The Wolf Of All Streets - USDT vs USDC: The Stablecoin War Just Escalated! #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

In this episode, Scott and the panel discuss the quick downturn in the crypto markets on the news that Iran ceasfire is over. At the same time, the stablecoin competition between USDT and USDC is heating up, with USDC quietly handling a majority of on-chain transactions, a point highlighted by a recent Visa report. As we consider the implications of institutional adoption and the need for clearer regulations, there's a consensus that the upcoming month is crucial for the Clarity Act, which could influence market dynamics significantly. The introduction of innovative privacy solutions, such as those being developed by Zama, promises to enhance confidentiality in on-chain finance, addressing the growing demand for secure transactions. With expectations that on-chain finance may soon encompass trillions, the future of crypto appears poised for a resurgence, especially if institutions can navigate the balance between privacy and compliance effectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to a slightly delayed Crypto Town Hall. I believe that our co-host, Dave Weisberger, is playing in poker tournaments in Vegas right now, or hopefully sleeping after playing in poker tournaments in Vegas last night since about 7.30 a.m. there. And I had a recording. So I appreciate you guys being patient and waiting for us and all of our amazing guests and panelists for giving us that little leeway to show up. So we got a lot, obviously, to talk about here on CryptoTay. town hall, you know, the market's slightly down, apparently on headlines that were ceasing to cease fire, although I don't know that we ever ceased fire, or no, what ceasefire actually means. But, you know, some structural weakness many people are pointing to under the market, like the Coinbase premium being negative and longs being leveraged once again, building up, meaning that, you know, maybe it's ripe for another flush, and this was just a little bear market rally. I mean, my default is it's summer and go away and touch grass, and maybe, come back in the fall and worry about it. But we can get into that conversation. Obviously, the title here,

USDT versus USCC, the stable coin war just escalated. Probably not going to be the main topic, but if you didn't see, obviously, USDT is by far the much larger by a total value locked, but actually quietly, USC has been doing the bulk of transactions on stable coins. And that number, that was around 70%, I think, and was from a recent visa, report and in context of OpenUSD launching, pretty interesting. I guess we can, there's actually about 10 more topics, but I guess we can just kind of start with the market if any of our, any of you guys have thoughts on where we're at, what's happening with the price action other than, hey, we're kind of sideways.

Feel free, raise your hand, jump in, bail me out, and let's get this started. You don't have to. I'm in the middle touching grass here, Scott. Yeah, well, touch grass, touch your phone button while you're touching the grass, please, Ryan. It's been interesting summer, but I mean, that's what we're expecting. It's a sideways summer is, you know, we weren't really expecting any breakouts anyways. And I'm surprised it hasn't gone lower. So I don't know.

I still think at the end of July is never really a happy time with Bitcoin. Interesting. That's what that. I mean, that's what Matt Hogan said to me this morning on YouTube. He said, you know, maybe the good news is that the bad news hasn't. cause the market to drop, right? You know, that obviously, you know, I mean, strategy being a seller at this point, Brian, I would love your opinion on that.

Maybe that's the next Ryan, Brian, Brian, Brian. But Brian, obviously, you know, your might go-to for treasury companies. So I think we had an interesting situation on Monday, and we haven't actually had the chance to unpack it. So that's probably a good place. Strategy sold, you know, $200-plus million worth of Bitcoin. And the immediate reaction actually was MSTR strategy. STRC and Bitcoin all sort of rose. So it was an interesting dynamic there. What do you think, Brian?

Yeah, I thought it was a great announcement and just what they needed to do. I think that this will gradually remove one of the biggest overhangs in the market today. I say that because it was a pretty comprehensive release. They obviously upped the dividend to 12% for STRC. They instituted dividend and reserve policies. They also talked about STRC and MSTR repurchase programs, which I think will be helpful. And to me, the key line was they said strategy's corporate objective is for STRC to trade overtime in a range of 99 to 100. So this basically tells you that they're going to continue to try to push it to par. I thought there were a few items that folks might not like. So there's a BTC monetization program, but obviously came with guardrails.

and for good reason. They're also saying that they won't change the STRC dividend rate solely because STRC trades below par, which I think is smart. You don't want to let the market dictate you into paying too high of a price. And then I thought like the buyback authorizations could have been larger. They were a billion each. But to me it tells me two big, big things. One is they're going to continue to support STRC.

