On The Brink with Castle Island - Michael Bentley (Euler) on Modular Lending (EP.552)

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Michael Bentley, Co-Founder & CEO of Euler joins the show to talk about crypto lending and the launch of Euler v2. In this episode:  The evolution of lending/borrowing in crypto/defi Euler's history and the upcoming launch of Euler v2 How crypto allows for market discovery of financial primitives Building programmable finance around blue chip and long tail assets alike

This is Wyatt from Castle Island Ventures, and today on the podcast, I was joined by Michael Bentley, founder of Euler. Euler is a decentralized crypto lending and borrowing application and a portfolio company of Castle Island. It was a pleasure sitting down on Michael, and I hope you enjoyed this episode. 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, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to British. and Zailing 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, Michael, thank you for joining us on the podcast today. This is Wyatt, joined by Michael Bentley, founder of Euler. Like I said, it's a pleasure to have you on. I think we can get straight into it. Be great if you could give a quick background about yourself and then how you got into

crypto and building a crypto company. Well, first, thank you very much for having me on. That's great to be here. A little bit about me. I started oil at back in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic. But prior to that, I used to be a research scientist at the University of Oxford. I used to do mathematical research mainly into biological populations and how they changed through times. There was a little bit of game theory and what's called dynamical systems. So it was all very nerdy stuff.

And actually, really, I was introduced to crypto back in 2015 and I started as a bit of a skeptic. Someone told me about Ethereum and it just didn't really click for me. And then in 2017, that was when I really started to find it more interesting. A friend of mine was going to the scene and was telling me about all the crazy things that were happening around that time. So I found it really interesting and started building little bots and little trading things to play around with. So I was having fun on technical front mainly, you know, finance, things like that, really

started to make me set up and take notice. So I was doing a bunch of hackathons in my spare time to raise a little bit of cash because I was expecting my first child and they cost a lot of money. So I thought, yeah, there's hackathons. And one thing led to another, honestly, I met my co-founder Doug that year. And we ended up winning a hackathon over the summer of 2020 whilst the pandemic was raging. And by September, we were approached by some investors who said, we really like what you guys are doing. We'd love to see if you can take this forward and make it a project.

So that's how old it was born, really. And how much of an intersection, your view, is there between the work that you were doing on the academic side, well outside of crypto and called the core principles that are crypto-defy. and the building blocks of digital currency? I think there's a surprisingly large overlap, honestly, and the work I was doing. My role was really to model populations and how they change through time.

And in biological populations, the entities involve, whether they're cells, bacteria cells, or humans, or insects, all these different types of populations I'm modelling. They're all actors in their game, and they all play a strategic role. So some of them are competitive,

some of them are cooperative. And my job is to model these populations out using mathematical and computational methods and see what the best strategies were really, or trying to predict what would happen in these games as they evolved over time. So you can imagine, hopefully, how that might translate into the world of crypto, where we have essentially people competing against one another in these complex, defy ecosystems, essentially all trying to be rational actors, all trying to maximize profit, and it's very similar to what happens in biological populations.

It's just that there the currency is usually reproductive success, right? Every individual's fighting for survival and reproduction, and in D5 ones just fighting to maximize sort of profit and risk reward. So there's actually a lot of overlap in just the way of thinking about systems like that, the strategic games, and then trying to predict how they were all over time and trying to really get into the weeds of things to research, the mechanisms of systems and so on, a huge amount of overlap. I've spoken recently with David Say from Babylon and Guillaume from Panoptic,

who were both professors from Harvard and Cornell, so I feel like the rise of highly talented academics in crypto is coming. But anyways, you mentioned coming about in terms of starting oiler. Break down, what is Euler? What was the origin story in terms of what you guys were trying to build from the outset? So, broadly speaking, oil is a lending protocol, right? So it's a protocol that lets people lend and borrow digital assets. Back in 2020, our goal then, myself and Doug, one of the things I wanted to do was try to see,

when you're lending and borrowing assets, usually there's an interest rate in bowl, and the borrowers are going to pay interest to the lenders. And I guess in the world of traditional finance, interest rates are usually set by corporations. They usually set by centralized entities or central banks sometimes. And there's a decision-making process there. In crypto, obviously, we try to do things in a more decentralized way. So back then, I was really interested in this problem of how you set interest rates in a decentralized way. How can they spontaneously emerge without having to have some entity in charge of setting what the interest rate is?

