On The Brink with Castle Island - Hoolie Tejwani (Coinbase) on The Evolution of Coinbase Ventures (EP.610)

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

Hoolie Tejwani, the head of Coinbase Ventures joins the show. In this episode we discuss: The history and rationale behind the launch of Coinbase Ventures. The evolution of the crypto venture category. Areas of focus for Coinbase Ventures. Stablecoins, Crypto/AI and consumer startup category. The regulatory landscape in the United States. Operation Chokepoint 2.0 and the impact on startups. The rise of the Coinbase Mafia. To learn more visit coinbase.com/ventures

Today on the podcast, I sat down with Huli to Jwani, the head of Coinbase Ventures. Coinbase Ventures has invested in over 500 startups since inception and is playing an increasingly active and important role in the crypto venture landscape. In this episode, we discussed the key areas of focus for the group, the regulatory environment for startups in the United States, and the rise of the Coinbase Mafia. I think you'll enjoy this one. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Huli from Coinbase Ventures. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions

and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and hosts may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only is 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. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin.

Bitcoin. Well, Huli, welcome back to the podcast. I feel like this is maybe the fifth or sixth Coinbase episode we have, but there are always interesting and people like them. So I'm glad to have you on. Thanks for having to have to chat. We're going to spend a lot of time talking about ventures here, but would love to just understand how you got to the company and the role you're in now. So I have a mix of a traditional background and then some wild career pivots. I won't go through all the details, but I'm a computer science background. I saw my career working on Wall Street inside of some of the

big financial institutions. I thought I'd never wanted to touch traditional finance ever again, surprise on me. And the spent of time at Baining Company and the private equity group, but I was at MIT at grad school when they did the first Bitcoin air drop to students. And that's what first perk my interest. What is this thing that my friends are funding their summer vacations with? And I was at an early stage VC fund during the ICA craze. And just by accident of history, became the person there who knew the most about crypto and having to sit down, explain the white paper to GPs and LPs and then what's Ethereum just forced me to go intellectually down the rabbit hole. And I just became obsessed with crypto and the long-term believer in all things we believe in.

And just had a chance coffee chat with a few ex-bane folks at Coinbase and someone pose a question that was like, hey, if you could bet on one company as an investor that you have extreme conviction on, you bet your career on what would it be? And I answered out hesitation, Coinbase. So it's like, okay, maybe I should pull my money where I went out this and take a ride. So I joined Coinbase end of 2018, and it was a very different company then. But I've been involved with Ventures since the beginning. You can talk through like the history of Coinbase Ventures and how it's evolved, but also it was very focused on M&A and the beginning part of my tenure.

It was involved in product strategy and strategic partnerships. And then about two years ago, and there was a need for someone to look after the Ventures program. I raised my hand for that toward duty. That's an awesome story. A lot of similarities to my story, actually. I was in consulting and found myself at a firm that, was trying to understand crypto blockchain space and forced me to go a lot deeper at the time. That's funny about the airdrop too at MIT.

I wonder if there'll be studies in years to come around what people actually did with theirdrop and how many people really have the diamond hands. Spoiler alert, I think a lot of people didn't claim it didn't, including me what it was and came to regret it later on. That's too funny. Well, I would love to understand a little bit more about Coinbase ventures. Obviously, you guys are just incredibly active. But let's talk maybe about the history, how the enterprise came to be and where you guys

are today. Stepping back, it's been a wild journey. So Coinbase Venture started really just as an experiment and this credit to Brian and Emily and the OG Coinbase group around just experimenting and not having a fear of failure. So it started with just a blog post saying, hey, Coinbase Ventures were open for business. There was no plan, no too dedicated to you around it. And just about a dozen folks across the company, volunteers working on it nights and weekends, really is a passion project.

