The Wolf Of All Streets - ETH Spot ETFs To Be Approved Today? w/ @zkLink_Official | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

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Alex, did you just text me? Yeah, of course. I thought you'd pop up and I'm like, oh, right. I should ask Scott if he's in Austin next week. I will be in Austin next week. I'm completely torturing myself right now. I was planning to go to Austin. I have a family vacation this weekend.

It's a Memorial Day. And yesterday at like 10 a.m., my friend says, hey, we're doing an RIA conference in Vegas. I forgot to invite you. It's today. The flight's at 2. And I got on a flight to Vegas at 2 p.m. yesterday. Slept two hours last night. Woke up.

I didn't really think about the whole three hours earlier to do my YouTube and newsletter and spaces. And my flight tomorrow is at 5 a.m. So I guess I'm going to do the double all-nighter straight to stay in a hotel with my kids for Memorial Day. Great. And then straight to Austin without going home. Without going for Memorial day. Great. So I, and then straight to Austin without going home, without going home. I booked my flight from there to Austin.

Yeah. I, I'm on like the tail end of like two weeks right now. I, I, uh, thought I was going to have to go to LA and then straight from here to Austin and be gone from like my house for three weeks. So at least I get three days at home,

but I got to say, so I'm wrapping up my company retreat right now. And we were in park city and beautiful place in some ways, great place to do a company retreat. You know, it's not a great idea when you have a bunch of people flying in from all over doing your retreat at 8,100 feet. Oh yeah. But one drink takes care of everybody. You really get to know them. My sleep numbers, like I wear two separate fucking trackers and my sleep numbers have been, like my whoopie

is yelling at me for like 20% recoveries every day that I've been here. Yeah, Mario and I were talking just before the spaces. We sometimes, you know, like do a quick call to catch up. And we were talking recently or last week about his biohacking. He literally takes everything, tracks his sleep, all those things. And he was like, you really got to get on top of the sleep thing.

And I was like, I promise I will. And then I called him today and said, I did inverse biohacking today. He'll be proud of me. I slept for two hours and won't sleep tonight. So good job. So I'm really working hard to do that. Yeah, I'm trying to I'm trying to live on one hour of sleep a night and just prove that I can still live forever. Yeah, I look forward to the amazing and well thought here is it's a, a friend of mine owns a company called a trade PMR. They're a boutique,

but pretty large custodian for RIAs, registered investment advisors, and obviously, and also a software platform. I've known him for a long time. So he was, you know, this is his yearly conference.

I just decided to come out last second and support, but actually the impetus for it was that I wanted to really, with this Ethereum spot ETF approval, I wanted to just spend the day today. I missed yesterday, but spend today in a room with these people just asking them their on-the-ground true thoughts about the Bitcoin spot ETF and then see if they even know what the word Ethereum means. I figured it was my best opportunity to come out here for 24 hours and do effectively a live focus group on a cross-section of these RIAs. And so that's why I did it. So I'm here. I haven't really had it. All I did so far was play craps with a 90-year-old guy named Norm. So that didn't really get me the information I was going for. I spent, uh,

I spent, um, I spent three, three hours last night in the high stakes craps and blackjack rooms and walked out up 15 bucks. Yeah. It was, it was, it was, so I didn't lose. How many free drinks did you get though? How many free drinks did you get though? That's, that's, that's the problem with the, you get, though? How many free drinks did you get, though? That's the real thing. That's the problem with the, you know, Ran, you always say that you like the Solana casino better than the real one,

but I haven't gotten any free drinks trying to trade meme coins yet. None. Because you don't trade enough meme coins. They only give free drinks to the big players. Sucks. Sucks. Well, I did get a free breakfast this morning. So that was pretty good. Where are you? Are are you in vegas yeah i decided to go to vegas at 10 p.m at 10 a.m yesterday and i got here at

7 p.m last night so it's a three-hour time can i ask you a question just like about your your personal life like if you took if you took like the ratio of number of days that you were on vacation versus number of days that you were actually working what do you think the ratio of number of days that you were on vacation versus number of days that you were actually working what do you think the ratio is like like 80 22 vacations yeah i think i think yeah i think i live by the pareto principle 20 vacation i think no i don't i don't even think i work bro okay 20 work i follow your wife's instagram i follow your wife's instagram you guys are always on vacation either you on uh you're in the bahamas no no take it just two seconds before you go to the vacation

did you say i follow your wife's instagram and brushed it off like it's nothing just just to to be clear you don't say this in front of two their friends they're friends in the real world they've hung out many times no we're friends but actually i prefer i prefer hanging with emmy than with scott everybody does the worst thing in my life literally everybody does how cool is my wife though that i literally was like i'm going to vegas today she's like cool and i said that means you have to drive the kids yourself to the family vacation i'll meet you there and then she said okay cool and then i said oh and i'm leaving straight for austin from there so i'm not going to come you know what so you got to drive you know what you know what like i i've met i've met a lot of like power couples in my life i've met a lot of power

couples i'll tell you one thing that emmy and scott are like the ultimate ultimate ultimate power couple um i'll tell you a few things about like that i've noticed about emmy like number one she is the most fucking supportive wife i've ever met i remember when scott was in a in a bad situation. I remember how Amy was sticking up for him on Twitter. She's fucking supportive. She's incredibly supportive of his life choices and his industry choices through bull market and bear market, number two. Number three, she is just an amazing, fun, real person to hang out with. I've spent evenings with Scott and Amy. When I go out with people from crypto, I'm skeptical to hang out with. Like I've spent like evenings with Scott and Emmy. And like, you know, like I always like when I go out with people from crypto,

like I always like I'm skeptical of like going out to their other house because like you never know, like are they, like Emmy's like one of us. Like, like honestly, I could go partying with Emmy and Scott and like have as much fun with Emmy as I'd have with Scott, like that kind of thing. So she's like. She's going to Vegas with one of my, yeah. She like goes to Vegas, like goes to Vegas with with my friends without me yeah yeah yeah no she's she's absolutely amazing words yeah they're very

absolutely amazing um and she's also a very like strong-headed person like when she decides something like i've seen how she's like she gets obsessive about it and i think she's an amazing mom so i think she's like she i mean scott you landed the jackpot bro thank you that check is in the mail buddy i appreciate it so as you know guys the team always asks us to change the title of the space based on the discussion none of you do it i do um so i'm just being very proactive right now and let me know when we move on topic so i can change the title again to something more relevant to the audience just let me know when you're ready, Scott. I want to know who else in the space is invested in ZK Link because I know I'm invested in it. I want to know who else is invested in it.

It's for a very long time. Yeah, I've been invested in ZK Link since the last cycle. When did you invest, Scott? We'll get to talk about them. Last cycle. Oh, shit shit i just invested in this cycle i'm late to the game on this one yeah i think we've probably all got in more or less the same the same valuation it's a very it's a very cool project the founders or the founder that i know is i don't know if he's joining us today is he joining us today yes yeah he's he's

coming on let me let me see more about about them. Do you know where they're listing? I know we're not talking about them yet. Well, I think we're waiting for ZK. ZK Think to launch, which I think is now-ish. I mean, it could be today. It could be soon. It's like in the next couple of days. And then it probably makes sense that they would launch after ZK Think launches.