They actually don't have to do that, I think, which is the big fear and what had led to the discount. And so I think that as they continue to do that and demonstrate that, hopefully it dress slowly back to par. And then this should enable future issuance and allow them to buy more BTC. And then the second thing is they can now monetize their multiple, whether it's at a premium or a discount. So they can increase BTC per share regardless of its valuation. And they do that by just buying back shares when they're trading at a discount. So I thought it was a big positive.

I think the market generally saw that too, especially for SCRC. So I think things generally improve, especially if we, you know, hang around here. Bitcoin gradually moves up. Yeah. I was going to say it appears to be a bad thing to having them sell BTC. But I concur with everything the previous speaker said. It could be just a bit of a release valve. actually, but it's good to contrast the fact that while BTC is doing that,

Ethereum does not have to do any of that. The biggest Ethereum holders are still buying Ethereum, and the validators, they don't have to sell. The miners and BDC have to sell to cover up operating costs because of AI spend that's getting higher, whereas contrast is to the Ethereum validators, they earn yield from staking with minimal operational expenses. So I think this is good news for Ethereum as well.

That's what I'm seeing. Rand, you were jumping in there. Yeah, I just wanted to say, you know, it's still kind of the four-year cycle playing out, even though it doesn't feel that way because we never really had much of the bull market before that. kind of like working like clockwork. And one thing that's a little bit different now

from the past five cycles I've been through is just the apathy in the market. Like nobody cares about anything anymore. And I think that's one of the reasons why we don't see tokens moving. Even the Robin Hood announcement, if you look at the different projects that Robin Hood integrated under chain, they barely moved.

A year ago, two years ago, And news like that would have had massive consequences. So I think eventually the market is going to go back to fundamentals. People are going to come back to crypto. They're going to be looking at who has been building during the bear market, which assets have been actually growing without the price following. And then, yeah, we should see hopefully a slingshot effect around that time. Yeah, that was one of the big stories today was that Robin Hood chain in a week.

could hit 100 million TVL. And I believe 89. something million of it was, you know, their earned 7% earned product on Morpho, right? So, I mean, it shows you that that kind of appetite for yield is there. And probably on Robin Hood, it's as simple as clicking a button and saying you want to earn yield for their customers, which is probably less complex than what we've seen in the past. So there definitely are things kind of happening under the surface, right? For sure.

I mean, I can tell you. there's a lot that's happening that's on a fundamental level, much, much stronger and more bullish than anything we've seen in crypto before is just, again, like, nobody's looking and everybody's so burnt out from a sort of failed bull market in 2025 that they're just not reacting yet. It'll come back.

I mean, I'm pretty confident eventually. Always does. Always does. Anyone else thoughts there? or we can uh yeah go ahead go ahead uh andres yeah so i think the big signal here is that institutional adoption keeps continues to happen so it's a big differentiator for i want to say like the last cycle where we were looking for more for kind of the underlying economics of all these protocols whereas now you see like the likes of vanguard starting to open up to digital assets whereas

before that wasn't a thing right so it's quite promising um i think as the infrastructure grows um we'll price appreciation will fall eventually, right? Yeah, my view is we're kind of... So many indicators. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, I was sorry. I was just going to say, I think there's a good amount of apathy in the market, and attention is diverted elsewhere, mostly to AI. And so I think, like, you need this major catalyst to come along to get people interested

again. To me, that is squarely Clarity Act. So Senate is out right now until Monday. You've got a lot of staffers working behind the scenes. think the news has been light. There's maybe been a bit mixed. So you've had a couple organizations come out in support or at least move to neutral of the Clarity Act. And then I think you've seen Trump's financial disclosures cause there to be a refocus on ethics. But they come back on Monday, the Senate does. And then I think they go back out on August 7th. So the next month is

really critical. If we cannot pass it by then, I think attention will shift to midterms. And then you'll see a recomposition within Congress, it'll be much harder to pass it. And so I think that is a big thing that could cause a lot of folks to really come back in. And so this is what I'm watching. And if anyone has heard any news or has any inklings either way on how this could go, I'd be very curious. I think the odds are so slim, but I would love anybody else's opinion who might be more bullish on it. I haven't even heard them even have a conversation yet about the ethics clause, which is what

