. 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 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 into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people started to worry. So out of this worry,

we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Guide, thanks for joining us. By my record, this is our third time having you on the podcast and excited to chat. A lot's happened over that period. To reiterate, as you know, we remain strong supporters of Athena. It's been incredible to watch everything you and the team have accomplished thus far. And I think we remain very excited for what's ahead. With all that said, it's been a great run since launch. Late 2023, you guys came The market have maintained exceptional scale since then across market regimes. UST has been a product that's proved deep utility and to be a strong asset, but at the same time has been stable across regimes.

What do you characterize as having worked well over that period in the context of what you guys have done, but also in the context of the broader industry? Thanks, obviously, for having me on. Always glad to be back. In the beginning, I guess the piece that we took a slightly different approach to different builders who are sort of working within the dollar acid issuance space. And I mean that broadly between the on-chain products and then the centralized stable coin issuers as well, I think we've recognized that with these relatively commoditized products, there wasn't very many ways to differentiate

your product versus at the large entrance who are coming to markets. And I think we've seen that play out in the last cycle where you've had extremely well capitalized large entities into the space and not find anywhere near as much traction as we managed to achieve, I think, consider the first 18 to 24 months of our launch. And really was just leading into how do you differentiate yourself versus others or how do you create structural modes around this product when you're competing as products like SIRPA and Tether that are in the tens of billions and obviously have deep liquidity and integrations that have been built over the last decade. And from our perspective, it was really leaning into how can you create a better user experience through the amount of

rewards that you could generate on the asset to be able to share with users. And in doing so, basically create a better savings product than you otherwise would be able to by just internalizing all the yield in the same way that some of these issues do. So I think that that was one element where we kind of created a structural advantage, I think, around the savings aspects of these products. I think the second piece was actually very targeted distribution focus since the beginning in terms of just understanding what are the sort of like five to ten entities that actually moves the needle at large scale in the space. And I think the history that we had the benefit of learning from in terms of tether and circles. Great to date was actually like the only

wheelmates that you create within this business are around brand reputation and then how deeply integrated you are with large distribution platforms with tens or hundreds of millions of users. And I think since day one, have always been extremely focused about moving out of just the sort of circular defy, people shuffling money from left pocket to the right pocket type of activity that we see within defy and really trying to deeply embed ourselves within large exchanges, brokerages, fintech, et cetera, et cetera. And just to name a few of the different partners that we've worked with on that side, Bybit, finance.

On the exchanges side, Robin Hood and Coinbase most recently, and also some tried-fired distribution partners with Jan Senderson and BlackRock most recently as well. I think it's just been a focus on distribution and trying to do that very well and sort of recognizing that 80% of the outcome probably comes from five to ten counterpities that you work very closely with. And then the other piece is focused on how do you beat T-E. build yields and provide a better product as a savings product for users. Yeah, you guys have done an excellent job on the distribution side, and it seems like

counterparties have a desire to work with Athena. It feels like outside of what you guys have done, you have the combination of vanilla stable coins, which is like USDT and USDA, and then you have some, I'd say, further out on the risk curve yield products, which are dollar denominated, and people sort of try and market them as yield-bearing dollar products, but you've seen DPEG, some of those are private credit, there are other more risk on assets. And you guys seem to straddle the middle that curve a little bit in being a product that's perceived as generating yield, but also as being stable to the dollar peg. Do you think you see more assets like that, or do you think the position you guys are in market is pretty unique? I think you definitely do

try and avoid overusing analogies as much as we can. But you can kind of think about the crypto debt or fixed income market, always just being cash. or T-Bill denominated, which was just kind of like what Circle and Tether, I think, represented. Tether being sort of cash with no yield. And then Circle is just being almost like a money-market fund in terms of the role that is playing over there. But obviously, that's not how real financial markets work. And there's an entire spectrum of dollar-linked products between a T-bill and a private creditor fund that takes 90 days to get out and has a 10% yield. And I think the recognition is that a lot of the infrastructure and new primitives and financial

products within Defi, there is a lot to build with that spectrum between two bills and what I've just described over there. And I think it's incorrect to think that any dollar link product has to just have T bills that are sitting behind it. Having said that, I do think the way you position these products is important with users just in the way that even how Genius has been quite prescriptive around what you can actually call the payments to over coin within the US. I think for that direction is actually a very useful thing for all the space in terms of how you present those products. So we obviously don't think that there's an issue with these type of products existing, and I think that more will come to market because their universe is so wide between a Dollar Link

