On The Brink with Castle Island - Kedian Sun (Level Money) on Stablecoin Expansion in DeFi (EP.617)

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Wyatt sits down with Kedian Sun, the founder of Level Money. In this episode:  Stablecoin usage in DeFi today Fiat-backed stablecoins vs other "stable" assets Ethereum vs other blockchains for stablecoins

This is Wyatt from Castle Island, and today's episode of On the Brink was the first of a series on StablecoinFi, where we'll talk to leading players billing stablecoin-focused applications in Defy. Today, I was joined by Keddy and Son, the founder of Level Money. Level is the issuer of Level U.S.D, a Defy native stable coin backed by other major stable coins, including USDT and USDC, earning yield in low-risk defy lending strategies to offer a Defy-Risc-Free rate. Level U.S.D has over $140 million in supply after just over six months in market and continues to grow rapidly. Keddy and I discussed the adoption of incumbent stablecoins versus newcomers, the evolution of stablecoin-based finance, and what's ahead for level among other topics. I hope you enjoy this episode.

Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them where 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. 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. 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, Kadyen, thanks for joining. Excited to chat today. I would love to learn a little bit more about you to start if you don't mind giving a personal background and telling us a little bit about level. Yeah, of course. First of all, you're excited to be here. Thanks for having me. A little bit about myself.

So I'm Ketian. I'm originally from New Zealand and came to you. to the US for college. My background's in finance. I studied finance at Wharton, did investment banking after graduation at investment bank called Lazard here in New York for a few years. And then I worked in FinTech at a company called Brex for a few years. And so, yeah, I guess my entire career is just being, kind of seeing different ways of like money moving around, essentially. I first got involved in crypto, I think it was my senior year of college, basically, I think a very classic story. A friend told me about Eath. I just went ahead and bought a bag, had no clue how

the tech worked, what this meant for the world in the future. But I think that was sort of like my entry point into crypto and how I continued to stay sort of in the loop with crypto while I was working in more traditional industries and banking and Pintech. And then while I was at Rex in SF, that was when I linked up with my co-founder who was working as an engineer at Flexport there. That was kind of like how we just started jamming and got into crypto full time from there. So yeah, that's kind of just a little bit about myself. Do you want me to get started on talking about like how we got started with level. Yeah, talk about level and how you guys got started. Cool. Yes, I guess we weren't always level. I mean, we started in the stable coin space in March of

23 and it was a different name back then. I guess like the story of how we actually got into stable coins, like I said, it was March of 2023. If you remember, this was a big month for stable coins and for crypto because that was when USDC depacked as a result of like the SVB collapse. And so I think that news got like our attention. Yeah. Because previously we actually weren't, well, everyone's obviously heard of stablecoins, probably had used them on Coinbase or other exchanges, but it wasn't something that I actually really looked into. I just sort of trusted that these stable coins were pegged to a dollar. That they worked. You just trusted that they worked. Yeah, exactly, which obviously March

2023 kind of destroyed that view, at least temporarily. And so I would say that despite that being probably the lowest sentiment ever in stable coins, we sort of were able to build up a lot of conviction at that point, thought this was sort of like the future of crypto and even like the future of finance, and just started building in the space. I mean, even at that point, I think people were still, like, other than that event, people were starting to pay a lot more attention to stable coins, but I think it's especially being in the last year where it's just become consensus. And, you know, we're just seeing so much stable coin activity, I think, since It was 2024. And then I think the other moment for me, this was a little bit more personally,

is like, I think after looking into that, I also just happened to make my first actual cross-border stable-win transaction during around that time. And I know this sounds almost silly that there was this first time, but I think when we live in sort of developed countries at the US or in the West, the banking system is generally not too bad. So you don't actually need to use tablequins that much, especially for domestic use cases. But in this case, it was me trying to send some money to a friend in Australia. We actually tried to do it through like the traditional banking system first. And, you know, it's just like a very classic story of like, and this is from the US to Australia. It's like nothing crazy. Right. It took days before it got bounced.