is holding up the entire thing. behind the scenes. I mean, is there really a world where you get a report that, you know, Trump made two point something billion dollars on crypto in a year with his family? And there's seven Democrats in the Senate who are going to vote for a bill that does not have a clause that prevents that. I would love somebody to take the other side of that, because I just can't see it. David, I think you were lifting your mic. Yeah, I think the letters that come to mind are NFW. on that. I think the other thing that's interesting

looking at the Senate is that we've got Mitch McConnell, people are speculating as to whether he's brain dead and he generally had been a pro-crypto vote. So, you know, we may be seeing the Senate kind of shift further away from the Republican Party

depending on how a special election goes in the Senate and obviously that's going to have an impact as far as, you know, the prospects for this passing as well. Meanwhile, some interesting data coming out of Andreas and Horowitz showing the crypto wallet counts are down from a peak back in 2024. And the offset on all this is that prediction market volumes are spiking.

So what do we need to do to get crypto back to being the speculators venue of choice? If we're counting on it to be speculation, I think we're in big trouble. then the builder then the builders venue of choice yeah anybody else thoughts there was it ever not the speculators arena i felt like crypto has been a casino from day one whether it be like pre-mining to icos to nfts like the whole thing has been just one speculation spotlight after another now with the prediction markets. It's taking it more mainstream gambling now. I think we just need better interfaces.

But that's probably because it's the same people that have been in the crypto industry so far. We haven't yet gotten the opportunity to onboard a new class of users and builders, which is finally what hopefully regulation and the US being open for crypto business is going to enable. Like I can tell you, you know,

a lot of my friends that are building companies wouldn't touch crypto just because of all the uncertainty around what that meant, around, you know, all of the stigma around it. There was a lot of people talking about institutions and finance moving on chain, but nobody really built it until now. So actually my view, to be honest, is I think crypto four years from now is just finance. And it's not going to be as degen and exciting as it is today, but it's going to be trillions, and it's going to be trillions,

and it's going to be much bigger, but it's also going to be a lot more boring versus what we've been through in the last decade. Yeah, I thought it was hilarious. If you guys didn't see it, I don't have it in front of me, but Vlad Tenna of the CEO of Robin Hood just at that point. You know, obviously they're developing Robin Hood chain as very serious RWA lending. And then he had a tweet that said, you know, we built it for RWA, but it's great for memes too. I don't know if you guys saw that, but I thought that that was really funny that even he was sort of saying, hey, come on guys, you know, do something. And remember when base launched and all the Brian Armstrong memes went crazy, bald and such. So I think that there was a hat tip to the fact that he's aware that there's still that side of it. And it's not going to all just be RWA in lending.

I guess we can move on to the topic up top. USTC versus USDC, the Stablecoin War just escalated. I was pretty surprised by the Visa report that said that the strong majority of actual transactions were happening on USC. Did anybody else see that and have any thoughts? I can just continue to give mine endlessly, which is, Ryan, you always bail me out when you're touching grass. I appreciate it.

Yeah, you know, I've got a great view right now, so I'm getting thrown here. The SDR, sorry, USDC versus USDT, I think USDT is so used over in Asia still, especially on Tron. So I think we lose sight and we become very myopic in our USDC universe here in the U.S. And we forget there's other networks, other markets, and millions of people using different types of crypto around the world that are outside the purview of the U.S. So, you know, Tron is still alive and healthy with USDT.

Now, here in the U.S., you know, we, when it comes to, you know, payment to payment, I still haven't heard a single person say that, oh, you can, you can sell me or you can send me USDC, unless it's like my immediate crypto circle. The everyday person is scratching their head about, you know, once again, prediction markets. They think it's a new gambling arena. But when it comes to USDT, USDC, like, it doesn't seem like any non-crypto cypherpun person is using it. or D-Gen non-chain gamblers. Interesting point.

Yeah, I have to wonder what Visa's methodology is and what transactions they're looking at then, right? Which wasn't in the reports when I read it, so kind of hard to dig into that. But, yeah, I mean, I don't know what the percentage is now, but there was a while even within last year, certainly that over 50% of USCT was moving on Tron. I know that was true.

I don't know if that's true now, but I would imagine Visa maybe to your point not really looking at what's happening on Trump. I think we do become very myopic in North America. But I'd say Tron is an amazing, like once again, an amazing example of how a chain can get a single use case and stay alive and even flourish in certain communities

with the network effect around a single use case. And we saw that with Pauley Market and we see that with USDT on Tron. some of these chains will never die because they have a good single use case that just caught on. Yeah, I think your point was the best. You still just don't hear anybody in the United States saying, hey, let me send you X stable coin, right? I wonder how things like payments on X and such are going to impact that.