Yeah, I'm going to check it out. All right, cool. I think we're going to get back to the – Scottott just a very direct question before you start with a recap and everything what happens let me change the title again what happens um if the etf um is it still at 75 percent what happens if it doesn't get approved doesn't go through this week is that even a possibility worth discussing yeah it's definitely possible so i mean it's still being handicapped at least by the bloomberg bros, I think, a 75% chance of approval. So that, you know, one in four, I'm in Vegas, you know, we've seen you lose on one in four quite often. So still 25% chance in their mind, it can be rejected. But when I spoke to them, it likely not necessarily even a rejection, very possible that if just the ducks are not in line yet, that we could see, you know, I think it's VanEck and ARK that effectively need an answer today, they could pull and just very, we could just they could just pull and it could be, you

know, refile and could happen in a week to or a month. So and also, we have the nuance here that it was such a quick turnaround that we're going to see the 19v4s likely approved and S1 maybe not. Right. So, I mean, S1 would take time because they would have to get in order. So we might not launch, you know, for a couple of weeks. But all indications right now are that this was a full pivot and turnaround and that we'll likely see these today. I mean, I haven't looked at the market in a couple in a little while. I know it was kind of dropping earlier. You did, Ryan did a video, did a show today on how he's trading the

ETH ETF decision. So maybe in a quick TLDR, Ryan, how are you trading this? Look, I think in the long term, it's very, very, very good for ETH. I'm not really a short term trader, to be honest. So I think like in terms of like, like a quick trade, I reckon you'd need to be long into the ETH ETF announcement because unlike Bitcoin, where we all had a lot of time to accrue, accumulate Bitcoin, knowing that there's a huge chance of an approval, I think ETH hasn't had that pent up demand. So unlike Bitcoin, which like dumped for a long time after the approval, I think with ETH, I think we're probably like, I think there's still a 25% chance. And I think it's as soon as it's, I think as soon as it gets approved, I think that we, we, we, we get a spike. I think, as I mentioned, there's a big debate here as to when it starts trading. If it starts trading immediately, then I think it's quite a disadvantage.

Why is it a disadvantage? Because it will be compared to Bitcoin without all the marketing and all the pent-up demand. But in the long term, as I spoke about on my show today, in the long term, I actually think that ETH is an easier investable asset for mass investors. And the reason why I said that is because if you think about ETH as an investment asset, it's not like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a very, very, very hard concept to explain to people. You're buying this like magic internet money. What can this magic internet money do?

Nothing except be a magic internet money. By buying it, you're kind of investing in the network. What does this network do? It does nothing but transfer this magic money from one place to another. There's no smart contracts on Bitcoin. There's no tokenization of assets. When you think about ETH, ETH is an asset that TradFi can quite easily understand. It's very hard for them to understand Bitcoin,

but ETH, it's quite easy for them to understand. It's a smart contract network. The more people use a smart contract, the more applications are built, the more uses there are for this application. There's not many protocols building on top of Bitcoin. There are many protocols building on top of ETH,

so TradFi can understand that. And so I've got a couple of quotes here from a tweet by Evan SS6. I don't know who Evan SS6 is, but Ken Griffin says, ETH will replace Bitcoin. Carl Icahn prefers Ethereum over Bitcoin to store a value and a payment system.

Stan Drunkermiller predicts ETH may eventually dominate Bitcoin. Jamie Dimon, against the pet truck, but believes ETH has some use cases. And again, do I believe that ETH is going to be bigger than Bitcoin? I don't know. Certainly not in this cycle or not even in the next cycle. However, I do believe that for TradFi, ETH is a better asset to value and understand in traditional financial models. And so I think that let's not discount that as to as

to why ETH may actually catch a bird in the long term. Can we all agree though, that once we start talking about the flippening again, it's time to sell? I don't know. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm kidding everyone. Not financial advice. It's just funny that that's, you know, that's always the peak is when ETH runs after Bitcoin. So people start talking about flippening and then, you know, right back to Bitcoin. So yeah. Tom. Okay. Sorry. Go ahead, Ren. No, go ahead. Go ahead.

Hey, good morning, guys. So just a few points here. So the ETH E discount, which I would consider a really good proxy for what the market thinks of the ETF approval today, is trading at about a 7% discount. So that's 93% chance or so of this getting approved by four o'clock today. That was 23 on the 17th, by the way. So that's a huge gap close just for context. Yeah. And that was 50% a year ago. So what a trade if you jumped into that. A few of the points. So supply and exchanges for Ethereum is actually at historic lows right now. So I think we're going to see a really interesting squeeze here. So there was

30 million Ethereum on exchanges two years ago. There's only about 13 million now. And if you just do a proxy and say, okay, Bitcoin ETFs are 15 billion, say we get a third of that for Ethereum, you're talking about another one to 2 million Ethereum that has to come off exchanges and or be purchased on the open market. And there just isn't a huge amount of supply right now. Of course, a lot of that is staked as well. So just a lot of supply crunch that I think could be coming when these are actually approved and purchased. And I totally agree with Rand's point. I think Ethereum is literally catnip for TradFi. It has all of the buzzwords you'd be able to pitch in your traditional RIA session with a client like, hey, it's got yield. Hey, it's the internet bond. This is a digital ledger. You can understand it. You're not buying a pet rock like gold. This thing actually has

some fundamental utility. It has quote-unquote cash flows, whether or not you believe that sort of makes sense in terms of value accrual. For TradFi, that absolutely matters. And those guys don't care about ETH for Solana versus NIR versus whatever. They don't know anything about the L1 wars. They don't know about EIP 4844 or whatever reducing cash flows for the native asset. They just care about all those buzzwords I mentioned and how they can sell that to their clients. And I think now that ETFs are being approved, you're going to see a continual flow of these guys coming in because it's so much easier to explain to clients. Tom, Rand did make a really compelling point

yesterday. At least short term, we're talking about supply, but when that ETH unlocks, we could see a flood kind of like GBTC unlock, right, Ran? I mean, that was the point you were making at least short term on the market. Yes. I mean, unless there's

huge inflows, which we can find from somewhere. I think that is a big concern. Yeah, I totally agree. I actually don't know what the fee is on that. Is it as bad as GBTC? I'll look that up. But you will still have the issue of people closing the discount trade right so like the the

the fee was a huge part of it but there were multiple reasons why people were exiting gbc hey they were locked in and wanted out right but the bulk of it was that people were playing the discount once the discount was gone they closed the trade so i think we'd still see a ton of that i mean i would imagine the bulk of people that are in EFE were playing that 50% closing to 7% closing to zero discount. Yeah, totally fair. And the management fee is 2.5% on EFE. Oh, God. Interesting. That's one of the sort of things that's been different this time than the Bitcoin spot ETF is that we haven't even seen fee announcements, right? Remember they were like, even ahead of the approval, we were seeing a Bitcoin.

