On The Brink with Castle Island - Josh Frank (The Tie) on Crypto Market Intelligence (EP.638)

Episode Date: June 26, 2025

Josh Frank, the founder and CEO of The Tie joins the show. In this episode we discuss: The origin story behind The Tie and how Josh approached founding the business. The digital asset data market. How sentiment data has evolved in the digital asset industry. The buy-side landscape for digital assets and how Josh sees that evolving in the coming years. The Canton Network and how The Tie is working with this new protocol. To learn more about The Tie visit their website. 

Today in the show, I sat down with Josh Frank, the founder and CEO of The Tie, a company building a market intelligence platform for digital assets. This was a fun conversation that touched on the history of the tie, a deep dive on some current events, as well as some prognostications for what's ahead for the industry. I think you'll enjoy this one. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Josh Frank from the tie. 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 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. 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 the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Well, Josh, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me on. We'd love to just start with a little bit of your background and maybe an overview of the tie. I mean, my background is not the most exciting thing in the world, but graduated college in 2017, started working in post-trade settlement technology, which is riveting. Basically spent my first few months resetting people's passwords, learning Swift actually, so I did know Swift, which is also riveting. But as you can tell, you know, it wasn't the most excited about that. And this was like 2017, this is when you had a bunch of influencers on Twitter talking about whatever nonsense coins. I love to give an example of John McAfee, right, where he would

just tweet out some random token, and it would go up by like 300% in five minutes. You had all these nonsensical ICOs launching. I mean, I'm sure you remember some of these, but Siren Labs that raised $80 million to launch your phone never did. You had Dentacoin, hit a billion in market cap. So you had all of this utter and complete nonsense, you know, and lack of fundamentals. I was sitting at my job, board and was like, okay, somebody needs to build a platform to make sense of this nonsense. And so started as a sentiment data company, actually originally is a free-to-use. Retail platform was just me when I started, actually hired another 22-year-olds in Pakistan because that's all I could afford. My co-founder joined me and didn't take any salary nine months later,

didn't raise any capital, kind of got off the ground, trying to build a free-to-use retail platform, and really kicked our tires for a long time, didn't have any clue what we were doing. We're not able to raise capital. We tried. I actually think I brought up to Nick in like 2018, but really couldn't find anything for a few years. And then starting late 2019, 2020, we saw institutions were coming in, and we saw that there was a demand for really more holistic view on information in crypto. And so we launched kind of our first institutional product, started to gain traction, really gained a lot of traction, started to bring on institutions, you know, created a couple different products. And then in 2021, we got approached by one of the top five Silicon Valley or

even higher VCs who came out and offered us a term sheet. We were even thinking about raising and then kind of got the ball rolling of like, okay, maybe there's something here that it's really scalable, went out and did kind of a strategic raise and then have kind of been off to the races since then. We're now about 80 or so people, profitable business, doing a lot of different things. But our core is really operating an all-in-one platform for institutions to stay on top of the crypto market. So the idea today is that if you walk into the office of a hedge fund and you ask them how they're staying on top of crypto, and I'm sure you guys suffer from this as well, you look at their screen. They have 72 different browser tabs open across four different screens.

Our goal has always been to consolidate all the information that an institution wants to see into a single screen. So market data, derivatives data, sentiment data, blockchain data, news, private company, research, fundraising data, you name it, all on a single console interface. And today we service hundreds of the largest institutions operating in the space. The sentiment data has always been fascinating to me. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the contrast between how traditional finance uses that type of data and then who's really doing it well in the crypto space.

Do you see buyside allocators harnessing that sentiment data? It should be used the same. It shouldn't matter if you're a crypto fund or you're a traditional fund. You should be using sentiment data the same. I think point and click trading based off of sentiment data is not necessarily the best idea. I think there's two ways to look at it, right? It's the short term making a trade right now versus the long term looking at sentiment and community as a fundamental.

