Washington Just Rewrote The Rules For Stablecoins. What It Means For Bitcoin
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00:19Consumer Reports top-rated subcompact SUV.Stop by your local Subaru dealership or visit Subaru.ca to learn more.Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services.Bitcoin continues to struggle at $84,000, a ton of liquidations there on the heat map.Meanwhile, geopolitics, as always, making the situation far more complicated.I don't know if you saw this yesterday, but markets actually went up massively on a fake announcementthat there was a peace deal between the United States and Iran, and then it came out naturallythat this is going to be a forever war, and there actually was no announcement, and markets went
00:55right back down.Hence, is Iran about to make it worse?I have no idea.Iran doesn't care about my Bitcoin prices.What we do care about, though, is a much greater conversation about what is happening in the market,with the infrastructure, with the buildout.And I have an amazing guest today from Robert Hood, Nicola White, to talk about all of that.Let's go.
01:30Good morning, everybody.Happy Wednesday.Welcome to Scenic, New York at dusk.I hope that you're all having a wonderful day.I know I am really excited for today's guests, who we've never had on before.I'm going to go ahead and bring her on right now.Nicola, good morning.How are you?
01:46Good morning, Scott.Good.Good.See, I was going to just butcher your name on purpose because that's what I do with Robin Hood.You know, I've long made the joke that I would, Johan and then Johan and then G.Oh, Han.And, you know, I could have been V-LAD for Vlad and we could do the holy trifecta.I could have called you, you know, Nicola.
02:06Yeah, it's, we don't make it easy for people, that's for sure.But we'll have a test at the end as well.Okay, well, we'll test the audience and see if they could get it together.So, yeah, yeah, I think we're an interesting time, obviously, here in the market.You know, the title here, Bitcoin keeps failing at 84K.It's funny because titles are titles.I think Bitcoin looks great in context of everything that's been happening in the world, right?I mean, you know, we were in the 60s and we're in the 70s.
02:34Now we're in the 80s, like 88, 82, 84.It's kind of all the same to me.I'm just happy we're moving up.Yeah, we've definitely.seen, we've definitely seen strong indicators, right? I think if you look at some of the news we'vegotten out over the last couple of weeks, the innovation exemption, the news we got this morningout of the OCC with them starting to codify some of the Genius Act, I think all the pieces arethere and the building is definitely happening, right? I think one of the things we're seeing
03:04with a lot of our customers is they are frantically building behind the scenes to start touse some of these, some of this guidance we've gotten recently. So I'm pretty excited about that.Yeah, you mentioned the OCC finalizes first federal rule to implement the Genius Act. So I think a lot ofpeople don't realize, I guess, the process of actually getting law into practice. So we got the law,the Genius Act, but then it has to go to every single one of these agencies for them to actuallysubmit their rules and then to create those and for it actually to be implemented. So I guess this isjust, you know, a step in the process, but still a very favorable step. I remember havingCaitlin Long on not long ago, and she was like, you know, the OCC has done it, the FDIC has done it,
03:45but the Fed's never going to do it. They're going to drag their feet. I think the Fed actuallydid it a couple weeks ago behind deadline. So the Genius Act is certainly being implemented here.Does that meaningfully impact what you're building or, you know, your business in general?Yeah, I think, so we're part of the USDG consortium. So we have stable coins available on ourplatform for customers to, you know, facilitate payments.get exposure to to stable coins through that product. But I think really what this unlocks ispayments more broadly. I think, you know, international payments is something that still hasquite a lot of friction. I think they think that the average cost to wire money internationally costs
04:28about 6%. We can do that for a fraction of the cost with stable coins. And, you know, the U.S. as thehub of finance globally, I think, you know, that's the last step.order to really, you know, start to unlock this and work on some of these use cases and work ongetting that friction down for customers. Right. So genius is the law of the land and we're going tosee how that's implemented, but you kind of touched on the innovation exemption before. And that'ssomewhat been in lieu of the Clarity Act, which we know failed and is probably dead in the water.And, you know, we've long talked about how the regulatory agencies are going to be forced towillingly step in and do what they can, you know, to give us what we would have gotten from