Right. And then it's like the next thing tried was like USDC and it literally just arrived in seconds. It's like that kind of magic moment for me. I think that was also what gave me even more conviction than stable coins. But going back to level, we've actually tried a few different stable coin models. The first version was essentially a fear back. stable coin that shared the treasury yield with distribution partners. So this is actually by similar to what Agora is trying to do now. We ran into a couple of challenges building this. The first was actually building a fear back stable coin takes a lot of time because especially at that point, you had to work with partner banks or like custodians, like treasury providers. And it's like

whenever you have to work with a centralized party, especially like a regulated one, it's just like a really slow process. And you've incumbents, right? You've incumbents who've been around and have a degree of capture with those players. Yeah, exactly. So it probably took us like six months to even get set up. And to be honest, like the custody model wasn't even good. We sort of like strung together custodians and treasury providers. And actually, I think a lot of the feedback we got from like the legitimate players in the space was like, we can't trust this thing. But yeah, I think we try to go to market with this model by offering to pay people the treasury yield and they sort of found increased adoption for us. I think we initially mostly focused on defy and

In crypto, people don't really care about 5% yields and defied, right? So that wasn't very successful. And then institutions, I think, there was just like, obviously also very hard to break into. And I think the custody model was a bit of a question. And so basically found that that didn't work. And then we started trying to build almost like an Athena competitor. I actually had a similar issue of later, you know, it took so much time to onboard with exchanges and custodians. And then I think ultimately, we actually just personally didn't feel like this was the stable coin or synthetic dollar model that we sort of resonated with.

in what we were in terms of what we're trying to build long term. But yeah, regardless, I think both those things taught us a lot about building stable coins and at least trying to go to market with them. And then last August, we started building level in its current form. And so this is a fully level, like level USD is fully built on chain. So actually, first thing that was nice is that we could build it really quickly. We don't need to rely on any third parties to start building. We could just build on Ethereum, use USDC, USDT.

We were building on RPA, like lending protocols more generally. And so we're able to get it together quite quickly. And yeah, what we end up with was actually like a very simple stable point. Like level USD is fully backed by USDC and USDT. Obviously the two largest and most trusted stablepoint feedback stable points in the space right now. And then what we do is generate yield on like the USDC and USDT reserves. And specifically we focus on really low risk sources of yield. And this for us was like letting protocols.

You know, people talk about RBA as essentially like the crypto risk free rate. And so we just park all of our capital there right now. We will be expanding to other blue chip lending protocols. So specifically, Morpho Prime Volts is coming up in the next few weeks. But yeah, the idea here is like a very low risk source of yield. That's also very liquid to back like level USD. And then, you know, the protocol accumulates this yield and we pass it back to the users through like a pretty standard 46-26-staking mechanism.

So that's, yeah, essentially like the journey of us building level and then kind of a quick summary of how it actually works. And to break that down and almost read it back so that everyone has a sense, you guys backing level USD, you have USDT and USDAC that is deposited in these relatively safe strategies on AVE and soon to be morpho as well. So on top of that level USD, that's then also an asset that can be used in longer tail pools within Defi and for Defi use cases. Yeah, exactly. I think a quick point is like technically after we deploy the assets level USD is backed by the landing protocol with C token.

So it's like the A tokens, the morph of all tokens eventually, et cetera. And then, yeah, correct. So level USD itself is like this commissionless asset. People can use it however they want, really. What we have done is integrated into other leading T5 protocols like Pendle, morph over collateral, et cetera. And so, yeah, people can go ahead and use level as well as S-level USD, which is the yield-bearing counterpart, kind of like wherever they want or wherever it is integrated.

Yep, very cool. I'm curious for your view because you guys clearly spent some time in the discovery space when it comes to building in stable coins. In your view, why another stable coin issuer and why another stable coin when we have USDC, we have USDC? And on top of that, how did you land on issuing a stable coin or building a stable coin primitive as opposed to, say, building an application around an existing large stable coin? I think that's a really good question. I think the first thing is actually, I know there's a lot of ways to segment stable coins, but at least in this context, I think there's like stable coins that are used or that are, I think, more designed to be used for like reward payments.

And then there are stable coins that are actually more like yield assets. And I actually personally think it's a bit of a misnomer to call these stable coins, yield-bearing stable coins or like stable coins generally. And just to be clear, I think there's not like any stable coins fault. It's sort of like as an industry we've adopted these terms. But if you look at the yield-bearing version of stable coins, including our own, that's not a stable coin because it's not pegged to a dollar. It's increasing in value as it accumulates yield or it's like rebasing. It's just actually not a staple coin.

