The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin's Bear Market Is OVER - But Wall Street Is Split

Episode Date: October 27, 2026

DoubleZero co-founder Austin Federa joins Andrew Parish and Tillman Holloway of Arch Public to debate whether the Bitcoin bear market is over, after Galaxy said the bottom was in back in June while Bernstein cut its targets for crypto stocks and stopped assuming any bullish price action. The panel starts with Wall Street's split on Bitcoin, volatility, IBIT options and ETF flows, then Austin explains DoubleZero's low-latency network, its new Edge for Builders data feeds and how AI agents are opening up fast trading. From there it's the K-shaped economy and Bitcoin ETF demand, Kraken's plan for regulated US perpetual futures on Hyperliquid, crypto and the dollar, on-chain IPOs, Ripple's national trust bank, crypto's market structure and self-custody problems, and why meme coins are entertainment, not investments. In this episode:00:00 Galaxy and Bernstein split on the bear market03:42 Volatility, IBIT options and repriced markets06:23 IBIT flows and a bottom in crypto narratives09:27 Austin Federa on DoubleZero and Edge for Builders15:49 AI agents, trading access and exchange UIs22:43 The K-shaped economy and Bitcoin ETF demand29:06 Kraken, Hyperliquid and US perpetual futures34:57 Crypto exchanges, Robinhood and on-chain IPOs37:26 Crypto market structure and self-custody risks44:07 Meme coins, pump.fun and entertainment vs. investing Austin Federa on X: https://x.com/Austin_FederaDoubleZero: https://doublezero.xyzAndrew Parish on X: https://x.com/AP_AbacusTillman Holloway on X: https://x.com/TEXASOL61Arch Public: https://archpublic.com Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm3ez-tlplQ If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show and leave a rating. It helps more than you know. Follow Scott Melker:Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ScottMelkerFollow Scott on X: https://x.com/scottmelkerThe Wolf Den newsletter: https://thewolfden.substack.comThe Daily Wolf on Yahoo Finance: https://finance.yahoo.com/videos/series/daily-wolf/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Bitcoin's bear market ended months ago. this according to Galaxy's Alex Thorne, who graced us with his presence on this very show last Tuesday. Meanwhile, Galaxy thinks that the bear market bottom was in and that we're heading into a bull market, but Bernstein is cutting, cutting their prices for Coinbase Circle and others because they do not want to take for granted any more bullish price action. Seems that we have no consensus on Wall Street, sale as old as time. Today, we have Austin Federa joining Tillman and Andrew for what will prove to be our best show in the history of all time. Let's go.

Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. My mic is very crooked. I am a rambling idiot today. I'm going to be honest. I recorded The Daily Wolf this morning, which is not something that we usually do. And I was all over the map, as you saw with that intro. And I made the joke to my producer that it was actually a very good show because I didn't have to do it after Mike

McClone sucked the life out of me for an hour. It's very hard to, you know, get up and do a show about how excited you are with everything in crypto when the first thing you hear every Monday is how everything you care about in the entire world is going to zero. But that's what we do. But now we have a much more inspirational panel. We got Andrew Austin and Tillman. Good morning, gentlemen. How are you? Wait, so you're a rambling idiot just today? Good morning. Is that only a good day? Is this, okay.

Shut up, Andrew. I always appreciate that you set reasonable expectations for the audience. You want them to know exactly what they're going to get. Well, I can tell you that the other three are not rambling idiots. So, yeah, Tillman, you actually missed it last week. You were on the plane. You and I had dinner Monday night in Tampa, and you were headed out. But we did have Alex Thorne on the show, and he was great.

but this was kind of the lead here. He wrote this great piece. Why now is the time to add and hold? Bitcoin pointed back to sort of the June lows as the likely bottom. As I said there in the intro, though, you can flip right over to Bernstein saying that crypto stock outlook is bad at Coinbase Robin Hood and Circle, cutting their expectations, etc. So as usual, we have a lack of consensus here.

Austin, since, you know, you're fresh here on Tuesdays, what do you? you think of the market generally. I am in the it bottomed in June camp and have been saying so personally. The market continues to be extremely confused. And this is like not a crypto thing. Like everyone I talk to is simultaneously bullish and so hair trigger about like they're just begging for a market crash. It feels like everyone wants it or at least there's so much expectation of one that when things go pretty normally, people get concerned. And this is just like a weird quirk of, I think, what we're living through right now, which is like a complete disruption of a lot of things due to AI, due to crypto. But, you know, everyone's bearish on the US dollar, but not really

sure if they want to run to Bitcoin or not. Because now, oh, what about Bitcoin and quantum computers? Like, it's a very interesting time. I think in part because nobody has any idea what they think, let alone what other people think. Yeah, I've never been more confused by markets generally. Andrew Tillman, what do you think? I think volatility is the new norm across the board. I think that's what you can expect. I think there's a disruption that's taking place in markets

that hasn't been discussed enough. And the disruption is a lot of low liquidity on some of the fronts and now new trading hours, new connected markets, new ways to hedge portfolios, you know, $700, I think, billion dollars of, Ibit, you know, outflows. Well, I mean, it was basically exclusive to Ibit. And, you know, we've talked about this on the show, but I bit options. And when they came online, Bitcoin had a different use case. And the use case was harvesting volatility. And you see that in Michael Saylor's strategy with how you know how how is he paying 12% well he's harvesting the volatility and keeping the

rest and that's that's going to be across every market i mean i saw oil i think is at 115 today silver had a 3x move in the last you know 24 months there's all of these traditional markets that i think are being repriced um i think part of that is due to suppression of those prices over a long period of time and kind of the dam broke but i also think that if you're going to inflate our currency, you can't just inflate our way out of the debt. You also have to spread the inflation out to where it doesn't hit consumer goods right on the chin. And I think the new markets that we're creating and the liquidity that's going to be needed to run those markets is a heck of an excuse to put a lot of money out into the world. And I think that the AI trade and the investment that's

needed on that front is also a great excuse. I think it's a It's a repricing of a lot of commodities. I wouldn't expect anything less of Bitcoin. I think when it moves, it's going to tear people's faces off. And I think when it crashes, it'll do the same. And that'll be the place where people start getting. But the broader exposure that it has and the on ramps that we've seen integrated over the last, call it three years, gives more people access to the very volatility that we're talking about.