We were seeing the S1 jockeying. Yeah. Yeah. So we were seeing all the jockeying for, you know, fees. And this time we have no idea how any of them are going to position themselves and they don't know how the others are positioning. It's really probably interesting behind the scenes. Zach, you had your hand up. What do you think of all this? Yeah. I mean, look, I think the way I'm trading this is I bought some ETH as soon as I heard the announcement that the SEC was engaging with

issuers. That's so far been a good trade. I plan to sell the actual announcement. Probably, I think the bear case for ETH once this ETF opens up is that if you're thinking about what institutional flows are coming, yes, there are probably some advisors out there that will want to take probably like a market cap weighted approach. But there's a much greater delta between the ETH versus the ETH ETF than there is Bitcoin versus the Bitcoin ETF. For people who wanted to allocate to Bitcoin, the ETF was a much easier way to do so. It was perceived as safer than self-custody or just having arrangement with Coinbase institutional. And it's quite liquid. With ETH, the main difference is that you don't have staking. And so if you look at the difference in performance

between ETH that you stake versus ETH that just sits there in ETF, it's something like 8% that can go up to 12% if you take into account restaking. And for institutions that have a lot of money to deploy, it seems like they may well be savvy enough to prefer actual ETH and ETH staking compared to the ETF, especially if the ETF is going to gather a lot of ETH that would otherwise be staked and have it not staked. It's sort of functionally the same as a downward difficulty adjustment on Bitcoin because you have more staking yield going to fewer stakers. And so you might not see the same institutional inflow as you saw with Bitcoin. And I imagine a

lot of the good news of the approval and anticipation of price action similar to the post Bitcoin ETF launch is probably priced in given that we so recently saw that. If I were like a fund, I actually think a super interesting trade would be short ETH itself or short the ETH futures and then buy spot ETH and stake it. And that way you're, to some extent, delta neutral on ETH, but you benefit from the greater slice of the pie that stakers will get if the ETF gathers ETH coins. But I don't know that I would think it's that obvious that we're going to have such positive price action on ETH itself post-ETF launch. All right, my mic got cut off.

Go ahead, Dan, and then Alex. So I thought you had a stroke, man. You just went quiet for a minute. No, I was trying to, you know how sometimes, you know how you get that mic glitch? It was the mic glitch where you push it and nothing happens. It's fun, yeah. Do you remember that day where everyone went quiet for like three push it nothing happens it's fun yeah yeah do you remember

that day where everyone went quiet for like three minutes everyone thought it's glitching for them and the space was like yes we all we all thought that everybody thought that they couldn't hear somebody uh that was the worst uh go ahead dan sorry go ahead dan yeah no um i think that covered a few points i was gonna make but um i'm more of a bitcoin maxi i don't i don't really have much allocation to other stuff but you know i have have dipped in on Ethereum on the back of this. I think it is going to get approved today. I think the 75% is just the Bitcoin fellows putting their finger in the air

and pulling their number out, right? So I looked on Polymarket. If you guys are on Polymarket, it's like a betting market. They're putting currently, there's about $10 million, $11 million bet on Polymarket of whether the ETS will get approved by the 31st of May. And it's given implied odds of 65%.

That was higher earlier. That was about 70-something earlier, but now it's at 65%. Just a quick point to would we see Ethereum replacing Bitcoin, that kind of stuff. I don't think so. I think this is kind of a really important point. The best way I ever heard described the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum was by Udi. And he said, Bitcoin is an asset that trades on a blockchain, but Ethereum is a blockchain that has an asset.

So Bitcoin is something you can invest in. It's like an investment kind of structure or property. You can hold on to it. That is the main thing. The main thing is the actual Bitcoins. Whereas Ethereum is the network, right? It's the network network and the ether token is just something that powers that so they are kind of when you think about it in that kind of way it may not sound intuitive but um that makes it real clear for me the difference between the two um and why they are how they are so yeah i still think it's gonna get approved

um i do think it get approved today i think it was a complete vault fast by the US regulatory system once Trump embraced crypto. And I'm guessing they saw some internal polling numbers and just shit the bed and pull it out. So I think it's going to be approved today. Alex? Yeah, kind of similar. I mean, going kind of, I think, pretty hard against what Ran was saying. I think ETH is a much less interesting product for ETFs, particularly if there's no staking. I think if the funds have been able to build a yield product into a staking, I think that might be different. But the folks for whom ETH has an

appeal are basically either big institutions who want the yield so they can't use it, or people on the retail side, it's people who actually want to use it. If you don't care about the programmability side, I think the vast, vast swath of people still don't, you're going to want to hold actual ETH. So I think the opportunity compared to Bitcoin, where the focus is on the asset, and I think it is still very understandable, is just it's a commodity. It means the size of flows between the two. I think Bitcoin is going to maintain an order of magnitude advantage, specifically on the ETF side. But I also think the more interesting part, like, look, we know that eventually, these ETFs are going to get approved. I think it was inevitable. Like, you know, a few months ago, it was definitely being priced as more like getting approved in

2025. I think the sentiment was very much that it wasn't going to happen in 2024. And I think the swing in the position of Washington DC towards crypto in the last two weeks is the much more interesting story in question here. I mean, just in the last, like just this week, we've had basically this major swing on when people think the ETFs are going to be approved. You had the Saab 121 CRA repeal go to Biden's desk and him strongly reverse the level of signaling that he had about vetoing. You'll remember three weeks ago, he basically said that he would veto the Saab 121 CRA

and he is now backpedaling hard on that. And the house yesterday passed the fit 21 bill with 70 plus Democrats voting for it. And yes, it's going to die in the Senate almost certainly, but like a few weeks, again, a few weeks ago, stab getting a floor vote was super doubtful, let alone 70 Democrats coming over and voting for it. And I think just the level of swing that we're seeing in the last two weeks of the DC posture is, I think, a huge story.

Yeah, I think that that's the story. I mean, I think we can all agree on that. We wouldn't be talking about Ethereum spot ETFs if all of that hadn't happened. And the other one that quietly seems to have happened in the background is the FDA FDIC chair stepping down and being replaced, right? Because you got to remember this guy is operation choke point 2.0 and choke point 1.0, if I remember correctly. So it's a really, really changing dynamic environment. Mike, listen, I want to go to you because you always sort of have the 30,000 foot view on all of this. Are you surprised by any of this?

And where does this fit in context of everything you're looking at? Yes, thank you. I think 30,000 view is, I love going on coinmarketcap.com. And to me, it's like we said earlier, ETFs tracking a broad basket of cryptos, in particular Ethereum. Number one, we all know it's a matter of time. And trying to dig in the nuances of timing is you know for the traders but i i love going to coinmarketcap.com so you look at the top three cryptos

in terms of market cap bitcoin ethereum and tether are we going to get an etf and tether next i say that jokingly because it's my theory all along is ethereum or that technology has made possible tokenization tether is just one of them the dollar is just one of them it's the most widely traded crypto on the planet to me that, that's what the government regulators are figuring out. You don't mess with the technology that goes to the dollar and is one of the largest investors in treasuries on the planet. And if you do, you're an idiot. So I think it's just coming around to, but we got to go through the nuances. The key thing I have a problem with this, and I have to point this out, is that example of, I love to look at Bitcoin versus beta, you know, versus the stock market, Bitcoin versus gold, Bitcoin versus NASDAQ.