Not really sure, but yeah, it's a really point well taken. thinking through other topics here. Anybody else? Okay, go ahead. I see a hand. Go ahead, Brian. I was just going to say this debate on or discussion around Tron and USDT kind of dovetails with the prior question on how do we get people back into crypto. And to me, I think we Trojan horse our way in via the large institution.

So behavior changes really slowly. And crypto obviously has a steep learning curve. You've got to get people to download like a Metamask browser extension. write down their seed phrase on board do a sex, send themselves stable coins. But I actually think like, especially if we can get clarity passes, but I think the horses left the bar and this will happen anyway. As these large institutions come in with this massive distribution and they abstract all the more difficult parts about digital assets behind it,

they will probably own much of the stack and be able to still extract some rents. But then you get people interacting on chain and I think slowly things start to move toward these public open chains, and then you can start to disintermediate those intermediaries via more defy-like applications and make defy ubiquitous. And I think at that point, like people will start to be talking more about, hey, send me some stable coins to my crypto wallet, which is now linked onto my iPhone or automatically included in my Chrome browser, things like that. Yeah, I was having a conversation with Matt Hogan this morning, and he was pointing

out how quietly, how well Defi is actually performing right now. And interestingly, since sort of of the drift and kelpdow hacks, it seems that actually that sort of put in a floor for Defi because we're seeing kind of exactly what you just mentioned, which is I don't think it's your average crypto person anymore. Institutions are actually quietly building on this stuff and it's boarding, but that's where all the interest is going to come from in the future. I think that kind of harkens back to the Robin Hood chain conversation. This space was downloaded via spaces down.com. Visit to download your spaces today.

I mean, Brian, I know you likely favor Solana, right? And so maybe you can speak to specifically what you see there. Yeah. I mean, we like Salana, obviously like CSO at Solana Treasury Company, UPEC. We really chose it because we think it combines two very unique attributes. One is it was a first. second generation smart contract blockchain, meaning it was hyper-performance and included things

like parallel transaction processing, so it could support mass usage. But then number two, it was very early. So it launched in 2020, so it has this really great network effects and a lot of users, developers, and DAPs. And I do think that there are more and more attempts to create new chains. Like I saw some news that B&B is creating a new chain come out this morning. And there are other chains that are just as performant, but I do think that in general, they have like five daily active users or they go down periodically. And so our view is that you need something that is both hyperperformant and highly used. And so that's why we chose to be backed by Solana. And I think that Solana's goal is what it calls internet capital markets. It wants all of the world's assets to be

on-chain accessible to anybody 24-7, 365 with just an internet connection. It's doing a bunch of different things, like moving toward this up and glow upgrade that'll make it even more performant, multiple concurrent proposers, that'll make it even more performant. And I think it's, you know, I think it has like a 97% market share of spot trading of on-chain equities. And so I think it's starting to move in that direction. I like to talk about it as the horse has left the bar with us upgrading our antiquated financial infrastructure. Everything was created 50 plus years ago and is slow and expensive, and we can upgrade that using blockchain and internet-based rails. And so our bet as this occurs on Solana, and Solana's hyper-focused on that

as its North Star. That was a great summary. Anybody else specific thoughts there on how this will accrue, what chains that will happen, you know, those things. I still think a stable coin-based chain where the gas token is a stable coin and then you have the large banks basically backing it and you know the blessing of the government as a main transactional chain i i don't know i still don't see any one of these individual decentralized products ever becoming like the main transactional chain in north america we're too tied to watching the government to see what they're going to bless for institutions. I don't feel like institutions are going to move unless all the banks get behind one stable coin-backed blockchain. Which is interesting because you have that announcement from

OpenUSD from last week, right? The 140 company consortium, which is funny because I don't know if you guys saw the Samsung news, but their logo was on it and they were like, we have no idea what this is. Which was the most hilarious part. But clearly, like, the corporate move is what's coming. Yeah, my only pushback, and I think corporations will probably want to try to own the whole stack. And obviously they've got billions of capital, billions of users. So they are in the advantage position. But I also do think it's hard for like JPMorgan to move over to city and say, hey, build on our onics or Kness chain.