So in the hackathon, I was trying to apply this branch of maths called control theory to interest rates. see if you have lenders, lending out, can you try to let an interest rate emerge spontaneously? That was an interesting challenge that people were facing in the early days with compound finance, which is another lending protocol that I was interested in back then. And then Goke was really interested in just the core challenge of building a DFI primitive, essentially, something that was really, he comes from a computer science background, and could we build something autonomous and independent that would function, and cut out the middle man composed with all these other cool building blocks that were emerging

in defy at the time, particularly wanting to focus on this idea of permissionless markets as well. In the early days, and this is still true largely today, I suppose, lending and borrowing of crypto assets was mainly focused around a couple of the blue chip assets, Bitcoin and Ethereum, and most of the defy tokens and long tail or even midtail of the market were not being really covered by a lending protocol. So we were also interested, if you break it all down, what do you actually need to be able to have more of a permissionless system? So that's really what inspired us to get started. And oil of V1 was launched in 2021 and did an okay job at satisfying those ambitions, I think. But there were various things that I don't think we'd gotten right with V1.

So I suppose in late 2022, early 2023, we started thinking about what would an oil of V2 look like if we were to build this back better? How would we build it back in a more modular fashion in a way that could help us achieve those really early ambitions? So I can tell you more about Oil of B2, but obviously one of the things that brought around a bit of urgency around that time was an unfortunate incident with all the B1 where the protocol itself ended up being exploited. And that obviously changed our direction quite significantly. 20203 was quite a tough year, really safe. And I'm interested to talk more about the experience with the exploit, but I wanted to touch first on something that you'd mentioned. I think what you highlighted about crypto systems and

blockchain systems enabling the decentralized discovery of interest rates is really interesting, because in a way that feels like you create the circumstances for more of a a market-driven discovery of what primitives like interest rates should be or what economic policy should be. Is it that which drove you to build a lending and borrowing protocol or company as opposed to building some other use case in crypto? Or maybe a better question is, did you know that you wanted to build in crypto and you chose lending, borrowing being the use case? Or was it that you saw crypto as an amazing arena to build, like you said, almost a decentralized economic policy engine? That's a good question.

I'm really interested in a lot of the mechanisms in Defi. So taking a step back, one of the things before I even really got interested in DeFi itself was I was interested in this idea of making an NFT-based trading game. So I was really interested in markets. That's very different. Really, really different. In the early days, I used to play, well, I still do play fantasy football game and not football in your football, but real soccer. Yeah, me too. I play the Premier League one.

Exactly. The primarily were really, really popular. And I got really good at it. I've once finished 32nd in the world out of 5 million people. So I took it very seriously. It was very, very competitive. And I had this thought one day, maybe I could build this game, but make it even better. And how would you make it better?

Well, in all of those games, usually the players have some price. And the better players that cost more. And so you're faced with tradeoffs from picking a team. You can't just pick all the best players. You can't afford them all. But someone in those games usually sets the prices up front. And I thought,

it wouldn't be cool if you could mint these players as NFTs and have them trading and have more of a free market so the prices could really be set by the market and we can make a sort of decentralized fantasy football trading game. So before doing oil, that's actually one of the things I was working on for a hackathon. And of course I didn't manage to take it very far. But that was one of my early plans was around that. But the lending and boring stuff, for me, it was just watching compound emerge, honestly, this other lending protocol. It really flipped for me when I saw how that was working in the popularity of compound. And then I realized in my academic day job, I was doing a lot of research on you get exposed to an awful lot of interdisciplinary techniques in that job.

I just saw this gap in the market. I just the interest rates in a decentralized, oh, control theory can handle this. So I started building toy interest rate models, really for a bit of fun and then just to try and win this accident competition. But it gets predictive. For some of my background, I get really solid. sucked in by technical challenges and nerds, like that very easily. So then it became addictive to think out, well, how far can we actually take this, right?

And that's how I got sucked into lending and borrowing, really. We'll need to share fantasy tips after because I need the help. But that's a great story. That shades to me of Vitalik's World of Warcraft story, where he wanted to create decentralized frameworks that they couldn't take your favorite characters away. And it's a similar aspect here for pricing. I can't say I ever felt victimized by the pricing models that they were using.