product that can provide some sort of savings return. And there's just very different ways that you can sort of cut both the risk and return for products like these. But equally, I think you just need to recognize that we shouldn't be calling the same thing. That's something that almost has like a a path of credit risk to the US government, which is sort of where Junis stable coins have been narrowly boxed in at the moment. Both have a place to coexist. And you will continue. need to see innovation in the type of products that are seen brought to market. But yeah, I guess the way that these products have sort of evolved through time is that they really tap into multiple different sources of collateral that can actually sit within them now. As you sort of reach

scale and distribution modes are sort of embedded through time, it's relatively easy to add new sources of collateral or new forms of uncorrelated yield and that kind of stuff to your product. It's really like getting to scale in the beginning, which is the hardest base in terms of convincing people to come over in the beginning and being able to have the flexibility to still produce the best risk-adjust return on dollars in the world. It's not that difficult to sort of adjust when there's something new and interesting to add. Do you think we're at a point where you can actually do portfolio construction on-chain and there's enough quality products to have a high-quality diversified portfolio? Or do you think we're still relatively early in the market maturity curve for that?

Yeah, we're definitely getting there and it's accelerating pretty quickly. I think the funny thing about crypto bear markets, which is, I guess what we've been in in the last eight to nine months, is that it's where people start to focus in on these real while. So it's a lot more just because there's assets on a relative basis become a lot more attractive versus what's going on in a crypto. And it's kind of the same thing that you see every cycle, which is like when funding rates and crypto, credit spreads are wide, there's nothing in Tradfair that ever becomes close or compares to those type of opportunities.

But it's really when you get into the bare market and it's kind of what we saw in 2023, like all of the growth of new tokenized treasuries coming to market and launching was kind of in that late 23, early 2024 period just before we had started to get into this new cycle we've just been through. So yeah, funny enough, I think the innovation or at least interest from users for those type of products is kind of been vastly correlated to Bitcoin prices in general. I think you've started to see an insane amount of new and interesting assets coming online, whether that's being put directly into morphoble, so just tokenized generally on chain. I'm excited to see more than come up.

on because in some sense is right, we sort of talk about the growth of tokenization is like one of the mega trends that I think has just continued to grow despite what's happening with crypto prices. And I think I do agree that tokenization generally is like a megatrend that we should all be excited about. And I sort of put it in the same bucket as stable coins, tokenization, and the growth of perpetual swaps on non-crypto assets are kind of the three megatrends that I'm the most excited about within the space.

But I think the funny thing is when you peel back the detail, 90% of non-recent of non-procuital non-equity-linked tokenized products are basically just held by two entities, which is Athena plus Sky. There is a question around who actually captures value from the growth of tokenization. Is it these sort of hybrid dollar issuers who can actually be involved in maturity transformation and creating a spread out of those tokenized products? Or is it the sort of tokenization issues themselves? So just capturing a small management fee on the assets that they're bringing on chain.

So, yeah, there is an interesting question whether it's actually the issues like us who kind benefit the most from more of those assets coming on chain rather than tokenization platforms themselves. Yeah, it's interesting because you have started to see what looks more like an established market structure emerged with on-chain capital formation where you have the software platforms or the wannabe software platforms, which are the morphos and the Vedas and the Aves that want to be vault providers and then want to pass on some level of delegation to curators who are then going to be the ones who are actually establishing what these vaults look like from an allocation perspective, from a rates perspective, from general specifications. And then you've asset issuers, like you were saying,

are asset originators now that are bringing assets on chain or structuring, whether it steals, whether they're structuring an asset basket or mix of some sort. Do you think that is the structure and maturity for the time being? We probably share this. I think there's a lot of room in the asset issuer side because we need high-quality assets to drive the industry forward. I think capital formation works pretty well. But yeah, overarchingly, do you see a lot of potential there? Do you see more asset issuers going to market? Do you think that's where the value is? And do you think this is what the market looks like? You're definitely going to see more asset issues or just like more assets from the existing issues come to market for sure. And I think the pace of that is

actually accelerating through time rather than decelerating where in the beginning, it was all just really 10 different issues with bringing money market funds. While here, you're actually starting to see much more diversification around. He-lock mortgages. triple A COLOs, they're going to go all the way down, I think, to like, single ACLOs. I think the one sort of piece that might have constrained the growth so far is that these assets are just almost diametrically opposed to the type of ways that on-chain users have interacted with the assets or savings products in the past, which is, like, highly regulated and KIC and much more difficult to work with from a duration perspective.