But the initial impetus has always said the same. And that was, let's back great founders who are pushing the state of the art for the crypto economy forward and help seed this ecosystem because at Coinbase, something I really appreciate is we really don't have a zero-sum mentality. It's very much a positive sum. We're capitalists. We're a public traded company. We have obligations to our shareholders, but we see ourselves as part of a platform that's part of a bigger rising tide. And we want to support and invests in that. So fast forward to today, we've ended up becoming one of the most active investors in the space. We've made over 500 investments all across the world. I think we're almost 50 countries now where we have

portfolio companies. And we've matured the investing program along with that. So we operate very much like the Seed Series A centric fund investing off the balance sheet. We're still doing our founder centric ecosystem type investing, but we also have now just thoughtful curiousics around ownership sizes and portfolio construction and flexibility to do larger strategic investments and now on-chain activity. It's one of the cool things about being. in this industry is that historically companies have been investing in startups just to promote the overall ecosystem. And obviously there's a moneymaking aspect to it as well. But even DCG in the early days, I think, invested in one of the Coinbase early rounds. So in a lot of ways,

seems like you guys are paying it back to the community. For sure. And we're investing with financial ROI long term is our primary orienting factor. But there's also a ton of strategic value that having this type of vehicle attached Coinbase has. So we have this network of really great founders, sometimes that turns into M&A conversations, BD partnership conversations. We invested in every L2 before base was a twinkle in anyone's eye and were able to help Jesse and team think through the partnership front on there. So I would say it's a very unique platform in the corporate venture world. And obviously, crypto venture just as a category has evolved a lot over the past seven years or so. How has that affected your guys' investment strategy and size of the checks you're writing, how you

approach the overall segment? I spoke to a little bit before, but When we started, there was a need to seat an ecosystem, and now the ecosystem's been seated. They're more investable opportunities than any capital allocator can invest into. So we've shifted to being very thesis-driven. We're not investing against the short-term narratives. And then we're now taking larger swings where we have higher conviction. So right now, our core strategies in the $1 to $5 million check range, targeting two to five percent ownership.

There's flexibility around that. But just as the market is matured, as the ecosystem, mature, we've been able to mature our allocation strategies as well. That makes sense. And obviously, on the founder side, I'm sure you get asked a lot of requests. People who are going to have a token probably want that token to be featured prominently. People that have an operating business probably want to do something with Coinbase. So how do you think about that overall founder support and what do those conversations

look like? They're always fun. So first and foremost, we have no bearing on Coinbase listings. It's a complete black box. There's companies being invested in that have gotten those things. Coinbase companies we invested in. Haven't gotten listed. There are plenty of assets that we haven't invested in and got listed.

So there's no bearing or association whatsoever. We view the value add for us as being an API into Coinbase. So we're in a pull-not-push model. We're not going to get in the founder's way. You call us when there's that high-impact conversation to be had. We're not going to get into the guts of how you operate and run the business. But that API into Coinbase, it's case-dependent, but it can manifest in a bunch of different ways. So a lot of our projects or portfolio companies, there is some type of partnership or BD angle to have.

So morphos is a good recent example where we're leveraging that protocol for on-chain borrow and lend on-coil-based retail. Sometimes there's M&A conversations. I think what I hear from founders where a lot of the value from us being on the cap table comes is, one, the brand signaling, but also the connective tissue to the portfolio. So we've got now 500 great founders in the space. And across all those projects, there's leads. and talent and all types of intangible value that comes from those connected touchpoints. That makes a lot of sense. And how do you guys think about it in terms of the categories? Are there key areas that you're particularly focused on where you try to canvas or is it

all inbound? How do you think about that? It's a balance of inbound and more proactive, outbound thesis-driven hunting and also a balance of the humility of knowing we're not the smartest folks in the room and the great founders we talk to every day are leading us to what's interesting. Everyone on the team has a rotating set of majors and minors, and every couple of quarters we can refresh that on what we're focused on. Right now, the current themes we're spending a lot of time on our stable coins and stablecoin related infrastructure. We were early investors in Bridge, which was acquired by Stripe. We made an investment in BVNK last year. And I think tied to where things are moving with legislation, there's just a flood of founders interested in space.