And I think in crypto, from a long term perspective, it can be viewed differently than equity markets where sentiment and community can be fundamental. But as it relates to short-term trading, the folks that are making money trading our sentiment data are the same exact folks making money, trading sentiment data and equity markets. Think of it as being like the largest traditional quantitative hedge funds, the Chicago prop trading firms, things like that. They're not even running at this point trading strategies purely based off our sentiment data. They're running existing trend following models that are maybe augmented with sentiment data or sentiment data is a factor in that model. If you see, for example, that there's a really big spike in sentiment on an asset over a

five-minute period, that doesn't necessarily mean that every time sentiment goes up, you should buy. It's not that simple of a relationship, obviously. When I think about short-term, I think about sentiment as being really useful for systematic trading. And then as it relates to long-term, I think sentiment is obviously incredibly important. And we've seen that play out with a lot of assets. And, you know, for example, chain link early on before they had a lot of fundamentals, they had these link Marines that were, you know, all over 4chan and that really blew up chain link, right? And then you had the XRP community, which is massively large, which obviously there's a ton of fundamentals behind Ripple at this point and they're buying a lot of assets, but that community has been what

kept XRP and Ripple afloat for so long, right? And so I think from a long-term perspective, I think it's very important to not understand, to me, sentiment doesn't matter so much. It's more how many people are talking about an asset, how that's growing over time, how many unique people And are those real human beings or are they bots? Because a lot of people are going to try to bot activity. That's what I was going to ask next is, I mean, there's so many cases over the history of crypto where you're like, this is just clearly a bot. You remember BitConnect and some of these more scam, fraudulent tokens during that ICO run up. That's got to be part of the secret sauce. Still one of the best videos in crypto history, though, the Big Connect. All time.

All time video. But I guess just parsing through like who's real. I guess even in the XRP case, there was a time where it was like, this can't be real. But it does seem to really be an organic following. I think it's also important to understand that not everything happens on Twitter. I think oftentimes we kind of misconstrue the fact being in the U.S. that all of activity happens on Twitter, a lot of the support for some assets like, you know, XRP and Cardano has come out of Japan. And Japanese investors have much more of a holder mentality than like Korea and other markets in that region. And so when they're buying assets, they're not necessarily trying to flip them right away, right? And so I think it's important to understand that community

extends beyond social or it at least extends beyond what's happening on Twitter as well. There was a bot activity. Honestly, it's kind of very easy to weed out. I mean, you can look at followers, you can look at how long an account's been around for. You can look at its history. But the easiest way, and I'm sure you do this, if you go look at account, it has 400,000 followers to token and no one you know follows them, that's not real. Probably a bot. We actually have this feature on our platform that we call the ape fluencer. And what the ape fluencer basically does, we track like the top few hundred VCs and hedge funds on Twitter. We basically trying to look at what they're following in real time to basically identify what are the hottest projects. You know,

what are the top projects right now? What's new? What's trending? As ways to like from a venture perspective, like, okay, I want to find a project earlier. So let me see like what's trending earlier. And then from more of a trading perspective, okay, obviously over the last few months, hyperliquid was followed by everyone and it blew up. So things like that as well. We do that a lot too, is just looking at who our peers are starting to follow. Definitely seems like, at least from a venture perspective, that's a good way to just stay on top of who's leaving a company who's going into stealth mode. Yeah, we actually track who is the first follow of project. So like, who was the first person to discover hyperliquid? Who is the first person to discover whatever else? And what's funny is you can

start to find like patterns. And look, obviously some of these accounts follow 10,000 people. There's a great assault there because they're kind of just following everyone. We haven't really gamified it so much to figure out like who is really finding things earliest, but I'm sure we could back into that, which would be kind of interesting. When you think about just the total market size for trading crypto today, I'd imagine that you guys have some maybe forward indicators around firms that might start by just buying a subscription, and then you look two years later, they're in market doing something commercially. Just curious what your views are just on where the market is today.

And if you see green shoots of new firms starting to enter the space. It's always the institutions are coming in crypto. That's just, it's always the narrative. And so, you know, when you talk about like, okay, who's trading crypto? The thing we have to remember, crypto is still really small. Bitcoin is very liquid, right? And you can trade size. Ethereum is liquid and you could trade size.

Solana is liquid and you can trade size maybe XRP and a few other assets. But once you start going beyond that list, you can't really trade size, right? You can't trade anything meaningful. And so if you think about like a $50 billion hedge fund, right, if a $50 billion hedge fund is like, okay, I want to launch a crypto hedge fund, what is the most? the amount of money you could think about launching your crypto head fund with if you're trading very actively. Maybe $250 million, maybe $500 million, but like once you start getting beyond that number, there's diminishing returns, there's scalability constraints with the strategy. And so let's say

they start with $100 million. $50 billion fund on management fees alone is making it close to a billion dollars or a billion dollars. If they take that $100 million and they double it, great, they made $20 million. That's 2% of what they're making on their management fee. You start to do the math and you're like, okay, well, is it really worth it for these very large firms and funds to start trading crypto? What we've seen with a lot of these firms is some of them are trading crypto out of their GP. So if they're trading partners capital, it's a little bit of a different situation. But a lot of them are trading, you know, CME and they're trading the ETF and they're doing the basis between the two or doing some active trading around the Bitcoin ETF and stuff like that.