I think that we tried corporate chains for five years and they didn't really catch on. I think you get a lot of benefits from doing things on a public blockchain, like Utilis. their existing distribution as well as composability. And then I do think we're seeing a lot of announcements from public companies hinting that they're building on public chains and that they want to meet users where they are and meet users where they want to be. So we're hopeful that this happens on public blockchains, although that is a key question for sure.

Yeah, I think it's a valid one. Actually, kind of a great time. I think, Rand, since I have you here. I invited you, obviously, you and I had a, conversation recently, which will be coming out on my YouTube, I think, this weekend. It actually blew my mind what you guys are building over at Zama. And I think that there's a huge element of all of this conversation that speaks exactly to what you guys are building and why it matters, because none of this is happening without

proper privacy, right? And with everybody able to see our transactions. Maybe, Rand, maybe you just start, if you could, since I invite you introduce yourself and tell me what you guys are building, what Zama is, so people can understand it. Sure. So maybe just a very quick background. I've been a developer since I was a teenager in the 90s, did a PhD in AI 20 years ago and then built one of the first AI companies focusing on privacy, which got acquired back in 2019. I've also been in crypto since 2013. And for the past six years, I've been building my current company, Zama, to bring confidentiality to on-chain finance on public chains like Ethereum and Solana. So the high level is that we want to enable

people to use Ethereum, to use Solana, to use base in all these chains with the confidentiality that they would have in TradFi today. So think of this like HTTPS for blockchain transactions. Sorry, I glitched there.

Yeah, perfect. But maybe let's talk about why that's so important and what the problem is that it's solving. If you think about it, right? When you are doing financial transactions, the base assumption off-chain is that this is private. You know, when you make a payment with a debit card or when you make a wire to someone, sure, your bank can see your bank account, but your neighbor cannot. For some reason, we were brainwashed into thinking that allowing people to see our transactions on chain was okay,

but it's actually not okay. I went in the street the other day. I walked out to a random person and I told him, hey, can you actually show me your bank account? They look at me like I was a weirdo. It's weird. Like asking people to show you their transactions is actually weird. So I think

the same thing is true for blockchain. And the more money people have, the more this becomes a problem. If you're a company, you certainly don't want other people to know how much debt you have, how much revenue making, how much you're paying your support, I mean, you know, if you and me are doing a deal and I have to pay you on chain,

do we really want everybody else to know what a deal is? Probably not, because, you know, everybody's going to want to have the best deal as well. If you have funds, if you're a VC, you've invested in early stage crypto companies, and now you hold a bunch of tokens. Everybody know how much you have. You move them, the market front runs you. You're losing 20, 30 percent of your funds are R are because of front runs. This is insane.

It makes no sense. And we think that this is okay because we didn't have a choice until now. And so the people that came on chain are specifically the people who didn't care. But the majority of the people are not on Shane and those people do care. And they're the ones with the trillions that they want to actually tokenize and bring to blockchains. So I think, you know, confidentiality doesn't bring trillions on shame, but it's a condition without which it will just never happen in the first place.

I think that's well stated. So how do you actually solve this? I remember you telling me about fully homomorphic encryption, which obviously way over my brain to understand. It's a bit of a mouthful. I've been trying to find a different way to call that. Let's just say FHE, for short, fully homomorphic encryption.

The idea about FHC is that you can compute an encrypted data without decrypting it. So for example, your balances on chain would be encrypted. The transfer amounts are encrypted. So if you look at the actual on-chain data, you're just seeing like some random encrypted number. But the way it was encrypted still allows the blockchain to run a smart contract on this encrypted value and to make a transfer of money. So from the outside, you only see a random number of tokens moving around. But in practice, you actually didn't move money.

So that's why, you know, I see this a little bit like HTTP for financial transactions. You know, when you put your credit card information on e-commerce website, you're not just sending it. You're encrypting it before you send it. And this is kind of the same idea for any kind of activity you want to do on chain. Yeah, that makes perfect sense when a lot easier to explain than the actual terminology. We've seen so many different, I guess, ideas for privacy. tech, right? ZK, MPC, T, all these things. How is this different? Where is it fit? And I guess

what can you do that they can't? I'm a very pragmatic guy. I want to be clear that if there was something better than what we're using now, we just have used it. Because ultimately, nobody cares about which technology does the job as long as it's secure, as long as it gives composability so that you can actually use it with smart contracts as long as it's post-Quantum, like you need those properties. And today, FHE is the only technology that actually allows you to have all of that. It's secure against quantum computers.