And those chart patterns do not look good. Now, yes, Bitcoin on a standalone, Ethereum on a standalone, they look great. But versus, you know, things that it's been beating over time, they all peaked in 2021. And this biggest pump and reason, perfect storm for Bitcoin to make new highs worked, but it's still showing a hangover to the things it used to beat over time, that's beta and gold. So I'm worried about that. I have to point that out. And then I kilt over to beta. The lesson we're seeing in finding out is the stock market versus GDP is two times GDP. So it's all that really matters. The Fed's even said it indirectly. Our economist team is saying it's the number one factor pushing inflation higher. So I have to tilt

over to my view is the Fed is probably not going to ease until the stock market goes down and tells them to because it's just too silly risky to do that. Now you're starting to hear those nuances kick in. And that to me is the problem is beta going down because it's just the high price cure. It's so expensive. And we all know the fastest horse in the race, there's a connection between certain Ethereum and beta. But to me, that's the big picture macro is we all get it now that stock market is so expensive, the Fed really can't ease its credit inflation by going up and that's the risk. And then I also want to tilt over. It's human nature. One thing I have to admit, I way underestimate is the enthusiasm for the Bitcoin ETFs. Biggest launch in the history of mankind, but it's human

nature to extrapolate that that's going to happen in Ethereum. We all know it's less likely, but people market will price for it and then be disappointed. And I think the final note is ETH. I mean, to me, that's been just like, you can't always expect things to work the same way that GBTC did. I mean, that discount at the end of 2022 was just too cheap. ETH, the discount, as you mentioned earlier, was close to 25%. It's going to go to zero. It's just a matter of time.

But to me, that's been the arbitrate. At some point, it's going to go to zero. It's just a matter of time. But to me, that's been the arb trade. At some point, it's going to go to zero. But at least that's been the opportunity. Maybe today. Yeah. But the macro is the Fed is not going to ease until the stock market goes down. You and I have been saying that for years. I think it's been over a year now.

The one place we can all say we were right. And now you even have, I think, Solomon Goldman, CEO, said he doesn't expect cuts this year. Right? I mean, so that's becoming the narrative is likely no cuts this year. Yeah, and exactly that. You're seeing it. The Fed's starting to prepare people for that. And what's the leading indicator for all risk assets?

I look at Bitcoin and the way it's trading now. The charts look great. Well, there you go. So I'm glad you mentioned that because from a traditional stock market investor, you have queues. Why would you bother with things? What's this Ethereum thing? Everybody knows Bitcoin. We all get it.

We know it. When you have the queues on a tear. And it's a key thing I like to say is these traditional assets are doing great. They're on a tear and you don't have the risk of losing. You know, you can lose there and it's fine. And then I'll tilt with this. It's a key thing. I was just on a commodities panel.

I just pointed out over time, certainly since the financial crisis, gold has beaten everything in commodities. It beats copper, it beats crude, it beats silver, and it's dipped in that trend. And I look at it like, okay, so what are you supposed to do with that? It's probably going to continue to do that. That's the thing i'm really worried about with bitcoin it's

underperforming the things that used to be particularly on the back of these etfs and now we all have to focus on say well we need inflows before we had the launch so that's to me the macro big risk is just a little backup in beta and you'll see how everything plays out. Scott's got a stroke. Oh, he just dropped out. Let me kind of pivot to, I was kind of taking some time off looking into ZK Link before Scott dropped off. So where did we leave it off, Ryan?

David, Rand, anybody? I was completely tuned out and then scott dropped out on me david you there yeah i'm here where did we leave off the discussion what was the last one was discussed we're still talking about now with mike yeah just now with mike what was still going through the ectf because i think we're pretty much over that uh i think we're generally over that mike was simply giving uh i'd say broader context um you know to the performance of crypto uh versus you know markets generally um you know commodity markets included so we can kind of use that to shift to macro um because i think we've discussed the ectf endlessly and scott is back now we've discussed the ECTF endlessly and Scott is back now we've discussed the ECTF endlessly and I wanted to get into the macro picture and I always

get you David because you join our morning show with not Rand with Danish on a daily basis where you guys do the same thing we do here but focus on macro instead of general economy and other asset classes rather than crypto so maybe give us a quick recap there, because obviously the correlation is one that cannot be ignored. Sure. Look, I think the focus on inflation and rates has been hyper for a long time and will continue to be. I don't think there was anything particularly important in that respect overnight. Oh, we did get a call out. It's not overnight.

It's been a few days. Everyone's been talking nothing but the EZTF and kind of the anti-crypto movement. Well, we got a call. So we haven't talked about macro for ages. Go ahead. Got a call out of David Solomon from Goldman Sachs. He doesn't expect to see a rate cut this year.

I think it's important. I think it's important in terms of people just slowly, slowly, and then the Fed eventually, I guess, coming around. I still believe there's going to be one rate cut this year. I think it's going to be for purposes of election momentum for Biden and for Powell to go ahead and save some face. But nevertheless, certainly, it's within the realm of possibility that we won't see any cuts. But I think one is the max. And then we saw macro housing is just absolutely frozen. I mean, there is no movement. We had no volume of transactional activity last month, which is really, I mean, it's generally very tough, certainly for first-time homebuyers for the younger crowd. The consumer we've seen reporting out of retailers over the

past bunch of days. Walmart did well, so people got really excited. But Target did awfully. Discounted retailers like TJ Maxx, TJX has done well. But dollar stores are struggling. And so it seems that the lower-end consumer is really having a difficult time. Credit card balances are at all-time highs. We're starting to see a serious issue with respect to delinquencies.

The CFPB is going to go ahead and come down hard on buy now, pay later, requiring them to go ahead and provide their borrowers with the same protections as credit card companies provide credit card users. So it'll limit credit expansion, which I don't think is a bad thing. There should be, especially for those that are not educated in terms of finance, there shouldn't be predatory lending going on in the case of BNPL. Not to say that all buy-now-pay-layer programs are predatory in nature, but nevertheless, there's going to be a squash in the expansion of credit there. Private credit is exploding. Private credit is a catch-all for everything that is not normally coming out of the bank, comes out of some sort of non-bank bank that lends money in private deals.

That world is enormous. It includes even JPMorgan Chase that today said they want to get further into the private credit realm. I know it begs the question, they're a lender. Why the hell are they getting into private credit? They're already a lender. What's the difference? Well, private credit doesn't have the same regulations, the same restrictions, the same transparency as normal way bank lending has. And so therefore, you could do a lot of funky things. You can go ahead and charge really high interest rates. You can go ahead and not provide the same sort of transparency and read through to your

shareholders or your investors as you would otherwise. I think it's a big problem, but Danish and I have been talking about it. Private credit comes in a lot of forms, everything from merchant cash advance to buy now, pay later, to pay day loans, to just straight up leveraged loans to high cost borrowers. That was a great recap.

So my next question to you is a more broader question. Yeah, it's a really good detailed breakdown. But my question to you is how much of this matters so we're we're seeing the tide shift we're seeing the elections work in favor of crypto oh um okay okay go ahead let let the one i don't know if we spoke about it i wasn't on the space early enough did you guys discuss nvidia's earnings i mean we didn't get specifically into it so yeah go ahead it's incredible they just beat no matter how high you put the expectation it's incredible and and to me mike mcglone is going to for sure disagree with me to me nvidia is the tell on where crypto is going um just the

growth of technology the growth of ai the growth of processing the growth of AI, the growth of processing, the growth of digitization is an unstoppable train. It certainly the values on a lot of these assets, crypto assets, I mean, as far as being seen as commodities, and this goes back to, you know, the earlier discussion about Bitcoin simply being, I'd say for lack of a better word, commodity, and maybe Ether being representative of cash flows in an enterprise and so on and so forth. To me, NVIDIA's earnings are really important. It shows that there is no stopping that train, and that's just the hardware. But the hardware pretends the fact that there's tons of development going on, tons of processing going on, tons of advancement in technology going on. And to me, the read through to crypto, not on any given day, but broadly over

time is huge. I believe that the way that NVIDIA goes is the way that the broad crypto space goes. Yes, there's going to be rug pulls, there's going to be, you know, frauds, there's going to be, you know, things that make no sense in crypto land. Sure. But to me, that's really important. And then obviously, the legislation that got passed yesterday is important. But why that correlation between Nvidia's earning and crypto? It is focused on leaps and bounds technology that is making things that much easier, that much more efficient of that world. And as we, you know, I have thoughts around, you know, stable coins are now probably if the legislation goes through stable coins, you know, get some form of normalized regulation in the United States. We will start to see stable coins being used by merchants. I seriously think so. Big merchants in the United States will start to use stable coins for purposes of payment. That will solidify the US dollar. Leave that aside for a second. But once stable coins start to get used and people start to think natively about crypto and various types of crypto and various use cases and various wallets that they, you know, regular way wallets that they have, like your Apple wallet, I think that we will then start to see much more growth and value out of crypto.