and that's a very obvious 10 to 100x growth category in terms of penetration from our point of view. Other categories are spending a lot of time, and right now we continue to be very focused on defy. There's a lot of progress that continue to be made there. On-chain consumer apps, everything from gaming to social to prediction markets and all the infrastructures now to place where we can finally have these internet scale consumer-grade apps. So experimentation is high there. And then last, and it's more of a longer-term forward-looking thing, is everything around crypto and AI. So we're definitely actively making investments there. We have a pretty well-thought-out thesis on the different intersection points where crypto and AI actually makes sense. We can talk more

about that. We follow where the best and brightest are spending their nights and weekends, and that's definitely a place where they're spending their nights and weekends right now. That crypto-AI intersection is definitely where you're seeing some of the best and brightest minds. I'd say unfortunately, it's maybe no surprise most technologies like that. But you do see a lot of scams and hype in that category as well, which I think makes it hard as a venture investment. to cut through what's real and what's not. So within that space, what do you think the most interesting maybe sub-segments are

within the crypto-AI overlap? Great question. So I'd break it down into three intercept points. So first, if you just take on its face, like, generative AI is changing everything, and we're on this exponential change curve with all the models and crypto is no exception. Reverse ordering from far out to near term.

The longer term is, okay, how can blockchains and distributed networks and incentive systems actually complement the delivery for generative AI in a way that's more grassroots, more user-aligned, everything from verifiable inference to we've made an investment last year in Vana Labs, which is doing really interesting stuff around data dows and how do you actually have attribution and value cruel to end users for contributing their individual data into model training. That is going to continue to be a long-term thing and unfold. The second is we really believe in this agentic economy is coming. So we're going to have a material amount of

GDP flowing through millions, billions of agents that are bartering with each other for all types of different resources on the behalf of objective functions of their end users. And crypto rails should play a big role in that. It won't be everything. But it makes sense for ejectic economy, that internet native money is going to be a way that that value is flowing. And then in the immediate a term, it's the on-chain AI. So everyone's experimenting with models and LLMs, and they started off with agents that are showing their own meme points. And that's where probably the immediate night and weekend activity is. We're meeting all those teams. We're making some select investments there. There will be short-term stuff around it, but I see a world where the majority of block space

in the not-too-far future is being propagated by AI agents, and it's happening in front of us. I guess the overlap, too, on the agentic payment side would be with stable coins and ultimately which blockchains they're on. So it seemed to me like the base effort would be really well positioned to the extent that you start to see things really take off there is, okay, make a stable coin payment with this interface and actually have it settle down to base. Hopefully, that's ideal. And we're very involved in investing around the base ecosystem. We have a dedicated strategy around the base ecosystem fund. But something for Coinbase Ventures we're always keeping in mind is we're completely chained ecosystem agnostic.

We've made a bunch of Salon investments. Name your major ecosystem and we've probably made an investment there. So from a coin-based product strategy perspective, we definitely hope the base is a big part of it. If it happens to be on a different blockchain, that's great too. We'll continue investing against the theme. I want to double click maybe a little bit on the defy category that you brought up because it strikes me that if you live in a world where you get market structure clarity in this market where you have actual securities living on blockchains, the ability to have those securities

potentially on a defy rail where you could be taking out a loan against a base of equity assets or something like that would seem like a big opportunity. How do you guys think about that in terms of defy being more than just cryptocurrency bearer assets? I categorize the state of defy today in terms of users who are participating in the capital that is on chain as relatively contained to this enthusiast base. The positive is that these protocols and smart contracts have been battle tested in a pretty meaningful way. If we get clear market structure, clarity, two impacts.

One, we can actually get to a point of network ownership, which is part of the original point around a lot of these tokens. So governance plays a role, but if you can pass back economic value to the token holders in some way, then folks like you who have a traditional finance training can actually value these networks in some type of, I don't know, it's a DCF, but some type of sense called framework. So that will be interesting because we have protocols that are revenue generating and users can participate in the value that's being generated on the network. Specific to real-world assets and RWA's, my view is, hey, look, USDC, Tether, those are the first examples of really killer apps in the quote-unquote real world asset category.

There's still more regulatory gating around getting the big institutional capital pools to top and flow, but it is meaningfully moving forward in that direction. So I don't have a strong sense of how much is really gated on the specific knob in legislation, but it's moving forward is my sense. I think it would be great to live in a world where the concept of like a national exchange or just the way that equities are processed today can be rethunked to just contemplate a blockchain. And if we get to that end state, I think the sky's the limit in terms of the things that people will build there.