I think Vitalik was enraged by something that happened in the game. I don't really happen, but I just felt like, yeah, wouldn't it be cool? If you could let the markets decide the prices, markets are really good at setting prices. So why the game designers choose them? Completely agree. I'm curious, especially since you've mentioned compound, it's clear that you had seen a leading, lending, borrowing application out there already,

and that was an inspiration of sorts. I think when you look at defy products across the board, there are two aspects. One is creating a product that is functionally better or maybe better at the base level or in terms of what it can do. And the second is creating a better user experience. And obviously there's overlap there. But I think they can hold separate appeals when it comes to people using the protocol. Were you trying to create a product that was functionally better than existing alternatives versus a better user experience?

And what made Euler v1 unique amongst other crypto lending and borrowing players? It was very successful at invading the market, even in tough times. When we finally launched, it was launched into a vicious bear market, where the terra-luna situation had just occurred. It was sort of blowing up there. And then later that year, FTCS and all the chaos around that, it was a really bad year, but oil kept growing. What made it better and what made it attractive?

There was a few things, really. I think it was a little bit of both. On the functional side, especially, I think Doca and our team's a fantastic developer, and we had a lot of extra features and cool things that you could do in order in a really efficient and professional manner that are just a bit clunky on other protocols. So you could batch transactions together, for instance, on our UI, which allow you to put on trades natively in the UI. And people were doing this on other protocols, but they would typically have to visit somebody else's UI and pay an extra fee. Or they would do it on compound UI, but they'd do it manually through so-called looping, whether they deposit and borrow and then swap something.

So there's lots of funky things happening there. And we made the user experience a lot nicer by taking advantage of this batching functionality that we've built into the protocol. on the UI itself, we just tried to look after people, make sure that they're aware of risks. So we were very risk-focused. We used to have a lot of information for people. It wasn't necessarily the easiest website to read at times because we weren't afraid of showing people information. And we didn't want to hold their hand too much or mask a lot of that because there is a lot of complexity and lending boring people need to know about the risks.

Then there was additional markets and all that couldn't be accessed on the protocols. So that's always something that's a good way to take over a market. I'll get a foothold in the market is to provide something. that you can't get elsewhere. And Oil of E1 was really successful with these liquid staking tokens, state teeth and CBE, all these things. People were doing trades at the time, looping state teeth against ETH,

so the deposit state teeth, earning a high interest rate, borrow ETH, paying a lower interest rate, swap it back, and then they build a leverage trade or leverage staking position and earn a higher rate of interest by doing that. One thing that they couldn't do on the protocols, though, was take the other side of that market. So there were some people saying, hey, this could be dangerous.

We're just allowing this bubble to grow up where people are just always long, one asset and always short the other asset. That's not very healthy. So as a team and just as developers, we always felt like it's healthy to enable two-sided markets and free and open markets.

Or there was a place where you could take the other side of that trade. And there weren't that many people wanting to take the other side of the trade, but the ones that were helped generate extra market activity and extra yield for the people that were long, state, teeth, and short eat.

So it just ended up. People found it very, very useful. to trade these kind of assets on oiler rather than elsewhere. And that was, I think, a major reason for Ayola was successful throughout such a tough year, really. When everything else was going badly, oil just kept growing. Yeah, that makes sense. I think a lot of people would say liquid stake tokens have been and continue to be a really interesting corner of crypto, particularly having assets that are interest-bearing just in and of themselves by owning them. tokenized treasuries are obviously increasing in popularity. How do you look at attracting interest to,

a product like Euler, obviously it's probably top of mind, giving you guys are about to launch V2. Are you focusing on what you'd call emerging assets like that that potentially offer new functionality relative to simple alternative tokens in that liquid stake tokenized treasuries bucket? Is it new chains? Is that an axis where you think you would differentiate or tap into a new market? I think OILA V2 especially, even way more so than oil B1, allows you to do things in the market that you just simply can't do on any of the protocol today or not very easily. The major class of lending protocol today, the most successful ones like Harvey are these big monolithic protocols where they have a single market for each asset, and they're all connected