And so I think I'll start with that category of like why we need more of these. And I think the answer is basically that it's like at the end of the day, these are yield assets. So you can think compare it to like the fixed income market in traditional finance. Obviously fixed income by definition the income is supposed to be fixed. In crypto, it's usually not fixed. but the idea is that the principal stays relatively pegged to the dollar and you can earn yield on top. And so in that case, you know, there's a market for like thousands of these. If we look at Tradfai, like the fixed income market is actually bigger than the equities market.

And there's literally thousands or tens of thousands of options out there. And so I think that's where like what we commonly call yield bearing stable coins. So I think more accurately like yield tokens kind of comes in. And then in terms of kind of these more like payment stable coins, the root of your question is basically probably implying that we don't need that many. of them because there's sort of network effects around stable coins. And I think that probably is the future state. There might not be too many of them. But that being said, I think the reason that there are a lot of them popping up now and the reason that we actually need a lot of them is actually good for like the stable coin industry. Because I have a pretty strong belief and we see this in most

industries. The winners of like the early stages of a new industry or like the winners now are not necessarily the winners of the future. And you sort of need a lot of competition to essentially increase the service area of innovation. And so I think this is why it's actually a good thing for a lot of new stable coins to be built right now. Everyone's trying to be innovative in some way. And this actually pushes forward with industry. And sure, maybe tether will continue to be the winner even for a very long time, especially if they can continue being innovative. But I think there's also a very good chance that one of these new stable points will become like the tether of tomorrow. And I think that's my view on like the number of stable coins that are popping up, even though I think

people are starting to complain about them. To answer you a question about, like, like why we decided to build like pick up be a stable coin issuer as opposed to building something on top of existing stable coins. Especially when we first started, the stable coin industry was much less sophisticated. It was essentially just like an industry of like issuers. And there was a lot of value to being an issuer, or at least like the perceived value was like very high. So I think that's where we started. I do agree with you and this is sort of part of like our longer term goals is that it's

actually very important to build applications around stable points. And so there's two options here. You can build on top of other stable points or stable coins can build applications or facilitate the building of applications on top of themselves. And so I think we started by being an issuer. And I think we've at least have some good signs of early traction as an issuer. But the long-term goal is actually to try to answer the question about how do we actually increase the usage of our stable point or stable points more generally?

I want to double click because I think you made one really interesting point there in particular, which is we might have sort of a narrow reality for traditional payments, USD stable coins, maybe what people think of first when they think of stable coins, which is the USDT and USDAC. And then I would hope, as I think you do, that we have this longer tail things that we call stable coins functionally today, but maybe it's a real estate backed asset that has some sort of dollar denominated value, but appreciates in value, hopefully. Maybe it's a defy risk-free rate along lines of what you guys are doing, but this longer tail of things which should have stable-ish value that hopefully appreciates. The point I wanted to ask is, do you think that we get to a point

where the true stable coins, so call it the USDTs and the USDCs, are used for payments? Or do you think we get to a world where these hopefully continually value accretive assets that are similar to stable coins, but peg or denominated in something that should appreciate and value, do those become used as payments? And then we can get to a world where we're settling transactions and paying for things and something other than what is still a fiat rooted asset. Yeah, good question. Personally, I believe we don't see that. And the reason is I think people have certain expectations of what they use as money. And I think having an asset that's backed by longer tail stuff. I think in theory, it's like you can use that as a method of payment. And yeah,

I think with crypto or blockchains, it does make that like theoretically easier. But I don't think that's going to be widely accepted. Right. So if you go to a merchant, they just want to know that it's a dollar, right? The merchant, you're going to understand like, you know, the hundred different types of these dollar pegged assets that are backed by long tail assets. And so there's a certain thing is very feasible. And then the other thing is just related to risk, just because something is peg to the dollar and has been historically doesn't actually mean that it is very safe and doesn't mean that it won't depeg in the future. And I think we saw this with the stable coin that was backed by real estate. And because real estate is a liquid, you know, the stable coin deep pegged by like