So when you see the price crash, there's a lot of people that come out of the woodwork for that opportunity. I know Austin, I mean, his business is predicated on people wanting opportunities, and they show up when the opportunities present themselves. So I think this is a prime example of that. Yeah, there's the street shot, by the way. I've been 110.3-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0. Yeah, that was a uniquely terrible headline by the Coin Telegraph. Oh, come on. They've done worse.

Yeah. True. It is, it is, you know, Ibit brought in $110 million and nobody brought in anything. No, I've got a guy in my mentions that said he bought, you know, four shares of Fidelity, Fidelity's Bitcoin ETF yesterday. I'm like, well, they, you know, they cover this stuff in millions, not in, you know, $100 increments. But it is interesting that we're finding, we're probably certainly at a bottom in terms of narratives. We're certainly at a bottom in terms of outside interest beyond podcasts like this.

When you see that screenshot that shows Ibit, which is institutional money moving in and out associated with their options trades. and you see zeros across the board for every other spot Bitcoin ETF. Yeah, that's, we are definitely at a bottom for narratives and interest. And that is, you know, that's something. If it's a signal, there's two ways to go with that signal. You have Jason Calacanis, who's on his about every three years saying Bitcoin is dead. He did it at 3,000. Is he saying it again?

Yeah, he did it 3,000. He did it again this morning at, you know, 80,174. So, you know, the same replay of the same tape just gets rewound and played again. And those of us that are, you know, have conviction in a particular asset trade, we take advantage of those moments. And so this is another opportunity. Again, I said it earlier this week. You know, every time we tick into the 70s, that's a gift. I don't care what level of the 70s it is.

Even if it's 79, 700, you know, it's an absolute gift based on probably where we are 12, 18 months from now. Jason says 57. Yeah. Well, okay, so again, Jason says 57, but previously it was a zero. And previously before it was a zero. So he's hedging down to 57. It's, again, the changes that get made to this. At least McClone sticks to 10,000.

I mean, you got to respect you for that. Good round number everybody can agree on. I like wake up in the middle of the night. I'm like, 10,000. Back to sleep. Okay, so that, I think what's interesting is that you're kind of talking about narratives, bottoming and all these things. But the fact is, if you look below the surface, like, it's never been better, right?

I mean, Austin, I think you're uniquely positioned to talk about this. So I want to bring up what you guys are doing specifically, right? But in this case, Q3, 2026 report to token holders from double zero. But like I read this, executive summary. In the third quarter of 2026, three new venues were added to double zero edge. Kalshi, hyperliquid, right? I mean, like everybody's partnering with it. It's like almost like AI, you know, like meta invests in a video who buys stuff from Anthropic who gives something to chat.

But like everything is being built regardless of price. And strangely, it doesn't affect price anymore because we've taken for granted how many things are being built, I think. Yeah, it is really interesting. This is kind of one of the things I've seen over the last two years. When we started double zero, like no one in crypto at any idea we were talking about. You found like four people who like maybe used to work at HFT firms are like, oh yeah, I remember this stuff. This is interesting. We can apply it to crypto and new finance.

And now, like, two years later, we have venues coming to us saying, hey, we would like to do market data feed on double zero edge so we can transmit our full book, which, you know, is like a very boring traditional thing for Tradfai, but is still pretty exotic when you're looking at crypto, especially in production markets where you have 3,000 instruments you might want to watch. But like the fundamentals here across the board are actually pretty good right now. We are much better integrated from like a liquidity and market standpoint than on. 1010. And yet, everybody is still worried. And so this is kind of one of these interesting things that we keep seeing is that speed is like starting to matter more. I think the RWA arbitrage play is becoming very strong. I mean, Hyperliquid has massive spikes at market open and market close for a reason. It's because there's a lot of latency arbitrage taking place as pricing is redetermined in real time as markets open and close. And that's interesting. There's a lot of interesting stuff taking place, getting much more exotic types of products and services on chain that have typically not been available or have been locked up in more opaque markets,

whether it's tokenized uranium now, which is like a trade you can finally do, which was something that you needed physical settlement for if you were trying to trade uranium even just six months or a year ago. And so the core use of this technology as a way to expand market access and make the cost of settlement lower, like that thesis is playing out. And we are seeing people in, you know, markets that historically not have access to U.S. treasuries or tokenized Tesla

being able to buy these things. At the same time, like, saw the full page ad in the Wall Street Journal was that yesterday about how CEOs, like, beware, tokenization is coming for your securities. Like, that's something to be afraid of. So it's an interesting guy.