But in terms of like large traditional funds coming in and actively trading a large number of assets that are spot crypto, I still think that's kind of a dream. scenario that we haven't hit yet. There are some. I would say the Chicago prop trade. I mean, anyone prop. If you're prop, you can do it. So there are a lot of five, 10 billion dollar funds that converted into prop trading firms that are now trading crypto. But the challenge is once you start putting LP money on the line, it's like, okay, is it worth making $20 million, but potentially I lose the sovereign wealth fund of this country's money. And they pull $3 billion out of my main fund, right? And so that's kind of the challenge that I think we're seeing in terms of like real widespread

institutions actually buying spot crypto. I see that too. And I wonder if just valuation methodology and frameworks are going to be required in order to really expand the pie because it's one thing to just trade CME basis trades on Bitcoin. That's a pretty straightforward trade. I'm not even talking about fundamental investing. I'm talking about even systematic, non-directional stuff. Like there's not enough liquidity on a lot of this, right?

So let's remove the idea that crypto could be worth. something, just the fact that, like, look, a fund is going to trade something if it's liquid and it's volatile. If something is liquid and volatile, funds are going to be interested in trading it because they can make money on it. The market is just not liquid enough yet, I think. If we do get broadly agreed upon fundamentals, I think that's very important because that does mean that fundamental funds can buy and fundamental funds can buy it a lot more size. I mean, we see that with some crypto funds like multi-coin has a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, but that hedge fund's not trading assets every minute, every hour, even every day or every week.

they're trading relatively infrequently. And I think the crossover funds would be good examples of this where a lot of the big crossover funds were actually taking positions in 2021 in crypto. A lot of them were doing like locked treasury deals with foundations where they would buy like 200 million in locked polygon or avalanche or whatever the asset is. I think that's a little bit different. To me, that's more like liquid investing than it is trading. So what do you think it takes to change those dynamics around liquidity? Is it, hey, big exchanges need to be more in the game here? I've been saying this for a while. I think it's ETFs. So I think once you start getting both single and multi-asset ETFs, I think that's incredibly important. I don't think single-name ETFs are going to perform that well. Maybe, but like I think it's more multi-asset ETFs, right? Like when you have an asset that enters the S&B 500, all of a sudden, it gets a bid, and it gets a bid, and it gets a bid, and then you get people that are looking at exposure to crypto. Maybe they're not.

not going to buy a single asset, but maybe they're going to buy this bucket of assets. But on the other hand, you're also going to have a ton of demand for that product among crypto funds that want to short it because right now it's really difficult to go long a single asset versus the rest of the market. And so if you have a product where you can actually go and you can put on size to short that product and take long single asset exposure, I think that's incredibly compelling. Well, I guess you have the ETFs, but you also have these public access vehicles now that are popping up in the market. It's just a weird market on the public side.

It's feeling frothy. What's your take on that? How long does that continue, these sort of micro-strategy clones? I'm not an expert at everyone's liquidation price and how levered everyone is and stuff like that. It feels like, and you've been around for a long time, right? I mean, you remember when Kodak was launching a blockchain minor, when Long Island Is T, re-read it to Long Island blockchain, these types of things, and I'm not saying these aren't more substantive because I think they are slightly more substantive, but they feel similar to me. When you take like a dead public company or somebody's like, I'm going to take a crypto company

that's losing $20 million a year. I'm going to spack it at a billion dollar valuation. I'm going to then take the proceeds and buy Bitcoin. We've seen a few examples of this. It feels like frothy activity. It's eye-opening that the convert market is just wide open for business on these type of things. Because on one level, you look at it and you say it feels frothy.

And the other side, you look at and you say, well, there's really not a world where Siler gets stomped out, at least based on what he's done so far. He's not taking the Bitcoin and taking out a cash loan against it. Well, I'm not even talking about seller. I'm talking about once you start doing this with other less liquid and more volatile assets, right? When you start launching like, we've seen some of these other assets that get, I think there might be an Athena one now.