to one another. And that's great from a capital efficiency standpoint. Deposit one thing as collateral, earn some interest on it whilst you're using it as collateral to borrow something else. Very, very nice from the capital efficiency standpoint. But as soon as some of these new assets will come along, whether that's tokenized real-world assets or some of the LRTs and things like that, it makes it very difficult to add those when you have this big monolith because the monolith is only as strong as its weakest collateral asset. So those protocols have to be highly governed and regulated and protected against risk. Whilst they're very popular, that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong per se with wanting

to have markets for other types of assets. And the alternative approach that people have usually taken for that is to have, oh, well, we'll just create these little isolated pairs. and isolated pairs can only get you so far. They do allow you to take risk on new assets and so on, but they're very, very capital inefficient. So what Oil of V2 really does is it allows people to create their own lending and boring markets for everything in the middle, essentially.

So you can with Oil of E2, it's this flexible and modular kit. You can build something like Arveh, if you want, or you can build isolated pairs, but you can also build smaller clusters of three or four different bolts, essentially, that connect different assets to one another. And with those, you can service whole swathes of the market that aren't currently service. Even if you're just focusing on the same assets that we have in Defi today, you can have riskier or less risky pools of assets than you can find on something like Carbe today.

And I think that's incredibly valuable and is definitely a path to go-to-market strategy. It's to service part of the industry or this desire for certain trades that just can't be carried out right now. I completely agree. I was having a conversation the other day where the point came up that what traditional finance actually does very well is build systems around these core assets. For that reason, I don't really see the value in tokenizing Apple stock or Tesla stock of these things where there's a lot of embedded finance built around them. But I think the value proposition of tokenization is allowing these longer tail assets to be transferable and have market structures built around them, which,

like you said, you don't get that in a monolithic type design, but I think you guys are doing incredibly effectively. I wanted to loop back a bit. You obviously mentioned the exploit. What have you and the team learned in the wake of having a security exploit? And how has Euler changed in terms of ethos and trajectory since then? It's a big topic. It's an interesting story. For anyone that wants to read the full thing, I wrote this blog post called War and Peace, the details, what happened. But in short, OILA V1 was a really, really heavily audited postcode. Everyone knew that as a team, we took security incredibly seriously. And as part of that process, it had this immunified bug bounty. I think it was the largest bug bounty of any lending protocol out there of its time. And one day, the bug report came in saying

that there was this issue. So we looked at the issue and it wasn't massive, but it was one of those. In a very rare circumstance, someone might be able to lose some money. So it's considered a bug that's something that should be fixed. So we developed to fix and took it to the auditors, had it audited, and patched the bug. And over a year later, it turned out that that small bug fix, and introduced a much larger bug. So in the end, what happened with Euler was around $200 million worth of assets were stolen. And they were stolen four days after the birth of my son.

So it's really bad timing. And then I think it took around six weeks. But as a team, we worked extraordinarily hard together to track down the perpetrator to essentially compel them to return the funds that they'd taken. And in the end, they actually returned $240 million worth of assets because what they'd done during that time was flopped some of the assets. that they're taken into Eath, which was going up in price at the time. So they had this very unusual circumstance where they stole 200 million,

to turn 240 million. I really, really, very careful experience, but one of the key things that we took from that, that we came back much stronger as a team, and we really realized during that period how much we prepared to fight for one another. We all stuck together and showed a huge amount of resilience. I remember one of the team calls we had during that period, based up to everyone, you know, I'm going to level with you.

Things are going to be tough, and it's likely that you're all going to lose your jobs and so on. And one of the team members said, that's absolutely not going to happen. I'm not giving it until we catch this guy. And I really summed up the team spirit from everybody in the team to go out and catch the person and put it right. So that was the first lesson,

just something about team morale and something special about our team. And I think that was really important because for most people, I'm not sure after what happened and then we continue, but it really helped us make the decision quite easy afterwards as to what we wanted to do. We took a little bit of time to reflect and realized that, yeah, if we had the opportunity to work with one another again on any of the project, we would leap at it. So why not just do it and keep boiler going?