It seems like they would really invite, you know, extra volume and liquidity and trading. Yeah, I mean, it's not the, you know, you got to look at who's taking out the ad, and it's generally not the people, you know, selling securities. It's the people making money in the middle of those transactions with things that I don't know why we still have, like transfer agents. Could you tell, I just briefly, kind of, I don't want to take for granted that people understand what you guys are doing and what, you know, high-frequency traders use these data

feeds for, but, like, this is one of those things that is, fundamental to making money on Wall Street for these firms that we lacked, as you said. Yeah, so Double Zero is, at its core, a project to try and build a new internet. And a new internet optimized for finance and low latency applications. And so we use the same type of technology that Wall Street firms have been using for two decades, which is dedicated high-performance fiber. And so Double Zero has access to fiber that runs under the oceans, under cities, over mountains. and it's a much faster path than the public internet for receiving market data, sending in trades,

blockchains reaching consensus, all this type of stuff. And if you're dealing with like a point source market like the New York Stock Exchange, there's great infrastructure in place already to get the fastest market data feeds out so high-frequency traders can trade on it. If you're talking about new finance venues, whether that is finance or Kalshi or Coinbase, or especially when you're talking about decentralized markets, like hyperliquivist, or Phoenix on Solana, getting that data and reading it quickly is actually quite difficult. And so that's one of the things that Double Zero specifies in is giving you the fastest look

at these new finance market platforms. And then we're expanding that coverage to include all sorts of other types of feeds. One of the things we actually just launched today on TestNet is Edge for Builders, which allows anybody who wants to publish a data feed to come in and basically use our existing technology stack to permissionlessly publish a data feed. And so that could be an exchange that wants to do this. It could be a trading firm that wants to sell a copy of their strategy and a trading strategy, anyone who has monetizable data that needs low latency distribution.

Wow, that's incredible. I knew it was going on. I just didn't know who was doing it. So it's good to finally see that. Before you got here, I was like, Andrew Austin, you guys should be friends. Like, you're kind of in the same, you know. Well, would you say that the primary use case right now and what you see, the demand, pointing towards is market makers on the arbitrage side, or do you see it more for,

you know, more vanilla purposes than that? So that's a huge category. Anyone who's doing something that looks like high frequency trading, which, yeah, market making basically looks like. The new emergent category for us is AI agents. We have seen a lot of people actually having, like, AI inference is still too slow to really trade on, but you can have AI build you a trading program. And then you can hook that up to double zero data.

And suddenly, you know, you're not, you're not Jane Street overnight, but you are closing the gap tremendously between click trading and a UI and what a market making firm is doing. Well, it definitely lowers the threshold, you know, and it allows you to make trades that you otherwise could not make. So I think that that's the story of technology here is the connection of markets or allowing people to not only make trades, but manage trades in ways that they otherwise. couldn't do. And across all of those markets, the yield opportunities are the story, right? That's that volatility that we were talking about. Completely. It's the idea that like, go back five years ago and if you had an alpha trade or an idea of what an alpha trade might be and you didn't work at a big firm, good luck actually executing that trade. Right? The execution and the data access was such a barrier. That's coming down very quickly. AI can build the program

for you, double zero can catch you the data. You can now actually, like through projects like the hub, you can get a bare metal server located in, like, NY4 at a pretty reasonable price. And, like, yes, it's not exactly the same as being co-loaded with Nizze and NASDAQ, but

it's much better than having your agent trade through Robin Hood or something like that. So, the access barrier is getting very low, very quickly. But that is where the agents are, like everybody, well, obviously, Arch Public, you guys have agentric trading, but the platforms are also building out their own agentic trading, but like nothing against them.

I love Robin Hood, but I feel like if everybody's building an agentic trading agent on Robin Hood, there's no alpha. Well, it's just a different type of trade. You know, the trades that Austin is facilitating, you can't do on Robin Hood. That's the reality. So it's, again, lowering the threshold and allowing more people to access these types of high frequency. And that's not for everybody, but it is for people. There's a large portion of people that are fascinated with it, like myself, that would

love to do it just for the educational side of it. And so I think the demand is there in spades. What's going to be impossible to stop is the market integration that we have in front of us. I don't think people even understand with real world assets. I mean, you said that, but I don't think people grasp how big that opportunity is. I guess I follow-up question to you as is, I've always thought that defy wouldn't become mainstream unless it was integrated into the user interface of major exchanges. Do you feel that way or do you see it differently?

How do you approach that? I think there's probably two ways to look at this. And I'll give you the sort of the more contrarian one first, which is the UI is not going to matter in six months. The same way that none of us really interface with like anthropics UI, we go in through a terminal or we go in through like a little web app on the computer. What we're really dealing with is the death of the UI because the agents are going to be able to navigate these systems.

And do I really care if I'm trading on interactive broker or Robin Hood or LMAX? I just care about getting the best price I can and the best execution. I can. And so what we'll probably see is a world where we have aggregator UIs, right? This is sort of the threat that Amazon faces right now is the everything store is not particularly useful if your agent is your interface to the everything store. And so the Everything House of Finance also, it's an existential problem for anyone like that. And like the unhappy path is we have what happened to Web 2. A bunch of walled gardens go up with a bunch of arbitrary blocks that prevents you from, like the original vision of the Web 2.0 API was like an open access data flow

beautiful utopia. And instead what we got is like a bunch of sign in with Facebook buttons everywhere that don't really work very well. And so we could see that in finance as well. Amazon's already restricting. I think Muse is not allowed to buy stuff on Amazon anymore. But Alexa Shopping, of course, can go buy stuff on Facebook Marketplace. We could see that happening with finance too. I think it probably won't because the incentives are so volume. Like finance is one of the last parts of the economy that is resilient to the price pressures of inflation. Like you see this across the board now where we're going to make it up on volume no longer applies to anything with physical settlement or physical labor. So it's better to sell one overpriced cocktail than sell three

low-cost cocktails because the cost of labor is such a major factor in this now. Finance is no cost of labor, especially when you're talking about crypto. And so the make-it-up on volume play still very much applies in finance. And that's why I think we're probably not going to see Wald Gardens developing between these various different companies. And at the same time, your agent's going to build you a UI that's more intuitive by you. Personally, I can't understand the Coinbase UI. I've used it for years. I go on Coinbase. I'm like, where the hell is any button that I would want? I don't even know if I'm on like Prime or the main exchange or like GDAX or pro or whatever they've renamed it to.