Even just one basic example, a lot of the living that you see on-chain obviously requires that you're able to get in and out of the asset in a pretty short order, because if you've looped an asset with a seven-day withdrawal period, 10 times, it's going to take you 70 days to just undo the position that you got into. And there's just small things like the switch. The constraints and friction around working with normal trad-fi assets that have these sort of blockers around them, just mean that a lot of the way that capital move very fluidly on chain

is not quite as easily to find a way directly into this product. So that's part of the cause of what I was describing in that. Why is it that just two entities have 90% of non-tokenized stock assets? And I think it's actually a lot related to that, which is people are just not comfortable yet with like full KYC redemption type of constraints that sit around these products now. And do you think new asset issuers are actually bringing or catalyzing more capital on chain? Or do you think it's something you've touched on before, which is you just end up competing for the same pool, which is split now between all coins, tokenized assets, perps and other vehicles?

I think what it helps to do is I don't believe that anyone in traditional finance is waking up and saying, right now, I would prefer to hold these assets on chain and pay more fees to a tokenization issue than I would be able to just hold this within my brokerage or custody account in Tadfly. There isn't very clear this is why it's better for those entities to be able to do this on chain. And so I'll be very surprised if anyone at proper sizes is actually doing that. From my perspective, it's more of actually reducing the amount of outflows that you see within a crypto bear market, where you can actually even just look at this total stable coin supply as a good barometer here versus 2020 and 2023. I think in 2022, broad stable coin supply was down maybe like 35 or 40 percent from the peak to the trough. And that was capital basically saying, I kind of earn above risk free rates in this market. And I'm going to pull it all out and go into T-bills outside of the space.

I think being able to offer those users who don't want to move the capital off-chain but can still access some of these products without having to fully off-board. I think it's done a good job of allowing people to stay on-chain more as you sort of write out these market-level periods. And you can kind of see down the numbers where stable-goin suppliers down maybe 10% from the peaks, 10% to 5% basically relative to like a minus 30 to 40, 3-4 years ago. Yeah, I agree. It increases the stickiness to the capital. to that point on different market regimes and cycles, you've spoken about this before too, but if you look at, call it a period that followed 2021, you had a lot of on-chain capital, at least from a mark-to-market perspective, where you had tokens launching at certain valuations. They would bleed down over time, but you at least had that value at launch.

I think a lot of that was justified by the fact that you just had a lot of venture dollars coming into the ecosystem in that period. do you think we will be back in a market regime like that or is it structurally different now and therefore we should reset expectations around what the next bull market would look like? Yeah, I think you're probably in a better position than I am to understand how the VC industry did in the last sort of cycle but my outside in less educated view than yours is probably not that well. I don't think that there are that many private deals than sort of the token complex at least outside of like equity deals that they did extremely well,

which would justify, you know, multiple, multi, multi-billion dollar funds like we see in the space right now. So I think more like generally there's been a reduction in the size of funds broadly where I don't know if it does make sense to have multi-billion dollar funds. You felt it's the opportunity size that exists within crypto now. And you've kind of seen that happen as different funds start to raise small funds versus where they were last cycle. Anecdotally as well,

I know a lot of the liquid capital that we speak to and have been close to, have us found different ways to be able to insert up like equities into their mandate so that they're not fully constrained by crypto. So it does feel like things have actually shrunk quite significantly from where we were on that side of things versus even like the beginning of last full cycle. You can't really blame them, I think, just relative to how some of these assets performed like through the cycle, I think, in this last cycle where I think the real reason people have felt so much pain, I think, in this last sort of drawdown is that, At least in 2022, right, you had an excuse for why the market went down and relative to other asset classes. It was kind of like beta adjusted in line with expectations, i.e. like, rates went from zero to five. Robin Hood and Coinbase were down 80 to 90%. So fair enough, outcoins to run down 90%. That seems like a pretty reasonable piece of relative performance.

But I think since 10-10 last year, the real pain is kind of been that you really got everything you ever asked for from this industry, right, which was like regulatory acceptance, hopefully soon a bit more guidance around what comes with clarity. You have acceptance of stable coins at the very highest level of government in the US, and all of these things you've ever wanted for the last 10 years materialized, but the prices of the assets that everyone owned or were dependent on to get rich in all coins, didn't go up when it happened. And so there is a real question of like, maybe you're right on the thesis,

but maybe these aren't the assets to sort of express that view. And there's a legitimate question as to, with all of these multi-hundred billion all our entities entering the space, which was always seen as like a bullish. There is a real question as to whether the value greater within the space actually accrues the equity of those businesses rather than the tokens that exist within crypto. Stripe using stable coins to improve payment systems around the world or BlackRock, tokenizing their funds or Robin Hood pushing on chain and all these different pieces. It's obviously great headlines, but what's happening there?