So OLA V2 was born out of that, the morale and everything that was shown during that period. More on the technical front and design decisions, as I mentioned earlier, OLA V2 was already being worked on or at least on paper prior to the exploit. So a lot of the design principles that went into V2 were not necessarily anything to do with the exploit. we could have actually fixed oil of V1 with a single line of code. It was really, really minor in the end. It turned out and put it back out to market straight away.

But we were really excited about what we were developing with V2 and decided that after they exploit, maybe it was better to spend our time rather than redeploying something we weren't entirely happy with from a product standpoint, putting all our energy into developing V2. So that's what we did. It changed things on a security front. We really took security very, very seriously for V1.

So I wouldn't say necessarily that we learned too many lessons from that period. We really did put everything in and we were running to the gold standard of the time when we were developing back in 2020. It's a nascent industry and people learn as a whole, things that work well and don't work well. And I think from that, a few areas that we've really worked hard on this time around, we've got a much more comprehensive formal verification testing library and fuzz testing library built around all of B2. We previously worked with experts like Satoro to do formal verification.

on all of V1. But tools and just the knowledge base and the ecosystem these days is so much broader that this time around we've got a much, much more robust testing library from fuzz testing and from formal verification. We brought on board a dedicated cybersecurity expert as well to work not just on the Web 3 side but also on the Web 2 side and to help coordinate all the relationships we've had. With V2 we've had, I'm not quite sure how many audits.

It might be like 11 different audits now that the total number of audits is approaching 30 when you consider all the different contracts. So $4 million have been spent. We hosted the largest ever code order competition on canteener recently. We've put 1.25 million for grabs for anybody that could find any high or severe bugs in the code. And the results just came back, actually. There were no highs, no mediums, and a bunch of low findings from that contest. So that's really testament to the work that we put in as a team to make sure that this is the most secure lending protocol out there. And we've done absolutely everything we can to ensure security. And credit to you and the team for both coming back and building something exceptional now

and also having that attention to security, which we will continue to need throughout the ecosystem. I think one interesting experience you've had related to that is you built a protocol in late 2021, early 2020, and there's a grace period. And now you've gone through another phase building. How has it been different in terms of the infrastructure and crypto and in terms of the ecosystem we're in now as a builder, building then versus now what has improved, what's stayed the same? How are things different or similar? Everything's improved, really. It's night and day, honestly. I think people forget how nascent of an industry it is at times. Defi is a few years old, really. So there were a lot of incidents in the early years of defy. And some of that was thought about

from complacency and sloppy coding. Some of it was with teams like ourselves that we're trying really, really hard. And ultimately, I suppose, falling short in certain areas. And it was partly because some of the tooling around security and so on just wasn't really there yet. And that's come on so, so far since we've been building an industry. All of the developer tooling, yeah, the knowledge based among the security community, all the contacts, the auditing firms, there's just a lot more experience in the industry as a whole now and a lot better tools. So I think that's starting to reflect in the number of incidents as well. It feels like they're slowly coming down in number.

They were quite prolific back in the early days. So I think that's a good thing. There's been a lot of learning, obviously, about patterns of things that work well and don't work well in DFI. In the early days, there's a lot of experimentation. And some things really showed that they just didn't work, certain patterns of doing things, especially around stuff like oracles and when you connect two different protocols to one another and so on,

a lot of lessons learned around those areas. So tons of stuff really. And then as the ecosystem as a whole as well, we've learned a lot about product market fit. What do people want? What are the strengths of crypto or its weaknesses? I think Dow governance is something that's been proven to not really work as well as people thought.

I remember in 2020, 2020, 2021, people started building on-chain Dow's and systems for governing post-calls. And back then, I thought this was brilliant. I really did think this was a great way to do things. It looked like a really promising way to create something. that had features of it, I suppose, like a corporation or a company, but that was more decentralized and more egalitarian and fair and transparent and so on. But I think over time, we just realized that Dow's as a whole don't coordinate very well and don't manage systems

very well. The level of engagement required from participants in Dow's is quite high and a lot of people aren't up for it. In the lending space especially, I think we've started to learn the lesson that maybe Dow's aren't the best way to manage risk in lending protocols and that there's perhaps better ways that are based on free market principles. So that's one of the key things I've noticed that's changed in lending really in the past few years. It's reassuring to hear from your perspective that everything's changed, gotten better in terms of really both a builder experience and a user experience. Hopefully that continues to happen year over a year.