Well, the broader problem is, is that you, if you want diversification, you have to learn 10 of them. Like, you know, what. And if I want, if a new, you know, tool comes online or a new asset that I want to trade, I've got to learn another one and move. I agree with you. I think that the technology layer is going to be the user layer. And it's going to fit across. every exchange and every asset that you want exposure to. I would say I don't know how quickly the user interface is going to be able to catch up with that.

But I agree with you. And I think that's the beautiful thing about finance is that it's been very, it's excluded a large portion of the world's population for a long time. And it's done it on the back of what you just said, that scaling those customers in with the small amounts of deposits that they can make is not an attractive marketing model or business model for the banks. So they never fight for those customers. They never go after them.

Quite frankly, they don't want to serve them even when they get them. And so it's defy and what I would call the Bitcoin standard is it's changing all of that. It's rewriting the rules on who gets to participate and lowering the barriers for trading specifically. I mean, think about the financial literacy in this country. If you talk to anyone coming out of high school or even college, most of them have no aspirations to participate in the market beyond their 401K contributions that they never think about. They don't.

And that's a shame. Our markets are the best in the world. Why wouldn't we be teaching people how to use the laws of compounding to their advantage just through the inflationary mechanism alone? I mean, the S&P 500 is not too shabby these days. But this is like this was the promise of crypto and in some ways a lot of the reality of it is it is a market where you are just allowed to participate. And that is not the default assumption in I mean most of the world, but let alone most markets still. And so, you know, like the K-shaped recovery thing is so overplayed. But it really is like there's like two classes of people. There's the people that took their stimulus checks and like bought a type of financial asset with it. And there's people who bought physical goods. with it and, you know, like, yeah, definitely some people needed to buy physical goods, but that feels like that was like a moment in society where, like, a certain number of people

join the up K and a certain number of people join the down K. And like, we are just living in the fallout of that where now, like, I talk to people who I know who are like not particularly interested in finance, not particularly interested in investing. And their biggest thing is that they feel like it's not real. It's like they've been left behind by the market to, the point now where they're almost choosing to opt out of the market. Like, it's something you can choose not to believe in. And that's just, like, terrifying to me. Yeah, well, the volume is what makes the market. And if, and I think that's why Larry Fink has hitched his wagon to Bitcoin, because there was nothing that proved more demand than the ETF response that we saw in Bitcoin.

I mean, that that, that was more successful than any ETF in the history by orders of magnitude. And that told them, wow, this demand is real and this speaks to the people. And it's fun to see, you know, the Texas Stock Exchange and all these kind of, you know, ICE partnering with OKX. I mean, there's some, there's some really interesting bedfellows finding themselves in this new frontier. Yeah, so a few points to unpack there. If I may. You may not. Sorry. Tell me when they're going to talk. Coinbase in terms of their UI, they're not really all that financially incentivized for you to find the lowest common denominator to trade. You know, there's the first there's that.

You know, the mention of Jane Street and the behemoth that it's become on Wall Street, you know, people don't realize that they didn't really rise to meaningful prominence until about 2020. They weren't even founded until the year 2000, I think, or maybe 1999. And, you know, how does that happen? Well, the great financial crisis happened. And to your point, if you've got a great idea and you want to bring it to some level of scale, you know, just go watch the big short, right? You know, the guy is running that little brown fund or whatever. They've got a great idea and we want to go do it. Well, they've got to go get a RISD at like JP Morgan and they've got to trade like several billion dollars to make that happen.

And they're like, well, let's go talk to them. And they're like, yeah, it's not, it's not going to happen. You're nowhere close. So all of that, though, changed during the great financial crisis where you essentially had bond deaths and equity deaths and trade deaths at, you know, global investment banks basically get wiped off the face of the earth. And so now you've got this vacuum where there are shops that come in. And Jane Street has become the shop that is the shop, like movements on Wall Street that you can't figure out. you're like, oh, wait a minute, that was Jane Street. Oh, wait a minute, that was Jane Street. Oh, wait a minute, that was Jane Street. So, you know, a lot of structure has adjusted and changed into Austin's point in the, you know, the work that he's doing, you know, to have the opportunity to take an idea and not have to have a half a billion to $2 billion for somebody to care on Wall Street is a meaningful adjustment and change. And that will continue to be the case. And that access will lower, lower and lower and lower and lower and lower as we go forward.

And it needs to be said that in a lot of ways, crypto has been the engine that has opened up those doors. And even though, you know, at the top of the conversation, you get a lot of people that say, well, what is crypto ever done? You know, you're not going to Starbucks and spending your Bitcoin. Well, this is what crypto has done. It is meaningfully changed the dynamic. of access.

Well, it's created a basis trade, right? Wall Street. The basis trade's real. I mean, go look at the 13F filings for Citadel, Millennium, Jane Street. They've got huge spot Bitcoin ETF positions. And they also have hedged short CME futures positions. Like, they're just playing the spread. And here's my point.