Sounds more bullish for the equity of those three businesses than any specific token that exists on chain. And so I think that that's really been the core issue. I think in the last cycle, that sort of gives people cause for concern, which was like, was I right about the thesis, but like wrong on the sort of asset action to express that thesis, essentially. I think a lot of people are feeling that way. I also think what we had in 2021 was a bit of a product of the fact that if you were looking at the alt-coin market or the defy market or call it the on-chain native side, then if you

wanted to express a bullish view there, you were effectively going to speculate on something new. because there were no businesses that were proven out yet. Versus, I think now we're finally getting to a point where some businesses, Athena included, I'd put something like maple in this bucket, some of the stickier protocols from a capital perspective, actually have multi-year track records now, which means that you have some degree of like a set of canonical assets, which if you believe that this category is going to continue to do well,

or I should say it will inflect, then you would want to own those as it supposed to just having to speculate on something that's net new. Exactly. Even though the growth of some of these assets on chain is amazing to see just from a, wow, it's incredible that we brought these products to market. Like, for example, the 24-7 equity perps, which allow people to punt Korean memory stocks on a Saturday at night. Like, that's a genuinely new, incredible thing that didn't exist in any market structure anywhere in the world. And we've used crypto infrastructure to bring that to life. But equally, we can point in that and say, wow, that's actually really cool and a cool use of the technology. Now it also means that people, with the trap capital, so the point that we're making in the beginning, they aren't forced to just bid our coins now, and you have this universe assets that are now competing for the same flows of capital. And so in some ways, like the true growth in the technology to give people the optionality to buy anything that they want at any point in time, 24-7, unlevered or with leverage,

it actually draws capital away, I think, from crypto-in-of-assets in the process as well. Completely agree. When you're looking at the market broadly, and let's say the set of assumptions or beliefs that you had when you were starting Athena to begin with, have any of those changed with regard to the belief that you still have in the asset and the purpose of the technology that you've built? Or is it largely the same set of guiding principles? Yeah, I think I was slightly more cynical than the average kind of builder who existed in the space when I first got in where I think a lot of the early DeFi builders were much more ideology-driven and I think closer to the original ethos of like Ethereum when their first came out. And my background

was more in finance where I just thought about crypto as basically a more interesting playground for finance and or potentially more efficient backend for financial service infrastructure, basically. I think it's kind of mirrored in a way even people talk about Ethereum now versus where we were in 2021, which was the way that it was described four years ago was this is going to replace the whole of finance and the time for that is actually really big. And so you could get excited about the numbers and the time of what these things could grow into. And I think we've slowly started to admit through time that actually the time is just basically replacing the back end for a subset of finance rather than replacing all of it.

Everyone kind of getting excited about all these asset managers coming on train, et cetera, et cetera. You kind of move from a position of saying we want to dominate and rebuild this entire thing to like, can we be a back end service provider for your business, which obviously just commands a lower aggregate valuation and a lower time to get people excited about. So I think it's more the cynicism that I had maybe four or five years ago relative to the market's kind of expectations of what we would achieve is potentially playing out in a quicker way than I would have thought. But I also think it's like extremely validating because in some senses I think the probability of everything that we're building in the space of like actually creating trillions of dollars of value is now higher than ever.

But it sort of just goes back to that point of is it sort of like very useful technology for the end user or for businesses to make themselves more efficient, but struggles to sort of capture value, even if you're correct in that assessment. To your point about being more of a back end, I'd say one assumption that's probably changed the most for me is I think when I was getting in the industry some five, six years ago, I really was bought into the idea of bearer assets as being a first in class instrument when it came to storing value and doing so in a hyper-secure way. and I think that the AI

mythos quantum era challenges that a little bit is my perspective at least. You know, I think that's reasonable, for sure. From the perspective of trust might be more of a feature than a bug in some cases at this point in time. Yeah.

When you're talking about what that market structure looks like, crypto technology might become a back end to a lot of finance, do you look at Athena's having a role in something like that or do you remain pretty solely focused on USDE and the proliferation of that asset?