50%. I think it was called USR or something like that. This has happened, I think, end of 2023 or sometime in 2024. And so, yeah, that's sort of why I don't really believe that anything that's not like truly a liquid stable coin is backed by safe assets can actually be used as a form of money or payment. To your point, even if vendors don't want to accept those longer tail stable coin assets, that's why I'm personally very excited about some of the pay with crypto and credit card functionality that are being built because it's much easier. Let's say I own tokenized Tesla stock, and I want to use that as what is functionally my credit card payment asset. I can easily swipe a card and you can go from that Tesla asset to stable coins, and the stable coins can either go to the vendor

or it can convert to dollars, and that can all happen very quickly. Whereas, from what I know, the functionality of some of the traditional pay-with stocks, the settlement just actually takes so long and it's so inefficient, and equity markets run on market hours and crypto markets run 24-7. So I could see maybe some sort of middle ground there where you can hold out of our asset and the stable coins. The USDA-type stable coins are used as the instantaneous transaction method. Yeah, I think what we both said is actually true.

So I agree with you that there can be these abstraction layers that make it very easy to convert from certain assets to stable coins that are used for payments. But I think what you describe as two separate processes, right? Like, you're using these assets as a store of value. That's what you're holding them for as a user. But then it's like when you go to make the payment, ultimately you're selling off. And like you said, crypto facilitates the very easy conversion of these assets. But the actual payment is still made in like the payment stable points. Yep.

Definitely. So looking at level USD in this stable coin landscape, last time I checked, I think this was last night, there's about 140 million in supply. I don't know if that's changed much over the last 12 hours. But where does this supply sit today? Like where does it exist? Is it in wallets? Is it in user wallets exchanges? And how is it being used? Who's using it? Yeah, good question. So I think since last time, we've actually grown to about 145. So sort of consistently growing in terms of where it's used. Right now, it is used mostly for defy use cases. as a way to generate yield. So, you know, we have part of the supply that's sitting in curve for liquidity. A lot of people have stake level USD for S-level USD in order to earn the yield. So right now, approximately one-third of level-USD is stake. And then with S-level USD, you can then take it and use it elsewhere. So, for example, on like Pendle, it's also accepted as collateral on some vaults in Morphil as well.

And then, yeah, like I mentioned, pendle is just generally a huge use case for both on-staked as well as state level USD. And then yesterday, I don't know if you saw, but we basically did some big announcements and we continue to do announcements this week about level USD and related assets, being able to be used as collateral on Woffo for borrowing. So these are probably like the main use cases currently.

And then, yeah, in terms of who are the users, it's sort of very split between like institutions and retail. I think, you know, with crypto being commissionless, sometimes it's hard to tell. But we do see wallets that are transacting, like, or that are minting and then using like millions of dollars of level U.S.D. at a time. But then we also have people that are literally doing like a few dollars at a time. And so just depending on where you define the line between retail and institutions slash whales, we have like a really wide spectrum.

And do you guys want level to be a fairly permissionless asset in the sense that anyone in Defi who wants to build a pool or wants to integrate it in some capacity can do so? Or do you want to be selected with partners? My thinking here is if you have folks who are going really far out on the risk curve in terms of what their pools look like in terms of creating vaults that might be backing another asset or stable coin. Do you guys have a selection threshold? Do you want to discourage folks you might not align with from a risk perspective or how do you vet people who would be working with level USD? Yeah. It's permissionless so anyone can use it. And we are starting to see protocols actually

reach out to us. I think they want to like have our blessing, but we don't always give that. But then they still go ahead and create it. They're free to do whatever they want with these assets, right? It's kind of like a very core principle of crypto and defy. In terms of protocols that we do put a more active effort into integrating for now, like we are quite selective here. And like, as you can probably tell, like we've literally just integrated with protocols that are already very established, very trusted. And so I think this includes the yield trading protocols like Pendle and Spectra. And then Morpho is like a big one. And Morpho and other more like Blue Chip lending protocols that won't accept us as collateral. And so,

I think it's actually almost like pretty easy to know like who are like these kind of more leading protocols. And that's also changing, right? You have protocols that are growing. But yeah, there's probably only really a handful of those. And then we also, we don't actively discourage people from integrating level USD. But, you know, we do see that with protocols that are not that they're not good. It's just that they're smaller currently.