It allows you to have composability. So your confidential assets, let's say your confidential USDC, you can put them in morpho to earn yield on it. You can swap them on dexes against other confidential assets. Like you can use all of what makes blockchain, blockchain, without actually revealing what you're doing. Other technologies all have a problem somewhere. T's, I mean, T's honestly not secure, period. There has been 47, 47 exploits of T's in the past two years. 47.

Like, I wouldn't touch this with a stick, honestly, at this point. ZK, great technology, but it suffers from two main issues. First, it's very hard to. to make it composable. You can send money privately with ZK, but you cannot use ZK for confidential swaps as easily as you can use FHE. The second issue with ZK that we just discover with Zcash

is you cannot actually audit the shielded asset supply. So you actually don't know if there was ever a bug and someone minted an infinite amount of shielded ZK tokens, you would never actually be able to prove whether or not this was the case. FHC is fully verifiable and auditable. You can always make sure that the amount of shielded tokens corresponds exactly to the amount of tokens that went into the system.

And you see those kind of differences, composability, auditability of the supply, programmability, they're the post-quantum security, they're the things that institutions care about. you know, someone who's just degen trading meme coins might not care about it. But people with money, like big money, the kind of money we're talking about when we talk about Trill is moving on chain. They care a lot about those things.

So I think the kind of sentiment is that there's this massive battle then for like who will be the one to rule them all for privacy. And Zcash has obviously had a huge narrative, right, of late. So I guess how would you, you know, say Zcash. Cash actually sits first what you guys are doing in Zama. Well, I can tell you, I think there are only three privacy protocols that are actually interesting that will exist in four years. So I think Zcash has a place.

But Zcash is not trying to compete on the confidential on-chain finance. Zcash is trying to be encrypted Bitcoin. And I do think, honestly, that there is a space for encrypted Bitcoin, just like there is a space for Bitcoin without smart contracts on Bitcoin. It's just Bitcoin. So I think Zcash will continue to have very much. value in that sense, and personally I'm going to probably continue holding Zcash for that. Where it becomes interesting is when you look at privacy protocols that enable on-chain

finance. And today there are really only two protocols that people are looking at. There is Canton for private chain type of approach, and then there is Zama for public chain confidentiality. So the two are kind of complementary in a way that we don't address exactly the same use cases, but we're both trying to address confidentiality for on-chain finance. I think, you know, Canton is like everybody has its own chain, and then, you know, you have those chains talking to each other. It's a little bit like intranets and companies. It's secure, it's private because you run it within your own organization,

and you can connect it to other people's intranets to exchange things. Zama is trying to be HTTPS on the internet. You know, we have one global public network, Ethereum, Solana, and you need confidentiality on top of that through encryption. This is where FHE and Zama really comes in. It's like, you know, HTTP, what did enable for e-commerce on the Internet? We're trying to do for public blockchains. So, I mean, also, yeah, you're not a layer one or a layer too, right? It's like your stack kind of sits on top.

There's no chain, no bridge. Exactly. I mean, interrupt you. Exactly. But I assume that's where you're kind of going. like you so, you know, I would imagine for builders, that's a very different proposition. Absolutely. You know, we want the money to stay where the money is.

And that money is on Ethereum and on Salah and out of those chains. We don't want people to have to move it to a new L1 where you have to rebuild everything. In fact, we even go one step beyond that. We want people to be able to use your confidential assets with existing financial products on chain, with existing DFI protocols. If you have USDC, you should be able to put your, USDC and Morpho without people knowing how much USDC are holding. If you have, you know, tokenized that are federal gold and you want to swap it for something else,

you should be able to do that confidentially on any decks that you want to use on Solana without having to worry about anything. And so if we do our job rights, people don't even know we exist because we're going to be woven into what it means to do a transaction of public chain in the first place. We're just going to be the encryption layer on top of Ethereum, on top of Solana. But people are going to be using Solana. They're going to be using Ethereum. They're going to be using USDC, USDT, morpho hyperliquids.

Zam is just here to secure and make all of that confidential. And this just reminded me that we were talking about, obviously, the earned product on Robin Hood chain and sort of this, you know, the yield is obviously back. You guys can do that on a token that nobody can see. which was basically impossible before, right? You have confidential USDC vaults now. Is that correct? Yes, correct.