I don't view them as like mutually exclusive. I just sort of see the type of products that we've created and others that look similar to us. It's just like more efficient ways to move money, settle money, or like save. And in some ways it's kind of like the new age sort of bank deposit, if that makes sense, where you kind of can one click from anywhere in the world and get access to a dollar savings account. We still kind of use that as basically the largest turn opportunity to actually be. build is in the space. I think we meme about trying to get 100 mil or billion users or whatever in the space and then make some people sort of cringe when like daily active users and some of

these chains and stuff are like sub 50K or whatever it is. But I do still think that that is actually the product that can reach that kind of scale that I'm describing. I sort of view it as like store value as Bitcoin is like in the hundreds of millions and should get into billions. And then Tether has started to prove out that 500 milish of people want to use digital dollars and dollar rails and savings accounts all over the world. And so our views, it's still one of the largest town opportunities to go and chase down. I do think that it is in a cycle that is almost detached itself from crypto in terms of just the long-term trends where these types of assets and products are going.

And ID viewed as just like a straight upgrade to existing finance infrastructure, building on stable coins, building on these saving products. We obviously want to play a bubble in that going forward. This is an overly simplistic question. but as the body of people that you talk to on a daily basis changed a lot over the last couple years? I'll definitely say like new entrants in terms of asset managers, banks, fintechs, etc. We used to sort of describe this idea of defy in the back end and then you had like the

fintech front end and you start to see that stuff like really materialize in a large way and very frequently even recently. I think you've seen even the way the Robin Hood sort of launched as aggressively as they did plug into like earned bolts and stuff that sit on chain for 30 million users that are sitting in that front end. And I think it's really sparked people to take the stuff more seriously and actually start to play catch up on that side. So I think a lot of those sort of ideas and thesis that we had before are really playing out in like real time now. And I think the pipeline of real businesses, real enterprises, fintax and brokerages that are trying to come into this space, it feels like more busy on that front than it never has, to be honest.

How much do you think depressed asset prices and just general existing noise in the altcoin market handicaps, the growth of that? a little bit. I think it's the type of product that you're trying to serve to user, which is probably more dependent on that. So if you're Robin Hood trying to spare like mean coin trading on the chain, I think a lot of the minimum coin traders kind of got carried out, whether it was from like the Trump main coin or 1010 afterwards. Like there are many ways you could have gone to zero, I think, in the last 18 months. And that just takes time to repair. But never so like a simple and dollar savings product, which I think is kind of universally interesting to people, regardless of where crypto prices are. So yeah, I think of a lot of it.

a lot of the trading type of activity naturally goes through these abs and plays where it just kind of crashes in terms of interest, like 90% from pig to trough. But I think these simple sort of like savings products do have a bit more durability through the cycle from Amperstractive at least. And even interestingly, you can kind of see that in the hyperliquid data as well. I think going to the point that we're talking about earlier, which is the crypto volumes are kind of down 60 to 70% versus where they were last cycle. And obviously, hyperliquids have done an incredible job of managing to grow even during this downtrend, but it's basically all come from the growth of these equity-linked or RWA commodity-linked, perhaps making up all the ground basically versus the

production in crypto and surprises and speculation. I don't think that that's actually like direction where any on-chain business has to go. And I think it's been a hard lesson for us as well, which is it's not really good enough to just sort of accept that every four years like the economics of your business kind of collapse and you just sit around and wait for a year until things come back, I think the best business is now in crypto are kind of trying to find ways to make themselves less reliant and less correlated to just what's happening in the crypto price cycle. And you can kind of see that even with, I've always been very impressed with the way the Coinbase and Robin Hood present in their earnings.

They have these like 10 or 11 distinct business lines with 100 mil plus of revenue. And you can kind of look at that. And that's actually pretty incredible to be able to find that diversification of different areas that you can actually pull revenue from that aren't just 100% correlated to Bitcoin while trading basically. Yeah, definitely. As you're talking to some of the asset managers and larger venues, like you said, as we drive into a more evolved regulatory environment,

do you think that D5 venues have a material role longer term? Or do you think eventually it's asset managers working with on-chain asset issuers and originators and then maybe you have some sort of curation layer, but that's kind of the stack right there? Yeah, I sort of see it flows in both directions. In some senses, when we consume tokenized assets into our products to then distribute through our distribution channels, you're actually playing a very useful role for asset managers, which is saying, hey, you're trying to bring this AAA product to market.