05:09clarity. We have this kind of interesting story of later. I don't even have it in front of me,but a lot of, you know, in the innovation exemption, companies are allowed to basically opt out.And we've seen, I think, 15 of them now opt out in advance of OKX ICE, which is one of theplatforms that will be doing this, you know, and there's some of the biggest names.It's an interesting time, right? So we have the ability now likely to have tokenizedstock offerings, but that doesn't mean that every company is going to want those tokenized stockofferings. Yeah, and I think it's an education process as well. I think we've been working withcompanies that have a lot of questions on how this works, what voting looks like. And we've
05:51seen some news out of the SEC recently where Tesla asked for some qualifications on how votingrights could work. And that's just in traditional stocks, right? So I think the industry is trying toinnovate and solve some of these problems in real time. And I think that that just means that some ofthese issuers are going to have questions and we need to spend some time and work through what theprocess looks like, how, you know, having tokenized equities can make processes like votingquite a lot easier. There's a lot of, you know, details to get sorted out about around that. That doesn'thappen overnight. But, you know, we're encouraged by the conversations we're having withissuers. And yeah, I think I think this is going to be a process that iterates over,
06:35you know, the next year or so.It's going to take a long time. I mean, you know, like you have so many, I think,like trains converging in the station at the same time. It's not just like, can we tokenize it?It's what happens when it's trading over here on Saturday at 3 a.m. and it's not over here.You know, it just seems like there's so many things that will have to be accounted for for it towork efficiently, that I think it's not a tomorrow. I think the tokenization of stocks and tradingthem will be tomorrow, but like everything on tokenized rails is not as fast as people arethinking. Yeah, and I think we've had like pieces of guidance, which has been great from the SEC,
07:13right? So I think last January, you got some guidance on what it meant for broker dealers towork in the tokenized space. You had issue, you had wallet guidance in, I want to say like May,if I have my times right. And then you had this latest innovation example.on TSVs that came out about a month ago.And you kind of have to layer all of those on top of each other because they're all,you know,very integral pieces of the market structure.And yeah,
07:38that's going to take time to sort out how the interplay between all those pieces of guidanceworks and how we're going to build something that really unlocks what our customersare looking for,which is,you know,24-7 trading fractionalization and the ability to offer shares globally, right?So, you know,our current stock token offering is available.
07:57I think it's in just about 120 countries globally.Those customers all want access to U.S. equities and U.S. stocks.So we're not only talking about unlocking inside the U.S.We're also talking about unlocking outside of the U.S. as well.Yeah, I think that's actually the bigger story, right?In the U.S., it's a McDonald's Burger King, like it's tokenized or otherwise,they're right across street for each other, right?But if you're in most of these jurisdictions, you literally have no access to U.S. capital markets.
08:26And I would argue at this point, you don't really care if you get the dividend or if you have the voting rights.You just want exposure that you couldn't get to capital markets and mostly price exposure, right?So I think that maybe it's a sliding scale on a process of getting to the version described in the innovation exemption,but your average person in Belgium probably doesn't care.Yeah, the good thing is we've solved dividends.So we worked pretty hard this year to solve that.But yeah, we have a lot of work to do on voting and making sure.that it's easily accessible to customers.
08:58And customers don't want, you know, to get, you know,materials in the mail and have to vote, go to the post office to drop off their proxystatements.And so we're working pretty closely with issuers to make sure we make that process more seamless.And that kind of goes hand in hand with, you know, moving everything onto the blockchain.Okay.So I didn't, I don't want to take for granted that everybody understands your role at Robin Hood.So because you are on the crypto side, obviously, with the.
09:26Bit Stamp acquisition and then working very closely with Johan.So maybe you can tell us sort of what you're focused on there.Yeah, so I've been a Robin Hood for almost two years now,really focused on building out our institutional business.So it's one of Robin Hood's first institutional businesses.We've kind of got into the space.And really the offering here, I think, is twofold, right.One, we want to make sure the institutions have access to liquidity in the space.