But yeah, I guess we need to see what the landscape does look like. Technically, it's all possible. I agree. Totally agree. Now, a lot of funds have this lens of either investing in infrastructure or applications. I'm a little skeptical that that's maybe the way to think about it. I think just more applications prove out that you need better infrastructure in certain categories and it's always cycling up.

But how do you guys think about that in terms of the portfolio and how many of the bets go at the infrastructure stage versus the end customer apps? Great question. We definitely invests across the stack. And even the definitions of what's infrastructure, what's an application is a bit fuzzy, is a stable coin custody and issuance platform infrastructure or not. I'd say our mix of investing has shifted more to the application layer, but that's a function of the progress that's been made on the infrastructure front over the past

call it two cycles. So we are at a place now where with L2s and alternate L1s that you are at some second transaction speed and some penny costs. So the limiting reagent to building applications, it just keeps coming down and down, embedded wallets, you could list off the different components. So it's just a function of now the tools are there to build really great applications. So we're spending more time there. But we're always open-minded. We're continuing to invest across both categories. And I don't think everything's solved on the infrastructure side either. It's a continual push. I guess you just always keep on

breaking stuff. Even my perception of the compliance software category, there are a bunch of things that work great when this industry is just Bitcoin and Ethereum. But when you're processing thousands of thousands of stablecoin transactions every minute, things start to break. For sure. And then how do you think about ledgering and eventually that stuff representing stable coins inside traditional banking systems? There's a whole ball of yarn of infrastructure problems that if you want to categorize them. That remained to be solved. So I saw that you guys recently announced something with Echo. Can you maybe talk a little bit more about what your efforts were there? I think that's a very promising platform.

Yeah, really excited about that. So stepping back, if we think about Coinbase is mission of increasing economic freedom and all the work we're doing. If we do our job right, at some point venture capital in general should be obsolete. We're all about open permissionless access to rewiring the financial system onto open permissionless networks. And capital formation is a part of that. So for Echo, we're part of them. We've stood up a base ecosystem group, which is effectively a syndicate for accredited investors to participate in the investments that we're making out of the base ecosystem fund. And it just comes back to our broad philosophy of we want to have more open community participation with all the right disclosures

and folks should know the risks of investing in startups. But I remember when I was earlier in my career and I'm negotiating an offer and I'm like, hey, I need to make sure I have the salary so I have the accredited investor checkbox so I can do angel investments. And if you think about it's so nonsensical, the rule set there has been adjusted for inflation. Does that make me any better or worse at picking early stage startups? And for me, it's a moral thing that I feel like just a huge amount of the population has been locked out of wealth creation because of originally well-intended rules that just need to be looked at and revisit it. So we're always pushing to figure out ways that we can expand participation, access the capital for builders and founders and

participation from the communities around the projects that want to invest in them. It was one of the really good things about the ICO era. I mean, people like to look upon that era with disdain in a lot of ways, but some of it was, look, fundamentally speaking, you can have retail investors that are not accredited participating in the upside here and really democratizing it. So it's a shame we threw away the baby with the bathwater on the ICOs, I think. Yeah, I agree. I always joke that the Ethereum ICO is the best venture investment of all time, probably, if you're involved in that first funding. But I do think that on this topic, to avoid the negative externalities of the ICO era, things do need to be complemented with proper disclosures and transparency and reducing

information asymmetry, and then it's buyer beware, but have all the information that everyone should be participating with like an even playing field of information around the projects. Totally, which is why I think a market structure bill is so important. And I guess that's a good dovetail to where I want to go next, just around regulatory clarity. So Coinbase has been remarkably out front on this, probably because it was existential to some degree, but your CLO recently testified to Congress about choke point 2.0. what's your take on where we stand right now in terms of choke point and some of the issues that are

facing the startups that you're investing in? So specifically to choke point, I give first major props to Nick. The first time I heard about choke point two bono, I think was a Nick Carter tweet. So kudos to y'all for being in front of it. Look, during the last administration and when choke point 2.0 is happening, I was getting calls from founders that were like I woke up and I don't have access to my bank account. And it's bad. It's just not a good look for the rule of law, for the, that things we often take for granted in operating in the United States and from a business perspective. And what I tell a lot of my friends who aren't living and breathing crypto or even care about is, look, if this can happen to an entrepreneur that happened to start a business in crypto,