And I said this a long time ago, a few years ago. It's kind of like, we didn't know who the market makers were. in the old crypto days. I'd rather know the devil than, you know, the devil be in the dark. And these guys say what you will about them. The fact that they even want to play in our markets, in our sandbox, tells you what they think about our markets. A lot of volume, a lot of depth of liquidity,

constant new engagement with new user adoption. I mean, you don't do that strategy unless there is a spread to play. And those people are playing at a level that they can't play in small sandbox. It has to be big. They're also onshore and regulated, which is like even if crypto markets are still the Wild West, like there's a cap on crime that a U.S.-based trading firm is going to do simply because they don't want, there's no right to trade in this country, right? We saw the Senate of the Biden administration like, yeah, you do something in this market

we don't like. Maybe we'll poke your license in this other market. That's a much better incentive structure than a bunch of like no name offshore market makers participating in. Couldn't agree more. They, well, they provide the very liquidity that keeps the market running and keeps it stable. And they do have motives and they are different than most other participants. But they keep each other honest is the way I look at it.

There's any inefficiency that presents itself, no one talks to the other folks like, hey, there's a market inefficiency. They take it for themselves and it gets filled. Andrew Kauai talking about taking for granted all the things that, you know, crypto has brought in sort of the forced innovation. This one, you know, we had Donald Trump stand up at a speech at the White House and say hyperliquid. Right? It was going to get on short.

Well, here you go. Cracken's parent plans regulated U.S. perpetual futures on hyperliquid. So I kind of like joke, you know, hyperliquid gets to choose whoever they want to dance with right now. And they sort of chose Cracken. So this isn't necessarily happening yet. But the CFDC, they're going to choose everyone. I see your head there, Austin, and you guys as well. I think Krakent needs them to choose them because they want an IPO.

There you go. But the broader point being that all of this crypto innovation is coming to a market near you in the United States, right? So not only as like the perpetual swap, which blows my mind if you were here early and you saw the early days of BitMex and Arthur Hayes and all of this, that this is going to become the standard or going to become pretty standard for how tokens and stocks are traded, in the future, but also that we've basically become the plumbing and infrastructure for the entire financial system at this point. You have the DTCC talking about, you know, settling quadrillions and volume on tokenized rails. So, yeah, I mean, the crypto innovation and all the things that were sort of these DGEN narratives before have become just, will become the financial system that we

don't understand, think about the same way. I don't know how my iPhone works or the internet works is just going to be what's under there. I guess, Austin, the question there, and I kind of ask a lot of people this. Is that the like worst version of what we had hoped for as like crypto guys who wanted to like invest in these tokens and see our thing? You build another financial system and we end up just being the plumbing for you know the existing financial system and our tokens don't go up. Yeah. I mean like look that there's an argument that like they're using our networks and they're not buying our tokens and it's like yeah, okay. Sure, we'll figure it out. Right. Like I fundamentally, I think the answer there is that you either have economics that work on a network or you don't.

Like, how valuable is Swift? Eh, not terribly valuable. Why? Because Swift has no programmability layer. If Swift had a programmability layer, it would be worth a lot more money. And so just because people are using these networks to transfer things now, it doesn't mean that there isn't going to be a lot of value built on top of it because they actually are programmable environments.

I think that's like a big difference there. the other part though is like should we as crypto people be sad about how integrated the markets have gotten and how much like crypto is now just finance and it's like I don't I think if you go back in time the sort of a lot of the people who are like the the US dollar is bad we should have Bitcoin be the national reserve currency genuinely did not understand anything about how nation state economies work And like even when we had sort of a gold-backed system in the United States, it wasn't really gold-backed. It was still full faith and credit with some gold in a vault somewhere backed. And like I think that crypto has been one of the best things for U.S. national security to come out of the financial industry in 30 years.

And it's because we have dollarization continuing to expand internationally at a time when the U.S. has more currencies pushing back against. it than it's had in our lifetime. I think that's a net positive for the U.S. It's good for the industry. I'm obviously sitting here in New York. I'm pretty pro-U.S. But like Bitcoin 2 in general, you want it paired with the strongest fiat currency, which is the U.S. dollar. And so even if you are a Bitcoin maxi who thinks like Bitcoin is the only currency you should be holding, you should be really happy that more of the traditional U.S. dollar denominated financial sector is participating in Bitcoin because it's simply just a co-currency trade. Yeah.

I think it's just different motives, right? People who wanted to get rich on Bitcoin saw it in a different light than people who want to preserve their wealth with Bitcoin. The rapper narrative is very strong in the super high net worth family office. They don't look at it the same way that the people who got in five, 10 years ago, look at it. And for good reason, right? It's about wealth preservation.

It's about asymmetric upside with, you know, while hedging your downside. And the Bitcoin is very unique on those fronts. And so you're going to see more and more adoption. And unfortunately for, you know, it's insane for Bitcoiners to go, we want the world to adopt Bitcoin and we want it to change the world except for rich Wall Street people. I mean, that just, you know, like that doesn't even make sense. And so you're going to see this narrative. even though it's not understood by a lot of people, it's understood by the super wealthy and they like it and they want exposure to it and they're going to continue to find exposure to it.