09:56So not only in spot crypto, but in perpetual futures, in tokenized equities.Those are kind of all places where we're looking to make sure that institutions as they're able to adopt blockchain have access to liquidity that we need.That's through our exchange product, which is BitStamp.But then also it's about the interplay between institutional and retail clients.So historically in traditional finance, those have been two pools that have been completely set.separated from each other, right? You have an institutional liquidity pool. You have a retail liquiditypool. But there are many benefits by bringing the two of them together. And so we're also, you know,figuring out ways to consolidate liquidity across the space so that our retail clients have access
10:40to institutional grade liquidity. So we launched a product last year called Smart Exchange Routing,where clients can actually leave orders on the same exchange that institutions trade on andinstitutions then can interact with retail clients through those products as well. SoA little bit of bringing the worlds together, but then also making sure that institutions, as they're starting to get into the space and as they have more clarity around regulation, have the liquidity and the infrastructure that they need.I assume institutions are not a monolith, as we often kind of describe them.I think a lot of the time when we talk about institutional adoption of crypto, in the early days, we thought it was going to be the Goldman Sachs and stuff.It was probably just hedge funds.right? So what kind of institutions when you talk about this? You know, who are you interfacing with?
11:29Who's actually interested and maybe who is entirely not interested that we think is?Yeah, you're right. When I started in the space about five years ago, we were talking primarily about hedge funds, right?It was people that were really looking to arb the markets in the space. Now I think we're talking about some of the larger institutions who are, you know, thinking about how they use blockchain technology.to reduce some of the frictions that exist in traditional finance.So, you know, moving cash should take seconds, not minutes or overnight to wire money.You shouldn't need to shut your systems down for two or three hours to roll to the next day.We should think about 24-7 markets.And so, yeah, I think now the spectrum is much larger, especially given some of the guidance we've
12:17seen from the regulators.there's people or institutions now feel like they have the permission to go and build in the space.Yeah, that makes perfect sense.And so the Bit Stamp acquisition, obviously, was huge because I think it opened an entirely newjurisdiction and new things that you probably couldn't build yourself.It seems like there's this sort of like bifurcated approach to how everybody is trying tobecome the everything exchange everywhere all at once, right?So you can either buy someone, right?
12:47And that seems to have been actually very popular in the United States for multiple exchanges.Like if you can't do derivatives, it can be very hard to get it by someone who can do derivatives, right?Things like that.But also building out tools yourselves.So, I mean, how does Robin Hood, I guess, specifically approach that deciding whether, hey, we want to, you know, try to build out our own entire product in a jurisdiction or buy one or it seems like the goal is to offer everything everywhere?Yeah, I think, you know, the goal is definitely to increase our reach and, and, and, you know,offer it to as many customers and jurisdictions as we can safely. And under the right regulatoryframework, the great thing that we got with BitStamp was just geographical reach. So BitStamp's one of
13:31the largest crypto, longest crypto exchanges. It's been around since 2011. And, you know, with it came,you know, about 50 different licenses globally, which we were able to leverage and build upon.That's not something that happens overnight, right? That takes years and years.of working with regulators, establishing the right cadence, establishing the right controls and checksand balances. And so for us, you know, BitStamp was a way to, you know, get those 50 licensesin a relatively short period of time. And over the last year and a half, we've been working onintegrating and consolidating what that offering looks like and really bringing together the Robin Hoodhood stack with the BitStamp stack for institutional trading, Robin Hood stack for retail trading,
14:13and making sure that the two platforms can interact and really get the best of both worlds.Yeah.I remember having, you know, conversations with people in the early 2020, 2020, 2021, 22,and it was like BitStamp, Bitcoin was the best Bitcoin.You know, there was like this sentiment that if you wanted to know what was really happening in Bitcoin at that time,and certainly before 17, 18, 19, it was like you had to watch Big Bit Stamp.That's where the whales were tradingand that's where the good Bitcoin was.
14:46Yeah, we definitely havea lot of OGs on the platformwho, you know,have been with BitSamp since 2011,Loyal used it as kind of theplace to do all of their trading over the yearsand, you know, hopefully we'reworking on modifying the platform
15:04and bringing it, you know,bringing the technology into a placewhere people feel like it isit is the place to trade Bitcoin going forSo we talk about obviously CFDC and SECC making rules themselves.What would it take generally for Robin Hood to actually be able to offer everything you can offer everywhere in the United States?Yeah, I think it's, it is really an iterative process in working with regulators, right?I think about two weeks ago, we actually enabled perps trading in the U.S. on the platform.