that just happened to be politically unfavored in a moment, think about any disfavored minority group. That amount of unchecked authoritarian power is not good. So kudos y'all for making noise and bringing it to the forefront. And definitely kudos to Paul and team for pushing forward on the. issue. I know Nick has his three checkbox wish list for how do we end Joe H.O.2.9. I think we've checked one. I don't think it's over yet. But in general, the regulatory regime tone on DC, it's 180 degree flip from where we were this time last year. The tone is much more constructive. And I'm optimistic that we'll continue checking the boxes to avoid that happening for founders

in our industry. It's just remarkable how fast things are going, not just on the choke point side, where you have the OCC and the FDIC coming out and taking real concrete measures, I'd say, but also on the stable coin bill. It seems like that's moving at lightning speed. I'd like to see the market structure bill move faster. If I think about what founders in our portfolio we're talking about, it's definitely bank accounts. It's definitely stable coin bill. And then the next thing is just, okay, definition of these things, are they securities, are they commodities? How do you trade them? What do we need to do in order to be compliance if they're a security versus a commodity? Curious what that conversation looks like in your

portfolio. It's very much the same. And security, commodity, or other discussion around the whole taxonomy around these things. No, I 100% agree. Stable coin legislation moving fast, I think, is partly a function of there's just brought bipartisan agreement around it. It touches both sides. If you want U.S. dollar hegemony and maintaining the world reserve currency status, it's nonsensical to not want programmable digital dollars everywhere. But I 100% agree with you. And it's important for market structure, legislation specifically to land so that the rules of the road are durable because Washington's a pendulum and things will swing one way or the other. So it's a very optimistic time in terms of how constructive the tone is. There's still a lot of work to be done on the policy

and the legislation front. When I think about the role of the SEC and one of their prongs of promoting capital formation, I won't make you on the record here, but I look at this and just say, look, if you're trying to stifle innovation here over the past few years, great job. Well done. You've basically created this environment where crypto-related companies would have an impossible time going public. You've created a situation where M&A becomes next to impossible because of this lack of regulatory clarity. But even more so, and people don't talk about this one as much, is you've just made the barrier to starting one of these companies so high from a personal risk perspective. Think about what it would take to start something like file coin a year ago under the Gensler SEC. You'd have to actually be a

crazy person to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and take that much personal risks. You've just seen these categories that have been just underfunded from an innovation perspective. It's super frustrating. You can argue that the meme coin cra is a function of, hey, the energy is going to go to the place that you said is all clear to go, whether that's sensible or not. I do think it was pretty interesting during the last regime, is that innovation doesn't stop. So we continue to see great founders building, but the tragedy was there saying, okay, now I have to extract the U.S. from my business plan or I have to domicile in Dubai or Singapore. And so it's the U.S.'s chance to get it right. And it's the U.S.'s ball to lose. I don't think crypto and this

secular trend we're on is anti-fragile by design. And it's not going to stop in its tracks by any one nation state. But we want to keep the talent, the energy, the capital innovation onshore. Now's our shop to get the frameworks right. Yeah, that was definitely a trend that we were seeing in terms of even U.S.-based entrepreneurs deciding to move abroad, move to the Middle East, move to London. Starting to see that turnaround a little bit, which I think is good. Agreed. Definitely.

Good for my travel schedule too. You're not on plans as much, maybe anymore. But look, overall, this is a huge market. Capital markets in the U.S. Second to none. And so if we can get it right here, it stands to reason that a lot of these businesses should just be built in the U.S. Agreed.