And I'm not suggesting Athena is, you know, there's anything wrong with Athena. But I'm just saying broadly like once you start getting like a public company buying asset number 25 by market cap, that asset's super volatile. You have one large investor who dumps and then all of a sudden that entire thing gets liquidated. It's a really interesting time. I want to talk a little bit about enterprise software market over the course of the years that you've been in the industry. Obviously, this was probably a case where four years ago heading into the

Gensler SEC, we thought there's going to be a world where banks and broker dealers are able to play in this market. Obviously, post-FTX, that didn't happen. And so that buyer base for a lot of enterprise software, let's say, has been neglected and not part of the market. Curious how you think about some of the businesses in our space that are enterprise focused trying to sell into those channels. The challenge we've seen, you had in 2021, a lot of companies raised at four, six, $8 billion valuation because they had incredible growth rate and they had material ARR, but they were trading at in some cases 100 times forward ARR, which is insane in retrospect. It was insane in that. It's still insane in retrospect. I think the challenge is you see a lot of these businesses,

and I'm sure you're looking at this, right, where you look at a wallet startup and you're like, okay, well, who's the biggest player in this space? What is the revenue number they had? have they stalled? How much are they growing? If you look at compliance software, who's the largest player? Have they stalled? Are they growing? It feels like a lot of crypto SaaS businesses. And I'm not commenting on any business individually. This isn't a dig at any individual business. Correct me if I'm mistaken. I don't think there's anyone above 200 to max 250 million in ARR from a SaaS perspective. And to call some of the things, ARR, I think is also a stretch because sometimes it's consulting and stuff like that. Right. And so I think there's this like a natural limitation we've seen in terms of how

many firms you can actually sell into, how much demand there is. And I'm not saying in a specific vertical. I'm saying across verticals, right? I mean, from a data perspective, we see the same thing, right? Like, we see all these new data companies popping up. And I'm like, okay, guys, that's great. Like, competition is great, but, you know, the pie isn't growing, right? And so it's not like you can make that much money, because if you think about crypto-native funds, crypto-VCs do tend to have more capital than the average hedge fund does. I would guess the average crypto hedge fund is 20 million in a U.M. And on a 220 model, you're talking to have $400,000 a year in management fees, by the time they pay themselves an analyst, their fund admin, their custodian,

they're actually going out of pocket on the GP. And so the thought that, even though there's so many funds out there that you can actually build a business, you know, everyone's like, oh, you guys are kind of like Bloomberg and you're going to overtake them. I'm like, if we were trying to sell $26,000 a year, $28,000 a year software per install, there's like 10 companies in crypto that can afford to buy that, right? And so it's very different, right, versus selling into a $50 billion fund that has a billion a year amount. You're talking 400 grand, a year-in-madvent fees versus a billion dollars in your management fees. It's obviously very different. We're still seeing kind of this limited constraint size on the more SaaS-A-R-type businesses.

I think with things like stable coins where I know you guys are very active investors, I think that obviously creates huge unlocks and brings new players in. I think in terms of people looking to buy crypto-specific software, I think that market is still capacity and trade. And I think as much as we'd like to trade out at 100x multiple and others would, And I think investors have to look at it and be like, okay, well, realistically, like, there is a cap on Tam. And unless that grows, the cap on what you can sell is, it's there. It's crazy to think about the past few years and just how the cap on Tam was really regulatory-driven. Sab 121 going in in 2022 effectively just knee-capped all of the banks, right?

It's hard for me to think about an analogy there where an entire market, which is obviously a huge buyer of data, just got eliminated by the stroke of a pen by one guy at the SEC. It'll just be really interesting to see over the next couple of years. I also just wonder about the market structure in crypto, where in traditional markets, the exchanges would be monetizing their market data at a very aggressive clip. And right now, that's just not the case in crypto. There's one exchange that's really actively trying to sell their market data. I mean, it's a big publicly listed U.S. company.

You also have to remember that in crypto, there's a million different exchanges, there's a million different venues. Liquidity is spread across a lot more venues than I think is within traditional market. So if you want NASDAQ data, you got to go to the NASDAQ, but in crypto, you just have a million different markets. So I think that just naturally, I just don't think they have as much power as traditional. And also keep in mind, even if they wanted to charge, what are they going to get? $2 million versus the amount of volume that they're generating on the exchange, it's probably

not worth it. And if you risk trying to charge a market maker for data, then the market makers like screw you and go somewhere else, you're probably foregoing a lot more revenue than you would have made otherwise. It's unclear who the sustainable long-term winners are in the trading space. And so I guess as that becomes more clear, we'll see more experimentation and trying to monetize. I'm sure people will charge for data. I mean, I was talking to one of the large index providers the other day, tradfine index providers, they were like, yeah, this crypto exchange asked us to pay this amount of money and this percentage of things for our data. So like screw you and we just remove them from our