And they could be like the blue chips of tomorrow. With that in mind, the growth of level USD, how do you look at growth on Ethereum mainnet? versus other blockchains. It seems like you've a couple of different arenas there. There's Maynett, there's Salonan and other VMs, there's Monad and Barra Chain and Mega-Eath and some of these newer EVM chains. And then you're also seeing a newer rise

of folks who are trying to build stable coin-specific chains. So I'm curious how you look at, where is the game to be played in your view and where are the major stable coins going to exist and transact? Yeah, I think right now we're just very focused on Ethereum. I think despite a lot of complaints about Ethereum, like it is the place with the most liquidity, with the most defy activity. And I think until we saturate like Ethereum, we probably wouldn't actively go to other chains

unless there's like a very good reason to do so from a distribution perspective. That being said, I think eventually, especially if we want to move towards more of these payment or money use cases, and first of all, Ethereum's fees are also great recently, right? So it's like that's actually not as big of a problem as it used to be. but obviously it still is, I think, higher than a lot of these L2s, alternative chains. And so I think in terms of like when we do get to that stage, you're trying to be used more for like smaller transactions and for payments, then it probably does make sense to have level USD on those chains

and kind of have those be the settlement layers. In terms of your question about stable coins, like purposeful stable coin chains, I think this is a very interesting topic. So I think at a level we actually do believe kind of in the value proposition of these chains. the reality is that the existing blockchains aren't built for stable coins specifically, right? They've sort of been built for like the more speculative cases of crypto. I think it's codex when they announced. I actually like their quote where they said that right now,

I think the way people are building on stable coins is kind of like, I think they said it's like jerry-rigging together, a bunch of plumbing that it wasn't built for this purpose originally. And I actually do resonate with that. And it can go into details around exactly why that is the case. But yeah, that being said, obviously there are already like trillions of, dollars worth of stable coins being transacted on existing chains. So it's not that they don't work. But I think it's actually that stablecoin solves such a big problem that the existing chains

are a good enough solution for now, even despite like where they do lack. But I think if we want to really scale this thing, we really want to scale stable coin use cases. I think we do think that these stable coin chains do serve value. And specifically, there's probably a few categories off the top of my head. The first is actually related to compliance. And so I think the fact that public block, like fully permissionless blockchains have permissionless validators. It's actually a problem for adoption for certain institutions. Because when you make a transaction, you could be indirectly paying like a validated in North Korea, for example.

And that's kind of just a no-go for a lot of institutions. And so I'm pretty sure all of these chains are building commission validators if they're not one. And then the other two are more like U-I-UX related. One is just like, it actually doesn't really make sense to use arbitrary volatile tokens to be paying for transactions, right? that's clearly not built for stable coin transactions. And we do have the things abstract that away,

but it's sort of like that's not really how it should be built from first principles. And I think the final one is just privacy. So publicly more blockchains, you know, it's kind of a feature and a bug where it is fully public. But like if you are getting your salary paid in stable coins, I'm sure you don't prefer that to be public, right? So yeah, that's kind of like our view on all of various chains and, yeah,

specifically stable chains. Yeah, another argument I've heard, which I think makes sense, is that to your point earlier, most of the chains we interact with today are built for permissionless finance and a permissionless building out of use cases. Presumably an enterprise grade chain that's meant to settle stable coins would actually be limited in scope and functionality in terms of certain financial use cases, in terms of asset issuance, in terms of some guardrails that would give comfort, just more so that the users

of traditional institutions wouldn't potentially venture onto something that could be either dangerous from a security perspective or from a high risk perspective. So we believe, and it looks to be the case, that that stable coins will continue to grow as a share of on-chain assets. And with that in mind, it will be a growing piece of defy. How do you think defy evolves around that stable coin growth and as stable coins constitute a wider share of on-chain assets and of defy? Yeah, I mean, I think Defi is built to support both stable as well as non-stable activity. And so we might have Defypire protocols that are specifically built to make stable coins or yield-bearing stable coins more useful.

But I think generally speaking, I do believe that's probably like what we're going to evolve into. And this is basically just like we're going to start seeing relatively less speculative activity in Defi and then like, you know, have more of these like stable coin or dollar-pay type of assets. And it sort of goes back to what I was saying earlier. You know, if we look at traditional finance, like, fixed income market is bigger than the equities market. And I think right now, like, if you compare

the speculative side of crypto to equities and then the stable coin side to fixed income, well, if anything, actually, I think stable coins is already almost like on part now. And so I think we will see more of that. And I think that's going to be like the longer term trend because at end of the day, pure speculation, it's always going to be around. That's why casinos exist too. But at end of the day, casinos are a much smaller market than like actually a functional finance. Yep. Makes sense. In your view, is there also a white space for stable coins pegged to other fiat currencies? That's been another topic people when talking about recently, or do you think this stays

mostly dollarized? No, I think absolutely. I mean, I think in DFI, I think U.S. dollar stable points will dominate just because it's become kind of like, I mean, even in Tritify it, the U.S. dollar is the global reserve currency. And then DFI when it's even more borderless, you know, it's even more so. Yeah, so the defy use cases, I still do think U.S. dollar stable coins will dominate. And then for like real world use cases, like, the,