You don't have integrations across every single centralized exchange in the market, but if we grow and we continue to add and buy more of your product, you can kind of be part of that growth story without having to set up that distribution yourself. So that's actually a very powerful piece, which is just the DNA and set up of a lot of these farms is not really there to kind of be on the ground and sort of building the distribution that we have in the last three years as wide as we have. But equally, they also have distinct distribution that we don't have access to, which is regulated for our own institutions in the US, which we obviously just haven't had the same track record in history as a lot of these firms in times of being able to build that up through time. And so in some sense, it's a very interesting like symbiotic relationship, which is saying we can be helpful to distribute your triad fire ice. in crypto into distribution channels that you wouldn't otherwise be able to access.

Equally, can you bring out crypto-native assets and then distribute them to your own channels and tradfi, which we can access. And so I think it works really nice, basically in both directions and continue to see more of these off-chain asset managers partnering with on-chain businesses that can sort of accelerate the growth of their products. Do you see Athena's role changing much over that period? Or what does your guy's business look like longer term? Pretty simple business from our perspective.

You're just generating a nym like a stable coin issue. in the bank would be able to generate, which is all of these products basically just have like a collateral yield that they can generate and then the cost of liabilities. And it looks different in terms of the percentages and how it's allocated between the businesses. But the core sort of business model is almost identical there. I think the spectrum is kind of you got tether, earning three and a half, but paying out zero. You've got circle earning three and a half and paying out roughly 50 to 6 percent blended on average. And then you have something like Athena, in which through the cycle has achieved something that's closer to sort of 6 to 8% as an average yield,

and then your cost of the ability is to either 3 and a half or slightly higher. And so it's really just trying to slice and dice the same, very simple business model of like NIM generation in different ways and just growth as supply as much as you can. So yeah, I think the fundamental of the business model doesn't change months. It's just really what are the assets in the way that you're finding to generate that NIM. That might evolve through time, and we have seen involved quite a bit for even us in the last sort of six to eight months, diverse flying out of a lot of the crypto-reliant exposure that we had into more traditional assets as well. And to sort of start to close out, what can people expect to see

from Athena in coming months or what's top of mind and priority for you guys? Right now, we sort of have three core pieces of the business. And the third one is, I think, going to be released just as you got as the airing the show. So we have the core, just the savings product, basically just wanting to bring that back to sort of the peaks that we achieved in last year, around 15 to 25 bill of supplies kind of the target that we want to get to back in the next 18 to 20 to 24 months. We have a white label stable coin insurance platform, which I believe is the largest in the market right now where essentially businesses can just come launch their own branded. Stablecoin products and our infrastructure and then control and to capture more of the economics

themselves. That I'm relatively excited about sort of the pipeline and the forward opportunity that sits there. And it's just a very scalable business where you just don't need more than like a handful of individuals to basically run that and continue growing it. And in the final piece, which we spent the last eight to nine months building is our own consumer-facing, neobanking, mobile application, basically built on all their products. And so I think that the interesting thing here

is that you have seen a few of these products in the market now, but you've never really seen it vertically integrated asset issuer plus neobank put together. So a lot of these products that are in the market right now are kind of slapping a rain deba card on someone else's deba-coin, which kind of leaves 50 to 60% of the revenues to circle into other base case through you building a product, which to us feel like a very sustainable and state of like market structure for who wins these markets.

And I think it's just uniquely exciting to us because we think we have a real opportunity here to win this. Because if you control the highest yield in the market on dollars, you just have like a structural edge versus everyone else to basically be able to compete and return users. So I think, yeah, being able to be a vertically integrated issue there plus direct to consumer as sort of like a path that broadens the distribution beyond us always relying on exchanges and other people to distribute our product. I think it's just exciting for us because it just allows us to try to get closer to the end user and to drive higher margins as a result. Exciting piece for us. And I think along the same mind of what I was saying before where we sort of view a dollar with a yield as one of the largest sort of time opportunities in the space. And I think being able to deliver that in a form factor that people are used to in a simple mobile app that anyone can download all over the world in a banking like experience. We think that's actually the correct way to be able to deliver that product to people outside of crypto.

Definitely. If anyone listening wants to get in touch about working with you guys, what's the best way? Yeah, it's worth of these just on the Athena X page. So just Athena and no other elements for that name. And then there's links on there to be able to contact us as the team directly. Perfect. Guy, thanks for joining again. Enjoy chatting.

Awesome. Appreciate the time. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To learn more about Castle Island, visit castle island. and to listen to all of our podcast episodes, please visit castle island.vc slash podcast or just click on the tab on our website. Thanks for listening.