And the links between what NVIDIA is doing on the technology side and who they're supporting is going to go ahead and become part of the ecosystem for crypto as well. One thing I said to my team, we're having a discussion yesterday. It's a bit off topic, but kind of know, kind of linked to NVIDIA. Is, you know, the teams like Mario, we should like, you know, what else should we expand to? You know, we're doing a lot of politics and obviously most of our focus is on crypto. I'm like, guys, and that was about a week ago. I'm like, guys, just nothing.

There's no need to always do millions. Focus on that one thing. We're doing extremely well in those two sectors. And a week later, I'm like, fuck, like I've given so many. When I used to give keynotes, one thing i talk about is the speed of every technological evolution it is just significantly quicker in terms of growth than the previous one and and i compared crypto to the to the tech boom to the to the to the to the to the mobile boom the tech boom and and and cycles previously it's like every cycle is faster than the last one. And AI is beating all expectations. So literally, yes, two days ago, I made a decision like, okay, shit, probably AI is the only other sector that's beating every single expectation out there, including my own personal

expectations. And that's what we're focusing on as outside of crypto and acquiring a lot of media assets there and kind of start doing, you'll see us do a lot more shows in the AI sector, more than the current weekly one. So, yeah, I'm glad you brought up Nvidia's earnings and I'm glad you kind of made that correlation to crypto as well. David,

it's probably. We should give Mike a chance to respond. Appreciate that. I actually completely agree with David. It's the lessons of Jeff Booth, you know, the price of tomorrow, the big Bitcoiner guy. I completely agree with him.

The thing that rapidly advancing technology is happening so fast. And that's where I've always been very favorable to Ethereum in the macro because what it's doing is the tokenization. It's creating this tokenization where you can trade assets 24-7. Now, there's obviously better forms to be able to do that. But that's what Ethereum started. And that's why we have Tether as the most widely traded crypto on the planet. It's the tokenization and the rapidly advancing technology. But if you look at the overlay Bitcoin versus Nvidia, it's kind of, you know, it goes through these ups and downs and these nuances, but it's basically flat since 2017, 2020. I mean, I agree that the

problem I point out, though, is the stock market going up, being led by that, is keeping inflation high. Remember, it's so high. It's two times GDP. That's the most since the 30s, which is keeping the Fed on the picture. Let's remember what the birth of Bitcoin came from, the financial crisis, right? And then we had the major performance of Bitcoin and cryptos came on the back of bitcoin came from um the financial crisis right and then we had the the major performance of bitcoin cryptos came on the back of zero interest rates and massive stimulus from the fed now i like to say you're getting five percent in a t-bill and we're so overdue for a backup in in in beta because it's not going to go it going up means the fed's not going to ease until it goes down that That's the problem.

David, I mean, you kind of took it in a different context, but similar point. Yeah, I would just say with respect to Mike and when, you know, for the markets generally, for the U.S. balance sheet generally, for entitlements. It's someone else's business now to go ahead and clean this mess that we call the United States up. And I don't think there's an easy answer. I think we're, you know, the market is generally just looking past that now. But by that time, I think credit will be maxed. I mean, corporate credit, personal credit will be maxed, and we will start to see some a massive fallout, not only from office, but retail and otherwise. I think, you know, rates will remain high for a while, strain things really hard. Fed will have no choice at some point then to go ahead and start cutting rates out of necessity, not necessarily as a reward. I want to pivot back from macro a bit, but David, I want to stay with you. Obviously, we talked about the fact that you've effectively, in Canada, have a publicly listed traded company that is, for lack

of a better term, the micro strategy of ETH on a very small level, right? Are you specifically, you were doing that obviously way before you expected this ETF approval or any of the news this week. Are you approaching this any differently now that the spot ETF could be approved today? I mean, I know you're not trading around the price action per se, but does this change anything for you, strengthen your case and how, when, what are you thinking we see in the short term? Listen, I'll give you my spin. So we're in the middle of,

so the company is incorporated in Canada. It's got its stock listed both in Canada and in the United States. Name of the company is Centaurus Energy. Certainly for purposes of overall value, yeah, I would have liked to have gone ahead and raised as much money as I could pre-ETF because clearly we're seeing nice run-up coming up into the ETF. But nevertheless, most investors are chasers. So the people that I've been trying to raise debt and it's debt capital that we're raising with upside from appreciation in the ETH, you know, obviously now they're all super interested in terms of staying power. I'd say, does the thesis change now that the ETF is approved, i.e. U.S. investors will have a way to

invest security-wise or stock-wise in Ether, which is what we were offering prior to the ETF? I think the staying power case is still there. First of all, MicroStrategy continues. I mean, we're just following the MicroStrategy playbook. MicroStrategy has continued to grow even in the wake of Bitcoin ETFs. In addition, unlike the ETFs it seems in the United States for ETH, we have the ability to do whatever we want with our ETH. So we're staking our ETH. So there's more features available, more cash flow generation that's available. And then the second thing is because we're a living, breathing enterprise that's got human governance that can pivot, as soon as Canadian regulatory regime allows for investment in other layer ones,

we will go ahead and consider that and, you know, maybe include those, maybe pivot to those. We'll have to wait and see. But for now, you know, the goal is still the same to go ahead and, you know, become as big as MicroStrategy offering U.S. investors the ability to invest in ETH with tax efficiency in the form of a security and the underlying ETH being staked and so generating, you know, cash flow. So it's full steam ahead, you know, a little bit of a different, you know, wrinkle here with the approval impending, but nevertheless, we'll continue. There was a Bloomberg article and a lot of people have sort of said the same. It is meaningful that they removed staking as part of this sort of overnight filing process because this could actually be negative for the spot ETFs and positive for ETH itself or something like your structure because we're going to have this educational curve right now, which I think, I mean, like I said, I'm on the ground with a bunch of RAs today. I'm going to go downstairs after this and probably have them all go, what the hell is Ethereum? What's happening here? Right. So we have this

huge educational curve. Do you think that a lot of them are going to find out about staking and yield, see that it's not in the spot ETFs, at least for now, and actually seek ways to gain exposure with that, you know, four or five percent upside? I think absolutely, especially for the financial investors, right, that are looking for, you know, you can't ignore the cash, right? You can't ignore the yield, even if you're not a yield based investor. But nevertheless, to go ahead and understand that, wow, this is not just a sit and wait type of asset like Bitcoin. This is a moving and shaking asset and could be staked and restaked. And depending on how far you want to go out on the risk curve, you know, you could actually generate

some really some meaningful returns. You know, it all depends on where we are in cycles and markets and, you know, how much staking is going on and so forth. But, you know, I think people will quickly, and I think that the news generally has done a good job of it. But I think, like you said, there's going to be, there's the entire world that this ETH ETF is being created for is not yet aware of ETH, right? They need to be educated from the ground up on ETH. How difficult do you think that education will be, David? I don't think terribly difficult. I think, you know, to go back to Rand's point earlier, going ahead and explaining that ETH is really a technology and Bitcoin is really an asset or a commodity, I think is the way that, you know, if it's done right, that's the way it should be posited. There's going to certainly be, though, there's more wrinkles around it because there are competing technologies, right? Other layer ones, which are not going to have the same amount of liquidity or investment or broad, you know, exposure to the market because of the ETF for ETH. But nevertheless, you know, they exist.