And it's going to be integrated into a lot of vault structures where it is the wrapper against real estate assets yield and defy yield and all sorts of other stuff. And from a collateral perspective too, I think it needs to be noted that as a rapper, it can act as a first out money pool, unlike any. other instrument because there's no repossession cost to it. You can smart contract the collateral against payments. And if the payments aren't made, collateral is relief. So there's just all sorts of, you know, again, things that improve use case across the board. By the way, kudos to the cracking guys and pay word for being careful about an IPO. You know, all of their peers have done IPOs and gotten their teeth kicked in over the past 12 months. So those guys have been sharp and considerate about where they're at and what they do and

how they do it. You know, partnering with hyperliquid, partnering with just about everybody they can find that will move the needle from volume and revenue standpoint makes a lot more sense. Because in a lot of ways, you know, let's just call it crypto exchanges or doing everything they can to turn into everything apps. They're doing just about everything. And so they're competing more with Robin Hood than anything else. And so you've got to, what do you do that's different or better than Robin Hood

so that when you do go public, there's a narrative that's something other than basically not a lot. And, you know, public markets are brutal. They'll strip you down to what you actually are. And then if they want to, they'll laugh at you. while your stock goes down. Shame. Yeah.

Yeah. So, the second guys, you know, sharp guys. Yeah. Fair company. I asked Darjeet about that last week. I had, you know, him on the podcast. I sort of joked, you know, he was saying that he thinks that what are their differentiators or one of the things we'll see, obviously, is effectively IPOs on chain for

the rest of the world. So it won't be, you know, you still won't, you won't be listed on New York Stock Exchange, but it won't matter because there'll be so much liquidity and you can effectively go public on chain. I was like, so why doesn't Cracken just go public on Cracken? Yeah. Do it. Interesting idea there. Well, this is like, you know, the direct listing was like a real disruptive event. And so like the direct on chain listing, I think, is going to be an equally disruptive event. Yeah, I think that's exactly what, what he was alluding to. One other story, I got a show is, you know, kind of big. Ripple gets a final go ahead to launch its own U.S. National

Trust Bank. So we've seen this kind of a series of these, but this is effective immediately, I think, from the OCC. This was announced that they had gotten conditional approval, I think, last December, and this comes in a string of a number of these. But just kind of talking about how far we've come and the surprises and all the stories that just kind of fall behind the wayside that you don't notice, this will allow them, obviously, to custody their own custody and manage their own stablecoin reserves for RLUSD, which is, I think, a 2.5 billion. It's a small market cap right now. But this, trend of, you know, the bank's hating us but becoming banks is wild.

Yes. To see it real time. Yeah. So I guess, you know, kudos to them on that one. Austin, you still got time. I don't want to, I want to take it for granted. And any other, like any other topics burn in a hole in your pocket here? Yeah. I mean, like, look, I keep coming back to this thing about how like these networks have big market structure problems with them still. This is a thing with crypto that I think we have not seriously enough addressed yet, which is like we don't need reg NMS.

Reg NMS is like probably a net negative to markets in total. But it's like it's way too hard still to have confidence about how you're trading and what your actual trades are, especially on these distributed networks. And so, like, one of the pieces that I, like, keep trying to talk to people about is, like, we have to decide if these markets are real or if these markets are toys. And I think they're real. I think we should treat them like they're real. But, like, it requires a much more commitment to high performance infrastructure. I have been more convinced that the MEV people, the anti-MV people have been right all along, that, like, we really need to try and minimize some of these negative market impacts that can happen.

And it's not MEV, right? Mev is actually like a pretty solved problem nowadays on most networks, but is the lack of determinism in ordering, the lack of determinism in landing. These are still really big problems, not for retail. I think they're very overblown for retail. They're very big problems when you talk about institutional players. And so that's like the thing that keeps me up at night from like, oh, will crypto make it perspective?

It's a glown. It's a glown. Yeah. Okay. Sorry, man. There, keep going. Sorry. But it's the market structure stuff. It's like, for the aspirations we want to get to with this stuff, we can't be playing these games. You can't have to pay three different companies to land a transaction reliably on Solana or Ethereum. Yeah, I mean, it's laughable. I have these same conversations. We work with some very large institutional funds. and they look at what's going on in the crypto space compared to the high-frequency desks that they come from. It's like shoestrings and duct tape.

I mean, it floats, but no one can figure out how or why. And, you know, it's a lot of putting out fires because there's constant revisions and things needing to be updated. And you even see that on the hardware side. I mean, look at how arrogant we were from a security perspective on cold storage and self-custody, and now we're finding out that there's a lot of issues that need to be addressed and that it's not a riskless transaction to self-custody. In fact, you have a higher risk factor from a loss perspective than you do now with major institutions that are here in the United States. And so the landscape's changing. And I think it's a risk first question.

And to your point, I think the evolution of markets can't just be from a storefront perspective. It has to be from the distribution, the back end perspective, and really, you know, the uniformity of those so that there's not malicious, you know, what I would call an attractive nuisance for bad characters to go and take advantage of. Yeah. And it just, it feels like there's a, there's still a lack of growing up in a lot of. the core components. You have a lot of companies on chain doing really interesting good stuff now. I think Backpack has done a very good job on their tokenized securities framework. Athena has done a really nice job on a lot of the stuff that they're doing as well. And then, like, man, like Ledger.

Right another one, right, Keystone? I never even heard. I see these and I'm like, I've never even heard of you. Yeah. Keystone's pretty good. But Treasor just had a whole big security incident too. And it's like, I get it. It's really hard to make a business selling a secure device that's meant to be updated every time a hack comes out for $75. But again, like, you know, I would pay a lot more. I would pay a subscription fee for a wallet that actually comes with like security features and a self-cust. But like an insurance. Yeah, you know.