Do you think there's a point where we get this growth unlock that I think a lot of people talk about where you have a lot of institutional adoption and there's another explosion of everyday users maybe similar to what we had in 2021? one, is it just a matter of infrastructure continues to improve and one day we get that? Or do you think there's something else that drives growth here? What does the next wave adoption look like? Good question. Well, we look back into 2020. I think the explosion of growth was partly bought about by some of the innovations at that time. Uniswap and so on were emerging. But it's also partly bought by circumstance by the pandemic, but everybody at home. They didn't really have much to do.

So they started looking online and fun things to do. And in Defi, especially, there's a lot of their experimentation was very organic and retail and grassroots from the general population. It wasn't institutional in nature. Now that that's gone away a little bit, I think the people have been super pessimistic about DFI for some reason, maybe not so much today, but certainly over the past year or so, I sort of felt that on social media, people would be very, very negative about DFI as a whole. And I think I always say to people, rather than things just going up and then falling back a bit, if you're just drawn a straight line from 2020, just from then to where we ended up in

in 2023 or early 2024. People will be so excited. They'd be like, wow, this is a really vibrant sector. It's growing, growing so quickly. But I think ultimately part of the negativity came about just from the fact that it went up and then came back down. I left a bit of taste in people's mouth, I suppose. But I still see day after day growth of the sector

and improvements in the technology. And I do see massive changes in the user base and types of people that are interested. I think the whole sector is professionalizing quite a lot. I went to a conference called Digital Assets Summit, and I think I went in 2021. I was down in London, and I was walking around, and there was a lot of folks in suits, and I was this Defi representative there. And when we were talking to people, the conversations just didn't really flow.

There was massive disconnect between what they thought Defi was and what we thought they were there to offer. There's a lot of custody solutions and so on with Bitcoin, but there wasn't really much interest from institutions in Defi as a technology. I went earlier, was it earlier this year or late last year? to the same conference and it was absolutely buzzing with people, mostly institutions. There were even sovereign wealth funds and all these folks, all very, very excited suddenly about defy and the promises that it could bring to revolutionize traditional finance. And there were all sorts of folks doing experimenting. Ultimately, I think institutions are already here.

We can clearly see that with BlackRock tokenizing its first fund and so on. I think that happened in March this year. But they're coming online every single day. they're here already and they're coming in vast numbers. It just takes them time. So I think the next wave will be institutional and it will emerge over the next few years. That's brilliant. For one final question, how do you think the defy landscape evolves in the next year, call it, and what stands out to you that you're excited about, whether it's directly in the context of Euler or otherwise? Well, there's continuing innovation in a lot of areas. I think Uniswad V4 is coming out later this year,

perhaps sooner than we think, and that's super interesting. I think the principle behind USWRV4 is quite similar to the principles behind Oil of V2 really. They've taken this more modular approach, like people deploy their own markets and let people customize them. And I think with that flexibility, we're going to see a lot of innovation around the X markets again, which could be fun. Some of that will probably be institutional as well.

I'm sure we'll see some surprises there with bigger institutions or traditional finance players coming in and experimenting with V4 hooks. Those same principles apply to OILA and I think there's a lot to be excited about with real world assets and tokenising assets and bringing them on chain. Alongside SWB4, obviously I'm really excited about what OILA V2 is going to bring. I think we'll be competing strongly with some of the bigger players in DeFi and traditional DFI and up and coming coming over. And up and coming players like Morpheb. But there's a whole new world out there as well to explore, as I've said, with some of these big traditional finance players coming online. And I think O'Ola has an awful lot to offer when it comes to enabling new markets.

for tokenized real world assets that could help really explore new ground and work with institutions to enable 24-7 markets and trading of more traditional assets on top of the ones that people are used to trading in defy. The move from BlackRock and some of these other projects that bring real world assets online is really really exciting. And I think we'll see a lot of continued innovations based driven by institutions outside of traditional defy projects. I'm excited. What do they always say gradually then all at once? I feel like that's how we're going to get there. Michael, thanks for coming on. I really enjoyed it. And looking forward to staying in touch, obviously, for V2 launch coming up.

Absolutely. Thanks very much for having me. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island.Vccelsen. 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.