So I think there's going to be, let me say it this way, let's say it positively. There's going to be a lot of interesting trading strategies or investment strategies that are now going to go on regarding all of this. There's going to be a lot of thinking about the right metrics to use to go ahead and value ETH, which I think is good and welcome, even though we've got certainly a head start. But nevertheless, there's going to be a lot of coalescence around these things. And we'll start to get some pretty serious minds beyond the crypto people, right?

A lot of TradFi people will now start to look at these assets. And I think the learning curve will be long, but frankly, Mario, to be really honest with you, it's all about how much the gains are. Most investors, even though they don't like to say it, most, I'd say somewhere between 95% and 100% are chasers. If we see the price of this go up, people are going to go ahead and raise their eyebrows and start to go ahead and really chase. And then they will become hopefully smart on this before it crashes. There's no better marketing for an asset than higher prices on that asset. I've always said that about Bitcoin. The best marketing for Bitcoin is a higher price of Bitcoin. It'll be the same with this. That's the way people are going to hear about ethereum and this

is that the price goes up they'll know they're not going to like go read an obscure medium post on uh proof of stake it's not not how this is going to work so i think that's just the reality you should yeah and let us know tomorrow when you speak to those ri rias uh today scott let us know how that goes i curious to get their stance and how easy it will be to educate them. Yeah, I think they're going to be lost. It's going to be a fun day for you. Let's get Tom's final thoughts. And then I've got a question for you, Scott, which pivots to another discussion. But Tom, go ahead. Yeah, so I was at a SALT conference earlier this week in New York City on Monday, Tuesday. And this is a conference for big institutional allocators, big hedge funds, and then other folks who are looking to move around money. It's Scaramucci's brand. And it was an alternative assets-focused conference. So crypto

is a very small subset, two out of like the, I don't know, 15 talks. And just my conversations with these big pools of capital, they are completely, completely not opposed to, but not even thinking about crypto. So, you know, if that gives you any indication of how early we are, even though there was crypto talks, there was crypto people there, all of the allocators are, it's not even really on their radar. Good. So still, still super early. Good.

Go ahead, Mario. Yeah, man man just my team is calling me usually they only call me when there's breaking news so hopefully there's nothing major just happened uh no there's nothing major uh yeah look i want to ask you a question we just talked briefly on zk link which are on stage today and you said that you invested ryan said that he invested and i said then i asked then I asked my team, hey, did we actually invest? Because there's a bunch of ZK projects that we've invested in.

They're like, no, we're in talks with them. So Vince, I'm glad you're here. The team is messaging you. Respond. Let's finalize it, Vince. Sure. Not putting you on the spot here. Yeah.

Not putting you on the spot. Ah, cool. You've got to give me your word because i'm going to lead this discussion and it depends which way you want it to go i'm joking scott why did you invest in zk link well i mean at the time i think it was early on a lot of narratives that actually are playing out now which i think we see in every cycle right vince i mean you guys were way ahead of this concept that now all of a sudden everybody is talking about yeah and i think that's why.

So, you know, you invest in these things. We didn't know when it would launch, when it would actually happen, but it was very compelling and something that when you look at them, you knew that they were on to something that a lot of people would be chasing. Yeah. I want to dig into the solution a bit further and without getting too technical, talking about roll-ups for the average Joe to understand is a very difficult task visit We'll try to make that happen. But first my question to you is are you guys listing it? Is there a date of when you're planning to list?

Wow, well you just get jumped all these technology to go to the house now We're gonna go to the I was just curious on that one at one point Then we're gonna start digging to our technology not too much that I can comment directly on this due to certain constraints, right, as you can probably understand. But what I can say is that it's not very far away. Yeah, it's pretty soon. Oh, it's pretty soon? Yeah.

Oh, okay, wow. Okay, nice. All right, well, man, I want to dig into what the solution is. And I want to – so the easiest way to kind of explain it would be kind of an aggregator for roll-ups. But I want to take it a step further. How would you describe ZK-Link in one sentence? And then for the audience, can you explain what roll-ups are, just the basics of it? Okay, let me try to describe what Zzekielink is doing in one sentence. We're building the industry's first aggregation layer to unify blockchains and roll-ups,

particularly Ethereum roll-ups. How does that sound to you? Okay, I think and that's what it says on your website, says it really well. It just says 1,000 blockchains and roll-ups aggregated. I think it's whoever came up with that sentence. It's just spot on. Go ahead. I think you already got it. We're beating the aggregator of roll-ups. That's pretty much it.

Okay. So when you say, so first you said 1,000 blockchains and roll-ups. Let's start with what a roll-up means. What is an Ethereum rollup? I think the general description of a rollup is that you take the data, you take some of the computation work from the blockchain off the chain and processes the off chain and then you have sort of proof and then you posted the data you posted the results of whatever processing of your you have done with the data and then you post the results back to the blockchain together with the proof it could be a zero-nudge proof or you could be a fraud proof used to buy okay before getting to the proof so it's actually it's a scaling mechanism for ethereum and what it does is it oh yes you get the transaction off chain and then the settlement

happens on chain is that fair to say yes it's very okay so so it's like it's like you've got a deal that's happening like say everything's verified on the blockchain on the ethereum blockchain but there's just so many transactions so what you do is you kind of roll up a bunch of transactions off chain um and then when you kind of roll up a bunch of transactions off-chain, and then when you settle all these different transactions into one settlement on-chain, it's one interesting way, and probably it's been around for a long time, one of the more popular scaling solutions.

Yeah, the purpose of doing this majorly is because you want to scale the number of transactions that you can process, right? There's not too much block space on-chain, and it could be very expensive, especially on Ethereum. And if you take that option, you can be a lot faster, cheaper, and so you could scale the amount of data that you can process on-chain and the amount of transactions you'll be able to process. I think the timing, just for the audience, I think the timing of transactions you can you'll be able to process i think the timing just for the audience i think the timing this discussion is important we're talking about ecc etc and

ethereum still being king but ethereum still faces a scaling issue um and there's multiple solutions in the works a whole bunch of l2 is doing great work in in scaling ethereum and um i think what the next question will be for vince is um is many solutions, there is many roll-ups. And how does an aggregator work? How can you aggregate roll-ups? How can you aggregate all these different scaling solutions? First of all, we're building this solution using zero-waste proof. So it will be secure, trustless, and permissionless.