index and no one cares. It's still such a nascent market from that perspective. What are you seeing from buyside participants in terms of looking at network data and token unlock schedules and things like that in order to understand the market? I think it really depends on who the firm is. I think one of the challenges that we have in crypto is that no one agrees what fundamentals are. And if I asked you what fundamentals were 10 years ago or five years ago or three years ago or 10 days ago, you might give me a different answer than you're giving me now, right? And this is partially why we build a platform that kind of has everything, which is also

a problem because it confuses people because there's too much to look at. The challenge is like, what do people agree fundamentals are? I think unlocks are pretty easy to understand because like if there are 50 tokens that are live and tomorrow there are going to be 200 tokens that are live, one might assume that the price is going to go down. So I think things like that are easy to understand. But I think one of the challenges, and we spoke about this before we started, if you think about what is fundamental for a tech stock, that might be very different than what is fundamental for a food and beverage company. Like obviously you have EBDA and you have core top line metrics, there's very different things and very different. Look at the multiple that Tesla

trades at an obscene multiple, right? And so fundamentals do matter, but I think we also need to start understanding like as we look at different sectors of crypto, what are the fundamentals that we need to look at to understand each sector? So your question was, what a buy side firm's looking at now? The unfortunate answer is it really depends. I do think there's a lot more demand for network level metrics now, how many people are using networks, how many transactions are there on networks, what are the fees that are generated, how much does it cost to transact? But people are also starting to get a lot smarter because like, okay, imagine you're looking at a D5 protocol that's got $4 billion in TVL.

Investors have historically looked at is how much TVL they have, but now people are starting to peel back the onion and they're like, okay, what is their customer concentration risk? You would never invest in us if 90% of our revenue is coming from one customer, but if 90% of our revenue is coming from our top 15 customers, that'd be a different story. We're starting with kind of high-level fundamentals, but I think the sophisticated investors are starting to peel back the onion more and more and more and understanding customer concentration, understanding user retention data, or these applications even retaining users. I mean, I think one of the biggest things is understanding fundamentals post-incentives, right? Because all these

projects have amazing fundamentals until their incentive period ends, and then no one's still using it. The more sophisticated folks are starting to peel back the onion, but obviously our clients range dramatically. Like a lot of our clients are very, very, very active event-driven traders. And so for them, fundamentals don't matter. It's really like, okay, Coinbase just listed this asset. Buy. Yeah, it's like the liquidity landscape moves the needle way more than the marginal

user coming on board and adopting the product in a lot of cases. With relatively illiquid assets, you're also going to see things move that don't make sense. And as much as we want to understand them from a, look, I do think things converge around fundamentals eventually. And I think they should. I mean, that's what we're building what we're building. But it takes agreed upon fundamentals and also like a penny stock might not trade based off its fundamentals, right? And crypto does trade like penny stocks or a lot of these assets do.

I guess with some regulatory clarity, we'll see more experimentation around just what the tokens do in some of these networks. And we'll start to think about this maybe more from a DCF perspective on some of these networks, which also leads to the question of how should investor relations be handled by some of these projects? It seems like it's somewhat non-existent in big parts of the market. Curious what your views are there. The challenge is everyone was so afraid of the SEC that we concocted all of these ridiculous models that we tried to justify around. Let's have a foundation and a Dow and a for-profit entity and this and of that. And decentralization is really just, it's mostly just created messes

and confusion and it's like who's in charge of what? Like if you're an investor and you want to learn more about a top 20 protocol that's pretty decentralized, who do you go to? Who do you talk to? Like, there's kind of no standardization in who to actually communicate with. And so I think there are a lot of things that need to happen there. We're doing a lot of work to help kind of roadshow projects in front of institutions and connect them to different folks and build bridges because we have a really good map and understanding of obviously we serve as hundreds of institutions, but we also know all the big projects.

But I think it's also a matter of the projects going out, whether working with us, and we've done a lot of work with projects to help them really surface their data and tell their narrative. But it doesn't necessarily need to be with us. it's with anyone else, you go on Apple's IR website and you'll get details about Apple. You'll get quarterly reports. She'll be able to listen to earnings calls, right? When you go and you approach a protocol, you should be able to get the same thing.