And having a system of model that's also adaptive because part of the challenge is, when When I first read the Bitcoin White Paper, I was like, man, this is something that has never existed before. And it just clicked in my brain that all these rules and institutions that have been set up in the 1930s, they're not going to be able to digest or process this. So we have to set up rules that also just account for the fact that this is an adaptive, changing thing. And that list of 12 classifications for a token, someone's going to come up with the 15th version of it, to having the ability for the rule set to also just adapt to the reality of what is happening with the technology. That would be a great thing. It's unclear to me that the regulatory regime works that way in terms of

just take a blank piece of paper and design this the way it ought to be designed. But in crypto, maybe there is some interesting opportunities to do that because there hasn't been an existing market structure. It's not the type of thing where banks and broker dealers have been running crypto businesses for the past 20, 25 years. And there is this unique opportunity probably in the next couple of years to build rules that work and can actually scale and not be relying on Orange Grove theory around securities laws dictating how a cryptocurrency is going to work. It just seems insane. Maybe I'm a little too optimistic, but I'll hope. I think there's a reason for optimism. I've been reading the SEC has this website where the Crypto Task Force is documenting who's come in and

spoken to them. And some of the documentation there is around what people are asking for, what people are proposing. And it's a really refreshing thing to see that those meetings are actually happening. I don't agree with everyone's posture, but the fact that they're even talking to people and soliciting input is something that I just haven't seen that in the last four years. Agreed. It's really a 180 from just being totally stonewalled and not receptive to hearing, to, okay, actually come in and let's understand what you're doing, develop common base of understanding. Going back to your SEC, mission comment, when I look at the mission statement, there was a point, I think it was 2022, 2023, meant every prong of this if you wanted to invert.

You're not protecting consumers. FTCS happens, Celsius happened. You're limiting the rate of capital formation, every prong was inverted, and now it looks like the polarity switch, which is great. Totally great at that. Well, I want to pick your brain here on what people are calling the Coinbase Mafia. It just seems like there's a ton of people that have done a tour of duty at Coinbase and gone on to great things. So how do you guys think about that? What's going on with that? Is that a focus area for you investing in some of these offshoots? So I think it's one of the really remarkable things about Coinbase and the culture and the DNA. So some fun facts, I think there have been over 100 startups now started by Coinbase.

alums, we've invested in about half of them. And Koymase really is a talent factory. It's a talent hub. First, there's an incredibly high hiring bar and the kind of folks that self-select to be here generally have a long-term view on crypto, generally are bias for action builders. And it's a great place to come do your graduate degree in crypto. And also, you have to get along with people, figure out how to work on a team, move from an idea to action. And so I think the time that folks spend at Coinbase is really good training for going to start your own thing. If you have that entrepreneurial bent. And we've seen a list like dozens of projects. So Dan Romero, Farcaster, Jacob, Corrin, Zora, Zach at Bridge, list goes on and on. So yeah, to answer your

question, when we started, there definitely was a, hey, let's back the great folks. Part of my job is being Coinbase Alumni Relations. So we put it that way. And we're going to continue to do that. And I think it's one of the long-term, really unique things about Coinbase. Emily always says talents are number one operating priority. And I've seen it lived out. Well, that's great that it sounds like it's a culture that starts at the top. It's been great to see Coinbase executives, Brian, especially step out in the front after FTX and really start to speak for the industry. And I give a lot of credit to Paul as well, just on the regulatory front. So it's good to have some of our best actors speaking so publicly as opposed to what turns out to be some of our

worst actors over the past couple of years. Appreciate it. And I'll really stress from being in those conversations, we're all really doing it for behalf of the industry. There's a broader call to action around it versus just what's specifically of local optimized interest for Coinbase. So getting into tornado cash, if you're a random Coinbase shareholder, you're probably like, why is that the topic that you're focused on? But there are, I think, a set of uniting principles for positive actors in this space. And we want to make sure that the ability to catalyze innovation broadly in the ecosystem is preserved. And then I get to meet the great founders who are capitalizing it and hopefully try to invest in them. Well, you guys keep on going at this pace. I think.

you'll need a separate callout in the 10K. It seems like there's a ton of embedded value here. So I think it's awesome what you guys are doing. No comment. Yeah. Pooley, this has been great. Really appreciate you taking the time. You guys are definitely up to some exciting stuff and really excited to just see where this goes. I think you guys are doing a great job for the ecosystem. So appreciate you coming on the podcast. Appreciate it, Matt. And likewise, when I first saw Castle Island Ventures being informed, you guys were social proof for me to go to some folks and say, hey, there's some buttoned up legit traditional finance people doing crypto. I'm not that crazy. I appreciate everything

you guys are doing too. I appreciate it. And thanks again for coming on. Cool. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island. Visit castle island.vc. 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.