Number two, the way we build the aggregator for the ropes is that we build a canonical bridge row up bridge on top of the row ups the layer two row ups of ethereum is posting data to ethereum and the layer the aggregator of row up is on top of is the same simultaneously we're sitting on top of 100 row up and we process the data in our officiant service and then settle the transactions and post the data onto the lateral ops and which ultimately settle to Ethereum. So the transactions happen in our aggregation layer is also settled on Ethereum. So we inherit the security and the consensus economic trust

of Ethereum itself. Okay, so essentially you offer a layer and the consensus economic trust of ethereum itself okay so you're essentially uh kind of you offer a layer for all these off-chain transactions to be aggregated and then to be settled in an efficient manner onto ethereum uh this could be very technical how i explained this but let me use some then let me try with this. Okay, so you have like many different highways that leads to the same right. And on top of these highways, we build a kind of another road, but that is connected to each of these highways and all the funds or the data we can we can can access our

aggregated layer, aggregation layer, and you can build applications. You can users can use applications in our aggregated layer, aggregation layer, and you can build applications, users can use the applications in our aggregation layer with direct access to the liquidities, the assets, the funds of the different Layer 2 roll-ups. So that is why we call it aggregator of Layer 2s, aggregator of roll-ups. And, okay, so you're essentially becoming like a layer three. Yes.

Can we use that term? Yeah, yeah. The flagship solution of Ziglink is called Ziglink Nova. It's essentially the industry's first aggregated layer three to unify. Just before you continue, sorry, Vince, before you continue talking about Nova, can you fix your mic slightly? Because I know the information is important from an educational perspective as well as talking about your product, your project. So I want to make sure the mic is important from an educational perspective as well as talking about your product,

your project. So I want to make sure the mic is clear. So you're talking about, so I said, I talked about how this is essentially a layer three and kind of feels like different layers as it becomes more and more user-friendly. And you were talking about ZKLink Nova, I think you said. Yes, yes. ZKLink Nova is the flagship solution platform of ZKLink. It is based on ZK-Link Nova, I think you said. Yes, yes. The ZK-Link Nova is the flagship solution platform of ZK-Link. It is based on ZK-Stock from ZK-Sync. I think probably some of you know, some probably don't know yet. And also our in-house technology called Nexus. So the ZK-Stock is the ZK-EVM execution runtime that can run

the smart contracts so you can build applications. It's for universal purpose so you can build any type of applications on top of ZK-Link. And at the same time, Nexus is the settlement scheme. It's the settlement of knowledge that settles all these transactions onto different blockchains and roll-ups. Make sure that all this data is synchronized different blockchains and roll-ups. Make sure that all this data is synchronized across these different chains and roll-ups.

It's very important to have the states transition, the new states to synchronize. What is it, Vince? Like, first, again, your mic isn't fixed. Can you make it clearer? Maybe take it off due to something? Is it better now? I can hear him okay clearer maybe taking off or something is it better no okay yeah that is better much better yeah we could hear him before but now it's better okay okay so so so i know scott i know you're invested but like no need to get defensive there scott i'm

a nice guy maybe you need to fix your headphones maybe you need to fix your headphones not just oh really is it? No. All right. My audio is bad. No, I was kidding. All right. So, Vince, the solution. So I want to kind of dig into the solution,

like what it means for kind of the users. Like when you aggregate different L2s, so when you add different roll-ups, what does it actually do? Yeah, this is actually a very good question because the blockchain technology could be too much for ordinary people, for users, right? So what users care about,

like layers or aggregated roll-up solution, is because we're facing these real problems day to day. There are hundreds already, hundreds, even thousands of layer one blockchains and layer two roll-ups on the market right now. For newcomers, it could be very difficult to really understand and know the differences of the different blockchain technologies and for them, they want to use the applications, right?

And today, what the newcomers will probably have to do is that they need to go to different blockchains. They have different kinds of applications and different wallets and different user interface. It's really difficult as a whole for the blockchain space for general user. And so we need abstraction when we need unification for user experience. If you have an aggregated layer, then the users using the applications on this aggregated layer, aggregation layer, do not really need to care about the underlying layer 1s, layer 2s. They just stay on this aggregated and abstracted layer with Unified Interface.

They can access to the assets and liquidities, especially assets, assets meaning trading opportunities, meaning a lot of different stuff that they can use, just to stay on this abstract data and aggregated layer. And number two, even if you're already a crypto veteran, so that you're probably already very familiar with a lot of DeFi applications, and you've probably already been using

like 10, 20 different blockchains, it still could be very difficult for you to bridge your funds from one layer one, layer two to another, simply because of these user experience of the canonical road bridges and also the third-party fast bridges, costly, risky, and they're still not super user-friendly. But I think the industry needs solutions to unify and abstract and aggregate to solve the problem of fragmentation of user experience and the developer experience. Of course, and to solve the problem of fragmentation of liquidities, which is very important and a very big part of the user experience in crypto. Because you always, the crypto user experience a lot of times is meaning that the trading experience right you buy and sell assets and the fragmented liquidity meaning that this less efficient capital if

unless utilization rates of your capital and you have to be able to understand and use different products meaning many times you find like yourself you know using one one blockchain for this purpose and another portion for that purpose, and you need to have different tools, different like the basic tool is for example wallets or these AMMs. It's really painful as a user experience. If we want to talk about, if we want to discuss the potentials of mass adoption of crypto, we need to solve this problem. I think there are a lot of teams trying to solve this problem. And Zclink is one of these teams that are already, you know,

our proposition is to build an aggregation layer using zero-energy proof because this technology is great. It's the end game, we believe. It's going to be impactful in terms of abstraction and retaining the security of the underlying blockchain which is Ethereum, the economic trust there is I think this. Sorry, I just want to know, I just like that back and forth because I like these discussions while we're doing it as you know kind of for financial reasons as a partner i actually really enjoy them because i sit there learning a lot um it's like two in one for me um

so so the first one is when you say you're you're aggregating all these different um roll-ups talk and ask you like what is the what does it really mean and you kind of dug into it you kind of broke it down into four categories you kind of aggregate it down into four categories. You kind of aggregate it. The benefit is the developer interface, so the experience for developers. The second one is aggregating liquidity, which I think is paramount. You aggregate UI from a UI experience, which kind of links to the developer interface.

And then from aggregation in terms of the benefits, so you don't have to use different wallets, for example, as well. Would that be the correct four categories of where an aggregator helps the user? Yeah, I think you could also combine these four different categories just mentioned into two majorly. It's developer experience and user experience. Developer experience meaning that we're providing an aggregated layer so they do not have to deploy their products 20 times in 20 different layer tools

using four or five different technology stacks. For example, Polygon CDK, ZK stack, Abitron Orbit, and OP stack. They're probably going to be more, right? Different tech stack to run, to launch a new chain, launch a new layer too. And then each of these tech stacks that comes with different offerings of different toolings. Number two is the user experience, like liquidity and assets. I will get it through the application layer, we can accept, we have direct access to the native assets onto the hundreds and thousands of blockchains and the ROAPs.

And then users use the applications built on top of application layer can directly buy, trade these assets from different blockchains. And that's these native assets because they're not proof. We accept these assets to deposit to our aggregated layer.