If you're an investor and an asset, you should be getting information about that asset, what they're doing, what their roadmap is, how they're growing, how much revenue they're generating, what their cash flow is, all metrics like that. And I think also projects need to take control of their own narrative as well. Again, we were talking about this earlier. if you take three random assets, take Ethereum, hyperliquid, and one that we were talking about before, which isn't yet live on exchanges, but Canton,

all of those assets are very different. They're all going to have very different fundamentals. They can't be valued and viewed the same way. And so I think it's up to projects. We do a lot of work. We actually help projects kind of build dashboards and analytics to kind of tell their story, but it's up to projects to get the story out there that they want to get out there,

right? So take, for example, Avalanche. Avalanche has the C chain, but Avalanche also has all of the L-1s. And the problem is when you go on any public data site, you're actually only seeing about 5% of the activity on the Avalanche network. We launched a website called Frosty Metrics. It's a free to use website for the public.

Anyone can go on. We have a free API, MIT Open Storage. You can use it. You can access it. We've done a lot of work on actually supporting and indexing and storing the data on all the so that investors can actually get a more comprehensive picture because if you go and you're like, oh, I'm looking at Avalanche for Solana. If you're just looking at the C chain, it's just completely not reflective of everything

going on in the market. Right. And so my point being with all of this is I think from an IR perspective, protocols need to be more proactive. They should be hiring heads of investor relations or heads of institutional or whatever they want to call it. And then I think they need to be proactive about getting their narrative out there as well because it's their job to help investors understand their protocol. And investors don't want to talk to the CTO and the founding team because they don't understand what they're saying. And investors get to understand fundamentals. And also just managing your cap table, right? We have a big investor that's wanting to

get out of this position? How are we going to think about that in the context? You know, you would see that at a publicly traded company. Yeah, I don't want this investor dumping $100 million of my token on the market, especially if it's some VCs aren't necessarily, they're not traders, right? And so they don't necessarily know how to spread an order over a very long period of time. The last thing you want to do is call up an OTC desk and say, hey, I want to sell $100 million with this thing, right? Exactly. The other thing I think about in the context of these companies or protocols on a go-forward basis is what does it look like to exit from a protocol? I mean, we've seen ICO-era companies just sitting on a boatload of Ethereum with not shipping a product. The chain is still somewhat there. But at least

in the equity market, we'll see some exits, hopefully we'll see a lot more IPOs. I wonder if there's an M&A landscape that comes in the protocol side or if these things are just zombies for 20 years. I mean, I think it's also, who does the assets belong to? In my view, the assets that are being held by the treasury, the token holder should ultimately be able to get those assets back, which is not the case. I mean, there's so many ICOs that I'm sure your listeners don't even remember. I don't like calling out individual projects, but there's one I know of 2017 L1 ICO. They raised $100, something million in E. I think they're sitting on over a billion dollars in tokens on their balance sheet.

Their market cap maybe is $30 million or $50 million or something. There's no reason to ship a product. If the token doubles, it does nothing for them. All the investors benefited zero out of that. And I think actually, ARCA has historically been somewhat proactive on some of these things and submitted governance proposals and tried to, if I'm not mistaken, I think, started with an A, I'm blanked on the protocol that returned a bunch of tokens to their Aragon. I think they did, yeah.

I think they returned a bunch of tokens to their investors. And I think there should be more proactive governance as well, which I think will enable some of this. But in terms of M&A, I think there's also, you know, you have instances in which there are dead coins sitting on exchanges and there are new assets that are trying to get listed that can't access those markets. So if they could kind of spack into those tokens and bring value and token holder value into those assets and get access to markets, I mean, I think that's interesting. I think there's lots of very interesting things that can happen in crypto. And I think something is just need to permanently go to zero as well. It's natural in technology that a new version of

the technology comes across and you're no longer competitive. And the way that would typically work itself out is either you go out of business, declare bankruptcy, you get sold. But there's really not a mechanism for that in crypto, just kind of stick around. Again, I'm not trying to shit on projects, but like Bitcoin cash still exists and has a real market cap. Like, light coin still exists and has a real market cap. Like, it's just things just stick around in crypto despite having no.

And that's why earlier, you know, I talked about the importance of community. Maybe there are fundamentals behind like coin. I don't know. Maybe there is. And it's cheaper Bitcoin. I know that's what people have said historically, right? But like, or Bitcoin Cash or even BSV still has some level of a market cap, right? Which is incredible. Yeah. Incredible. If you haven't claimed and sold your BSV, if you had old Bitcoin, I implore you to. I don't even know if it's still

listed anywhere. I don't think it's still listed anywhere. But that's why community matters, because community can keep dead projects alive in crypto. You mentioned Canton. How do you think about that market opportunity to go into more traditional regulated financial services firms? and give them some of the privacy features they're looking for. Seems to be a lot of demand there from some of the participants that are looking at an ecosystem like that. Yeah, for anyone who doesn't know the backstory behind Kenton, just to provide a little backstory. So digital asset is a company that was kind of started or spun out of DRW about 10 years ago or so. And over the last 10 years, they developed a smart contract language called Damol.