Insurance is what I just want a hardware wallet with insurance. Yeah, that's get it. That interesting subscription fee, I think they charge those. annually on the ETS. I think they're about 25 days with points. Yeah, yeah, exactly, right? So I, you know, I think maybe that's the general idea there. Which is basically what Anchorage charges you and an ETF effectively as insurance in a way that like, you know, you don't get a lot of, you know, risk security protocols that they're kind of mandated to go through. So, yeah, it is, there's adjustments and changes in our industry that are happening.

know, both as visibly as we can stand and then underneath it all, lots of stuff that's happening. And all of it's good. All of it is a good thing. It's funny, we didn't, we celebrated when like, you know, legacy Wall Street company or brokerages added crypto to their platforms. But now we're not happy because, oh, okay, well, our crypto exchanges aren't as pure and as we'd like them to be. So which is it, right? Are we happy when there's instituted- We're never happy.

That's what it is. Just know, we're never happy. We're happy when the price goes up. That's right. Well, I mean, it reminds me of like when people say, yeah, I can't wait for Bitcoin to hit a million dollars. And I will ask them, like, what time frame do you think that's possible in? And they go, like a year.

And I go, do you want to live in a world where Bitcoin goes to a million dollars in a year? Like, that's a crazy world, guys. Like, there's a lot of unintended consequences to Bitcoin going to a million dollars in a 12-month period. So be careful what you wish for. Like, what we really want and what Austin's getting at is we want stability. Markets love predictability and stability. Now, that is going to, there's no shortage of opportunity, and there will be for a very

long time because the market is expanding at a rate that we've never seen before. technology is expanding at a rate and it's you know we're attached to that curve so that's not the issue like the expansion of markets and market participation barriers being lowered and all of the instant settlement 24-7 all that's coming whether we like it or not the question is is in what package does it come and and i think you could look at you know two separate markets pump dot fun would be one example where there was crazy manipulation going on. No, how dare you?

Well, you know what? I think a lot of people, and I talk to people, you know, in the crypto space a lot, and they'll go, well, you know, lots of millionaires were made on those. And I'll go, no, if you really do, if you studied the data. Very few. Yeah. Well, it's like three people on every project. And those three people had one button that dumped a thousand wallets. And it's all these, you know, technical tactics that come with unregulated, unstandardized markets.

And I think, you know, that's the future is the standardization. But let me like, let me give you like a soft defense for Pump.comun and Mean Coins. Now that I'm allowed to, I got, this is a side note. It's all on the internet. I got like drive by looped in to this like weird predatory lawyer that was trying to do a class action against Pump.combe. Nice. So for like a year, I couldn't talk about it. I've simply because I worked at the Salonah Foundation.

thankfully the dude lost everything which is great but anyway gloves are off yeah 100% I just you know I actually think that like oftentimes we look at things that are entertainment products as financial products in crypto that NFTs were not really a financial product I'm not sure meme coins are ever really a financial product and like no one's like particularly mad that people are spending $600 to go see you know a band And then they're spending $48 on a beer because it's entertainment. We don't consider it like an investment class.

And so I think the problem was when people started conflating meme coins, which were effectively people having fun on chain and getting some dopamine from numbers moving around on screen with an actual financial asset class. And that was the thing that I think was like a mistake. And obviously, like, you really should not invest in meme coins. But like, if you think this is fun, you want to play around with it, great. I have no problem with that. I would agree. I just think it needs to be clearly understood. Like when you go into a casino, you understand that the house wins.

You understand you're buying entertainment. You understand that over time you're going to lose. I think that that's where the standardization comes in. It's like where you know what the rules are. You know what the house edge is. You kind of know what the market participants look like. A lot of these are so, it's a rigged. It's so rigged and so lot.

cited that it doesn't even resemble a market. It resembles more of a scam, right? And so I, but I won't throw the baby out with the backwater. That is the first evolution of markets, of all markets, right? The internet started with pornography. That's exactly right. And if you can't throw out the internet without throwing out a lot of bad and good, you know, in the process, and it's the same thing with crypto, but, you know, we're 17 years into this journey. It's kind of time to have the rest of the market evolve like Bitcoin has, you know, standardized things. Yeah, agree with all that. Austin. Thank you very much.

I can't wait to hear more stories of Pump Fun now that the gloves are off. I've been in those positions, by the way, where you get caught into something that has absolutely nothing to do. There was a dip, like, a few months ago where it went down to, like, basically, all-time lows. And I was like, this is, like, the highest revenue-generating coin per market cap in the entire industry. Like, I would like to buy some more of this. and the lawyers were like, you really, you really. Austin, I wanted to be noted that I usually have Tourette's on this show with, you know, movies and TV shows.

And so when you mentioned, you know, building a new internet and the chair that you're in and I did not go in that direction. I did not talk about Silicon Valley, anything like that. I left that alone. I left it alone. You know, good stuff. You're doing great stuff. Usually just telegrams me the jokes.

I don't want to live in a world where somebody else. makes the world a better place than it. Well done. Very well done. Awesome, man. Austin, thank you so much. I'm going to keep these guys on for a couple more minutes. Appreciate you and look forward to having you on again soon.

Appreciate it. See, Austin. Oh, our faces just got really big. Zoom out. Or I can make Tillman's head huge. No, it's Andrew's heads, really. Sorry, guys. All right, so let's do this.