So it means the aggregation of the liquidities. Okay, so let's dig into kind of your solutions. We've talked about, sorry, your project and why you guys are kind of leading the charge here as the leading aggregator because i think any any aggregators when it comes to crypto in general and blockchains are probably the one of the the narratives that isn't getting enough uh enough attention um you know i don't think so i don't think that this has been discussed enough i think this is a very exactly this is a very new trend and and recently i we're not aware of...

But it's a necessary trend. For the space to mature, aggregators are a must to make the experience easier and make the experience better. Yeah, absolutely. We definitely agree with you. And there are not so many teams building this, but the layer tools themselves also are proposing aggregation solutions to the industry as well.

For example, Polygon CDK have the CDK shared bridge, right? They have their Agilair, Polygon Agilair, which recently, I think about a month or two ago, they have also published a thesis on this. And for ZKStack and ZK-Sync has also launched their hybrid bridge. So the CDKStack hybridchains they also share their the same same bridge so these the different uh options using the their shared bridge can also be aggregated the liquidities can can directly talk to each other and also there's op chains

op hyperchains so sorry superch, shared the bridge by OP stack, and probably Tyco and Skrull, the other Layer 2 builders, probably will also launch their own stack. But they do not solve the problem to the degree that they're still trying to unify liquidities and trying to unify developer experience, everything within their sub-ecosystem.

So as we were saying, there are like 10, 20 different major layer 2 builders, players in the space right now, and they're competing directly with each other. Right. So they're trying to acquire as many users as possible, acquire as much DVO, as much liquidity as possible, but they're still creating the problem of fragmentation among themselves. So you still have four or five different tech stacks, still have 10, 20 different layer twos, major layer twos. And we are solving like a one step further. So we are providing this aggregated solution

using the tech stack agnostic approach that we can unify among these different tech stacks. That is the major difference between us and the other major layer 2 players. Yeah, so another important point I want to mention, kind of linking it back to just ZKLink, beyond the technical solution. And I know we've gone over time,

but it's just a really interesting discussion from a technical perspective. But you guys have some of the most respected backers. I'm not talking about Scott and Ryan, I'm talking about Arrington Capital, I'm talking about Coinbase Ventures,rington capital you've got big brain holdings morning stars they're polygon ventures crypto.com is that crypto.com oh republic crypto and crypto.com both them warby venture salon of fucking hell so i'm adventures fembushi cap you've got everybody

marshall groups anyone in the um marshland group anyone in the in the, anyone in the VC ecosystem, anyone that's investing in crypto knows a lot of these names. And this is just another indicator when you're looking at projects, see who they're backed by, because a lot of these VCs do a lot of DD. So I'm pretty impressed. You've got an incredible community. You've been building for a long time. Ryan and Scott said they invested in the previous cycle um so so maybe give us an idea more on the moving away from technical solution is um you've got a token what is the utility of the token and do you have any information on on um you know when you're listing i know you said you can't discuss too much about this but any any other points on listing token etc and are you doing a public sale for example on any launch pads for anyone in the audience that wants to participate um yeah uh okay i'll try to be very brief on this um the two-league of course is is is like the most important instruments for the protocol to be fully decentralized in the long term so meaning that the governance of the long-term development of the protocol itself in terms of technology numbers of the that the governance of the long-term development of the protocol itself in terms of technology, in terms of the governance,

in terms of the community building and to coordinate all the resources, take a resource, the funds necessary to make sure the long-term survival and the development and the thriving of the ecosystem.

And number two, utilities that we have implemented the token into the proving system. So two, utilities that we have implemented the token into the proofing system. So there will be a decentralized proof market. So there will be decentralized proofing network that can earn rewards through taking the token and access to the network

and provide the computational resources to generate the proof, compute, and process the data and, you know, post the proof to make sure that this system can actually work. And number three is the utility for this. We have another solution on the Zika Link X, which is application-specific scaling engine for high-performance order book decks.

So we're trying to provide the infra solution for order book decks builders to match user experience to compete with the centralized exchanges while we stay in self-custodial, stay in permissionless, trustless, etc. And the token is going to be live very soon, as I said, and I cannot really discuss too much on this specifically Steam Days or venues, etc.

But I think, yeah, I think the interesting thing about that, about this, that we're still very early. The ecosystem is still very early, right? Even though we have already built a large community with 600,000 people, something like that, and we have one billion US dollar total value locked on our portion already, I think the ecosystem is too early there's only just a 20 30 about 30 different applications built on top of the chain i think they're very soon we can we can reach to 300 different applications in the ecosystem there's a lot of opportunities a lot of different kinds of like utilities and applications

that's fun and that's really useful. We hope that there will be some innovations that we can promote in the ecosystem that can improve the experience to be ready for the next wave of DeFi. I think DeFi is going to come back in this new cycle. Today is supposed to be a big day for Ethereum ecosystem, right? So people, you guys have been chatting about

the meaning and the outlook of Ethereum, you know, what if the small ETF got approved, what does it mean? And as a builder, we have been a long-term builder more than three years already, almost four in the space. I think this opens up the space for the whole smart contract platform. Now finally, I think this smart contract platform is going to be somehow more adopted and endorsed by institutional players, meaning a lot of institutional funds entering the space, entering DeFi. I think the comeback of DeFi means a lot

for builders on Ethereum, on other smart contract platforms. And plus, there's also OOAPs that is emerging very quickly recently on Bitcoin. Layer 1, there's Bitcoin layers, although from technology perspective, they're still premature, they're still very premature, very early stage, I would say. But there's still this opportunity for the potential of a large amount of Bitcoin liquidity entering smart contract platforms, meaning it could bring like hundreds of maybe billions of dollars, at least the very least, billions of dollars of Bitcoins onto the smart contract platform

like Ethereum and Ethereum roll-ups. And yeah, we're very excited about what's happening right now in the space, in the industry with the ETFs and also with these exciting advancements of roll-up technology and the adoption is very very is happening very fast and we have there's already like a 30 to 40 billion US dollar on the different layer tools and this is causing the severe issue of augmentation liquidity if we can combine them together it can be it can be can be explosion it can be a blow-up agree agree look again you need to get a better mic when you do your next show that's my biggest recommendation for you because there's not much

i could recommend on the link it's a big problem as well oh good no good on the zk link i don't get a bit technical for the audience but it's an incredible solution you guys are working on. You've got some of the biggest names backing you. I'd love to send you my WhatsApp as well via DM. I know you're in talks with the team, but I'd love to talk to you personally to participate. You've got Rand and Scott already as investors, and I'd love to be part of it as well. And yeah, man, I think any other aggregators in the ecosystem should be looked at. I think you start getting enough love.

I think everyone's getting enough love. I think everyone's talking about other narratives, gaming, AI, RWAs, et cetera. But aggregation is probably the next wave as blockchain and crypto becomes more user-friendly and adoption increases. So I love what you guys are building. I appreciate you coming on the show. Scott, I think it's one of the better projects that we've had on the show and i would love to have you back um cool um i'll see you all tomorrow yeah tomorrow should be awesome because we're going to find out uh we'll have a lot more context we should have launched one of you know we should launch a breaking news space if it hits later but i don't want to give anyone any bright ideas but remember when we used to do that we would just

show up when there was big news. Yeah. The good old days. Yeah, exactly. So, exactly. So, you'll be coming on when there's breaking news, yeah? Yeah, exactly. I'll be around. I'm in Vegas.

Come on, let's go. Let's do it. Of course you will. Of course you will. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much. We'll see you again tomorrow. Bye.