And they had be 50 or more different enterprises, including Goldman Sachs and Broadridge and TradeWeb and other big names that were basically building private permissioned blockchains on top of Dammal. And so they introduced something called the Canton Network, which basically enables the separate private blockchains to communicate. So imagine on one hand, you have Goldman's node. And the other hand, you have J.P. Morgans. In order for those two to communicate, Goldman would have historically had to actually run a node for J.P. Morgan on their private blockchain.

And J.P. Morgan would have had to run a node for Goldman in their private blockchain. And so you had these private blockchains, but they couldn't take advantage of interoperability. And so what Canton introduces is what's called a global synchronizer that allows these private permission chains to communicate with one another. A lot of the thesis was that there would be a lot of demand. So if Bank One wants to make a trade with Bank two and they want to settle that trade with the Fed and said settlement instructions to another counterparty, they could do that. The reason privacy is so important is because in financial markets, you know, with Swift and other things, most transactions are bilateral, right? It's not, if you're Goldman and you're making a transaction, you probably don't want to

be broadcasting the world what's in that transaction. And so with transactions on Cantonon, the only thing that is public is the amount of Canton coin that's used in the transaction and the two parties. So we know that party A made a transaction with party B. And this much Canton was using the transaction. But for example, if you're transacting a lot of stable coins, there's complete privacy on that transaction. Right. So party A sent $500 million in stable coins to party B. You wouldn't know that. You would just know that there was $1 in Canton coin used for that transaction, there is a increasingly large amount of demand for privacy, particularly in stablecoin transactions. And I think there's even some regulatory requirements in some cases.

Folks like Broadridge that have been out in pretty big advocates for Canton, they're doing trillions in trillions in repo transactions per month on their permission subnet on Canton. But they and among others are excited about the global synchronizer, which is going to enable this cross-node communication. And I apologize if that wasn't a perfect explanation. I think it's a really good explanation. I think the stable coin, private transactions is just clearly, there's so much demand in the market for that, even at a retail level, right? You think about international payroll use cases and not wanting everyone that works at the same company to know what their cubicle made is getting paid. I think there's just some

or just like even like inner company transfers. We're sending money to ourselves. We don't want to see that. Or like market makers sending funds to exchange, they don't want people to see what they're sending to exchanges is people are trading based off of that information and stuff like that. Right. So I think there is a real use case in demand for privacy that's not trying to evade regulations or sanctions. It's just you want to have privacy and transactions. I mean, you don't know how much money banks are sending each other and how much money I'm sending to my bank account or anything else.

So why should that be public? What was it that got you so excited about building products and services in that ecosystem? Was it just that you saw that there was a herd coming here? There's going to be a need for data information about this blockchain? I give a lot of credit to the DA team for getting me excited about what they're doing. And like, obviously, we're very close with a lot of the other participants in the network, and we have been for a while. And so it's talking to some of these financial institutions that have 80 engineers working on building on Dammel.

And you're like, oh, wow, like there's real people that are deploying real resources into this ecosystem and have been doing it for a while. I think that was partially it. We're just very close to a lot of the participants in the network, like Cumberland and a bunch of the banks and others. And so got excited. And we've been active on the network since TestNet. So we've been active for a while. And it was also exciting to feel like we were getting it on the ground floor with something

that I think is a big opportunity. All right, Josh, I feel like we could talk for hours here. And this is so fascinating. But maybe just as we wrap this up, you've built a business that's profitable, which congratulations. Very few people are doing that in crypto. But how have you thought about that decision versus raising venture dollars and curious just what's next for the tie over the next couple of years?