Hey, Arch Public. Tellman and I had a hell of a dinner last Monday. We did. Yeah, it's always great to get with customers and hear how they're using the tools and how much they appreciate what it's done for them. We're going to continue to do those types of events. We were, you know, born in the pandemic. And I said this from stage, it's really important for us to connect face to face with people. And so that's the purpose of it. It couldn't have gone better.

And I didn't have any exposure to Tampa before. that trip. But wow, what a city, what a group of people we met not only that came to the event on Wednesday and Thursday, but also to the dinner on Monday. It was truly fantastic. You know who I wish had no exposure to Tampa? The Milwaukee Brewers. I'm supposed to go to the world. I'm supposed to take my son to the World Series tomorrow night. And I was like, there's no way they sweep the Dodgers and there is. So I'll go to game five. He's going to kill me. My son, he's seven. He's seven. this morning he said, Dad, the next time I see a brewers player on the street, I'm going to kick him in the nuts.

And I said, okay. He is his father's son. And I was like, maybe you should kick the Tampa Bay Rays players in the nuts. They're the ones who are sucking right now. No, I'm with them. You've got to stay loyal to your team. You don't turn your back on them when they're out. He's more of a Yankee fan, to be honest, because his mom, he's a fairweather fan already for

seven-year-old, so it's not great. That's fun. Anyways, Andrew, do you have any words to say today? Yeah, no. In the basement. I'm over here getting through the podcast. It is surviving. Listen, our arch public customers are assault of the earth-type folks and spend

the time in Tampa was a lot of fun. You know, the clients themselves are, they're just sharp people. they're people that want to be involved in a community. Being involved in the community myself is just fantastic. And for all the right reasons, it's one thing to get some sort of financial benefit using ArchPublics tools. It's another thing to have actual human connections, not only with Arch Public's team, but also with the community at large.

And just a special time, special moment. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, we have a good time. I said, you know, I think you clipped it, but like last week, tell me you missed it, but I was talking to Andrew, and I was just like, that it's such a testament to what you guys have built is just how many people are willing to travel to hang out with you and to just sing your praises to anyone who will listen. It's unbelievable. Well, it's, you know, it's really tremendous when you can remove your own emotion and kind of you as the barrier to your strategies. And then when you, you know, we've, we've said it from, there's been a lot of customers that have come on board because they've seen us on this show. And those customers continue to reiterate kind of the same thing, which is you've given me my time back, which is the most valuable thing. And I don't think about the markets the way I used to. I love dips now instead of just when the price is moving. So the volatility that we were talking about today on the show is the story. If you think the markets haven't changed in the last 10 years, but really in the last three or four years since COVID.

Ten weeks. Yeah, you're sorely mistaken. And so how do you change with it? Well, automation does that. And we've made our tools free to use. So if you come to our website and you click get started and you have a Coinbase or a Gemini account, you can literally be up and going in five minutes. So we want to prove to you that automation is real, that you control it, that you custody your funds and whatever exchange you want to utilize. And it's a completely user-driven technology layer like we were discussing today on the call.

And that user experience allows you more flexibility. It allows you more competition amongst the exchanges in terms of fees. It allows you access to things that are complementary or offsetting from a correlation perspective. all sorts of benefits. So this is it's like a very, you know, small step towards a long journey of seeing what automated tools can do for you for your strategies and what you want done in the markets. And having an extension of your will in the markets is really what it's about. We pride ourselves in what you are expected is going to happen and happens. And so that's about, you know, you knowing what's going to happen and being able to see that happen.

So get started and we'll be happy to help you get set up and teach you all about the tools. Our customer service division and our employees are a fantastic resource on that front. So, yeah. That's a testimony. Too bad. They're all going to be replaced by Grockbot. Sorry, guys. Well, truth be told, I think that's the story about customers.

I like you guys. Well, look at all the crypto exchanges and how pathetic they are on the customer service side. Like, you can't get a real person to talk to you. I think the service space is going to be more valuable than ever, you know, going forward because AI is a cheap substitute. It doesn't really replace people. It never will. Andrew, any final words? I've got to get you up 500 of them on the show.

I'm looking forward to you being replaced by Grockpot. You're a cheap substitute for an ADHD riddle podcast host, you know? I mean, whatever. One day he's going to be pouring his La Croy. And it's going to start. That's the castor oil. That's castor oil. This is Pamplemoose.

It's good. What is it? Pamplemoose. It's a grapefruit in France. You unculture. A name is plug. Yeah, maybe look. Read a book.

In French about grapefruits. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I will be replaced. by AI. I look forward to it. So I don't have to talk to you. Yeah. Max Headroom. I mean, it happened in the 80s. It'll happen again. Max Headroom. Yeah. Yeah. I wish they would replace the Tampa Bay Reyes with AI agents. With winners. Hey, listen, I can talk trash. Texas is on the verge of blowing their entire season. So I did see

that we made it back to number 11, which is huge. It means we have a shot at the playoffs if we went out. Playoffs? Playoffs. You're talking about playoffs? Playoffs. Playoffs. The greatest sporting clips of all time.

Yeah. Any other jokes you guys would like to make before I let you go? No. No, not at all. Let's end on a high note. Like, uh, like, uh, Costanza. All right.

That's it. I'm out of here. Literally just hit the music like while you do that way, do that one more time. I'm going to time it perfectly do it. All right. That's it. We're out of here.

At Capital One, we don't just use technology. We architect it. Our teams have true end-to-end product ownership, shipping distributed systems that handle high concurrency at scale. No single-server bottlenecks, engineered beyond legacy downtime, and operating right here in downtown Toronto. That's Technology at Capital One. Search Technology at Capital One, Canada.