We just launched a first vault in partnership with Steakhouse and Morpho. So, you know, Steakhouse has the prime USDC vault on Morpho, which is sort of like the vanilla USDC earning vault for LPs. We created exactly the same thing. Same strategy, same risk profile. But you can actually deposit confidential USDC into it, meaning that when you enter the vault, nobody knows how much you contributed to that vault.

So people can see that the vault has, I think right now, 12 million, 11 million TVL, but nobody knows whether you put in $1 or a million or $10 million of that TVL. And if you think about this from a pure asset management's perspective, if you're a portfolio manager, you know, if you're a pension fund, if you're a fund, and you have to manage a portfolio of assets, You want to be able to move between strategies, aka vaults.

You want to be able to move between assets, whether there are RWAs, utility tokens, Bitcoin, but you want to do that without people knowing your positions. That's exactly what we're going towards. This vault is just a first proof of concept that you can actually have active portfolio management on Ethereum using all of the cutting-edge best, more secure strategies in vaults, but with confidentiality. That's really fascinating. It's a huge unlock, I would say.

The point is, there's no downside. Think about it, right? So if you can have the same yield, the same curator exposure, the same vault on morpho, but with confidentiality, then a question becomes why not? Why not actually shield your balances

if you can have exactly the same access to ancient finance? I guess the elephant in the room then is that, you know, this is for institutions, and it feels like compliance and privacy would be somewhat our opposites, right? Because, you know, regulators, et cetera, probably demand a lot of transparency, and a lot of this is, you know, obviously hidden, I guess. So how does that work, you know, to get institutions to put real size on chain and they still have all the compliance they need, but it's private? This is actually where FHE and the programability,

that comes with it is really strong. The fact that we can compute on the encrypted state on chain directly means that whenever someone issues a confidential asset, so let's say, for example, I've got a confidential USDC contract, I can build into the smart contract code itself in solidity, you know, it's just smart contract on Ethereum, I can build my compliance rules. And those rules will apply to the shielded asset

in my contract. So for example, I could say the user should be able to see their own balances, obviously, right? You want to know how much money you have. But I could also say, me as a token issuer, I authorize a third-party compliance officer to see the activities of people using my token. So it's up to the token issuer to decide what compliance means for the asset they've issued. The Zama Protocol, itself doesn't actually tell you how to be compliant, which is give you the tools so that you can program compliance at the token contract level. Really so interesting. I just realized we kept you and kept asking questions for a really,

really long time. Sticking around, I just had one last thing I was wondering. Can you put some numbers on this? I mean, how big is this? How fast is this growing? I mean, I can't tell you really how fast this is going to grow. I can tell you. I can tell you really how fast this is going to grow, I can tell you what I'm aiming for. My bet is that in four years, finance is going to move on chain to the tune of trillions. Honestly, if nobody here believes that on-shade finance is going to be trillions, like, what are we even doing? You know, like, we have to assume that finance is going to be trillions on chain in the next few years.

So when that happens, I think most of that is going to be encrypted. I think most of it is going to be confidential because if you're not encrypting your money on chain, you're actually losing money to other people. And the growth of confidentiality is going to follow the growth of RWAs, the growth of stable coins, the growth of just finance moving on chain. It's probably going to be growing over the next 12 months, but I think it's going to be explosive over the next four years. It's really one of those things where all of a sudden,

there's a whole network effect of liquidity happening, and it just, yeah, I think 95% of financial transactions on chain in four years are going to be encrypted. And I'm certainly, you know, doing everything I can to make sure Zama is the technology that enables that. I appreciate you taking so much time. And where can people, is it at Zama? ZAMA? Yeah, the X handle is just at Zama. And if you want to try out the Morphavolt, you can just go on app.zama.org,

wallet connect and then take it for a spin. Fascinating. All right. We brought that. Thanks to everybody. We brought that right up to 1115 when the show normally end. Sorry, we started a little late today, but we'll try to prevent doing that in the future. That was great. I appreciate everybody for joining. Everybody, give everybody on the panel a follow. They all deserve it. And otherwise, we will see you back on Friday. Thank you, everybody. Thanks, Rand. Appreciate you guys. Bye. This space was downloaded via spacesdown.com. Visit to download your spaces today.