I think that actually goes back to our question around SaaS Tam in crypto. The question is, if you raise more money, is there a buy? for that business. And I think there are a lot of companies, for example, in our space that have overraised, that raised at $300,400 million dollar valuations at very large multiples of their revenue. And so, for one, I've been of the view of I'm only going to raise once I know that the outcome for my investors is going to be big enough to justify another raise. We raise it 100. If I'm going to raise at 400, I want to make sure that my investors get out at least a billion. There's a return for them. I think that's partially it. But I think the other thing, too, is probably the most valuable

insight I have. But I've learned over the last eight years of doing this that in crypto, sometimes it's not the best thing to chase the traditional valuation metric that all investors care about, like SaaS, A-R, GRR, N-R, R, R, R, R, R, R, R, R-F-10, all of those different metrics. Those are obviously important metrics, but they shouldn't define your entire strategy as a founder. If there's an opportunity to make money, even it's wacky and weird, take it. Your job is to maximize shareholder value, And so I think part of the reason we've been able to build a profitable business is because we've been very, very flexible. I think we're lucky because we don't have a giant mandate from our shareholders to do one

thing or the other. We don't really have investors on our cap table. And so we've been able to do wacky things. I mean, we have very large positions in tokens. In some cases, we're doing deals that have zero cash components. They're all token. We're taking a ton of upside. We're doing call options with tokens.

We're doing all sorts of wacky stuff to make money. But we've learned that sometimes in crypto, you kind of have to do that in order. to make money versus if we just tried to sell in 751st, it doesn't move the needle enough in terms of growing a business. In terms of what's next for us, the biggest thing for us has always been the terminal, right? That's kind of our core. We have this terminal and that enables the rest of our businesses, right? Because we have this amazing terminal product, other companies want to license our data and build products using our data. So now we have a lot of new crypto protocols that are using our data as part of the protocols that they're building, or we have exchanges that are

licensing our data, or we can do connectivity between with institutions for tokens and different things like that. And so for me, it's always been the terminal. And so for me, in terms of where we're going, I think one of the biggest takeaways that we've had, we built by far the most complicated product in crypto. We've overcomplicated crypto data. I mean, we've built a product that's akin to a FACSetter Bloomberg type experience for crypto with, by the way, an incredible amount of customizable ability. So users can not only use the platform, but they can actually access all of our raw data in SQL. They can build their own components. They can pipe in external data and Python. So imagine you wanted to use coin metrics data and the Thai data and Amber Data data

and FlipSide data all in a single thing. You could do that, which is incredibly useful. We've realized we were letting our five power users drive our strategy for our thousands of regular users. And so what we've really been focused on as a company is really how do we actually just like tell people what matters. Obviously, we want to give them optionality, biggest takeaway and the biggest learning that I've had as a founder is that people tell you they want all of these features and all of these things. But at the end of the day, they just want to know what they should look at. As it relates to what we're doing, I mean, one really cool example, this is the first time to talk about it. One of the things we've had on the platform is research.

So we actually aggregate research from about 40 or 50 OTC desks. And theoretically, and other service providers and asset managers, and that's really cool. You can come onto the platform and you can see research. You're not going to read through 40 different research reports to get insights. And so now we've basically aggregated all the research. We've aggregated every single podcast and we've aggregated all of conference content, including all of our conferences. And now you can go and you can see trends on top of it. So what are the top 10 topics that are being most discussed in the short term versus

the long term? How is that changing? What are the sub-topics? Okay, ETH is really hot. What are people talking about around ETH? And then actually being able to see like, okay, I want to go see the specific mentions of this specific topic point across different podcasts and research pieces. and conferences and things like that.

And to me, that's more like, okay, we're taking all this information that we have, and then we're condensing it into insights and then letting people kind of start at the insight level and then peel back and dive deeper into like, okay, on this podcast, we talked about Canton, maybe that's a trending topic. Somebody wants to see where that's talked about and then dive deeper into that topic. That's incredibly valuable. I do that just naturally listening to like 20 podcasts a weekend on crypto stuff, but to have the ability to aggregate, here's where people are talking about Canton or Maple.

that's very valuable. And that's just one example of the types of things that we're working on, where, for example, one thing we built with news, some more experience, we had this thing called the news faros where we pulled in 10,000 news stories a day or whatever it was. Super overwhelming. Now you can come in and you can see what are the 10 stories

being written the most and retweeted the most today? And what are the things that people are talking about on social the most? We actually separated that. So you can now come on what's being talking about in the news, what's being talked about in social and what's happening on chain. It's really like how do you take all of the raw data and distill insights is really what we've learned as opposed to like giving people ultimate customizability, which they think they want, but my experiences they don't want. Well, Josh, congrats on what you've built. Where can we send people to learn more about the tie? You can follow the tie on Twitter at the tie I.O. You can go to our website, the tie.com. You can also follow me. I'm not really as active as I should be on social, but it's at Joshua underscore Frank underscore on Twitter, I think.

All right. We'll put it in the show notes. All right, well, thanks for doing this, Josh. Good to see it. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On the Brink-Podcast.com or just click on the tab in our website.

Thanks for listening.