The reality is most places outside the US, or a lot of them don't accept US dollars, even though I guess people are starting to accept them more. And so, I think, to increase adoption in those jurisdictions, it's like basically every currency, I think will need their own stable coin. And there's actually a lot of room to grow for them. And then that being said, it's kind of like, if you do have stable coins, other currencies and they're on chain, then there is like this market for, I think, games and like trading around different currency stable points.

So, yeah, so I think it will grow a lot. We're not going to see a future where we only have U.S. dollar stable coins being 99% of the market, especially as we develop more real world use cases. Got it. No, it's very helpful. And is the core product level USD? Is that going to be the primary focus for the time being? Are you guys going to look into these other sorts of stable coin primitives or what's on your mind going forward?

Yeah, good question. We sort of think about growth in two phases. For new stable coins, is always the first part, which is scaling and building out like credibility and essentially a brand as a stable coin. So I think during this phase, we're going to essentially focus on what we're doing now, which is like this more defy native stable coin, built on lending protocols, because like continue to consistently offer more attractive like risk return profile. So this includes high yield, continue our low risk strategies,

and then also just really increase like the utility and capital efficiency through just like integrating with a lot of defy protocols. Our view is actually that new stablecoins actually have to expand, beyond just being a stable coin issuer. I think there's a lot of different ways to do this, but I think I'm stealing a quote probably from an M0 interview. I think one of the founders or someone there was saying that the stable coins now are kind of like the Blackberries

or like the Nokia's in the early days of phones. And then as we've seen, obviously, like pure phone makers, they lost, right? And I think that's kind of like potentially how to think about stable coins now. It's like if you're just a stable coin issuer, that means you're the problem of just being like a phone manufacturer. And we've obviously seen, like, you know, Apple's the most successful phone of all time. And the reason for that is because they were building value ad, like, products on top of that, including, like, the App Store and a bunch of other things.

And so I think, especially for new stable coins, like the low-hanging fruit of partnering with exchanges or, like, trying to basically get distribution. Purely partnering up or paying for distribution is probably not going to be enough. And so we do believe that stablecoins do need to build value ad services themselves to increase their distribution. Like I said, there's a lot of different ways you can approach this. And this is something that we're thinking a lot about. Not going to review, I think, too much here. But yeah, that's the ideas that we will be moving into building products that are going to increase, like the utility, as well as the use case and distribution of our core primitives, which is level USD.

Very cool. And broadly speaking, I wanted to ask in closing here, what are you excited about and what keeps you up at night? In general, I'm actually just very excited about crypto, which is probably right now a little bit contrarian because we obviously see so much doing with crypto. But I guess that is more related to like the speculative side. And if anything like when it's a bare market. And I keep stealing people's because I think it was like Sam from FRAX that said this. Bare market for crypto, like for the markets is actually a bull market for stable coins. And so yeah, kind of despite the rest of the market and you know, obviously want everyone to

stay safe, not lose their money. But it's kind of like actually a really good time for stable coins to be building. And I think we're seeing so many stablecoin issues. as well as stable coin use cases and just all of this like stuff that's being built around stable coins and just super excited about like the future of crypto being driven by stable coins. In terms of what keeps me up at night, it's kind of like the other side of the coin, which is just like this is a massive, massive opportunity. Yeah, what I spend most of my time thinking about is like how do we build products to actually

be able to capture this opportunity? Because it's like not everyone's going to be a winner. There is a lot of competition. And then it's like, I think we do have to be very strategic about what we build and how we go to market. Yeah, that's probably just like what I spend most of my days. I'm nice thinking about. Awesome. Well, leave it there. Ketty, and thanks for coming on and really enjoy chatting. Hopefully we can do it again soon. Yeah, I appreciate it. This was fun. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about

Castle Island, visit castle island.Vc. 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.