15:35And that was something that we've been working with the CFTC and the NFA for the last couple of months.It's, you know, something that was a long time, a long work in progress.People see the announcement.They don't often see the amount of work that is going in in D.C.with our legal teams and our regulatory teams and all of the process that has to happenbehind the scenes.But, you know, for us, you know, we love the PERPS product.We think that, you know, it takes a lot of the frictions that exist in some of the
16:03traditional futures products out of the mix and really being able to offer it to our customersin a responsible and responsible and right.regulated way was something that was pretty important to us to be able to do this year. And we're at5% rollout now. So hopefully for over the next couple of weeks, as we roll it out to the remainingRobin Hood users, it's a product that really resonates with our customers.Yeah, let's talk about prediction markets, because that's obviously, I think, been kind of thehotter narrative of late. And I think, you know, since Bitcoin and crypto were sort of in a baremarket, a lot of the attention went to prediction markets. Every time I open the news, it's like,
16:40this state sues this person,sues the federal regulator who's suingthe state back, who's suing a platform.How does this allpossibly shake out? I think there was a story todaythat Utah is suingKalshi now over alleged illegal gambling.I mean, it's every single day.
16:56We have some battle between the statesand the federal regulator and the platforms allsort of in the mix.Yeah. So, I mean,prediction markets doesn't sit within the cryptodivision, but I know it's somethingthat the team is focused on.making sure that we're doing it in the right way. So we're spending a lot of time in D.C.,
17:15working with regulators. But, you know, I think it's definitely something that customers haveappetite for. So, you know, we want to make sure we're doing it in the right way.So on the crypto side, just a general question, how do you decide what people can trade and wherethey can trade it? You know, without the very distinct, you know, legal, legislative clarity as towants a security or commodity or, you know, do you look at the tokenomics? How do you decide what getslisted? Yeah, I mean, can't go into a lot of the specifics about what our process is. It's anindependent process. And, you know, we don't want it to be reverse engineered. So we don'tshare it publicly exactly what goes into it. But you can think that there is a set of criteria
18:00that we look at each token against before listing it. And then each after that, each jurisdictionneeds to go and do their own analysis.And so as we operate across more jurisdictions,it's not a given that one regulator will allow us to list itand another regulator might not.And so then once you've kind of made the decision,you need to look across all the different jurisdictionsand make sure that it's regulatory compliant
18:26in each jurisdiction before listing it there.Yeah, I can't even comprehend how you do that, right?Because, yeah, like you talk,we're in 120 countries with this product.I mean, you know, hundreds of countriesand every state.Right?So like that seems even worse.
18:43Like, you know, you ask, how do you do this in the United States?The question might be like, how do you do this in New York?Yeah, absolutely.And we have a great team behind it that spends a lot of time on this.And they're in the details every day trying to make sure that we can bring products to customers as fast as possible.Yeah.So you work in.York, right? I do work in New York. Why is New York no fun anymore? You know, we, we have, we have a great
19:14relationship with the New York DFS. We have two bit licenses at Robin Hood. So we don't even, we don'thave one. We have two. We have one for Robin Hood and one for BitStamp. But, you know, I think that the,I think the regulator is, is definitely spending a lot of time these days trying to think about what thislooks like, especially in light of federal regulation. But, you know, we'll see where this goes.We talk to them pretty much every month, if not every week. So we're working to bring various productsto New York residents as well. So we talked about kind of the implementation of stable coin rules.How much do you see on the back end exchanges using stable coins, you know, even for part of thebusiness in the future? There was a story.
20:02today, stable coin transfers at $891 billion in third quarter.I mean, this is going hockey stick adoption as far as numbers and actual usage.This is one of those times in crypto, or it's not just market cap, right?I think a tether actually went down a billion dollars or something was one of the stories,but it doesn't matter how much is in circulation when they're being moved around so much.Yeah, you know, it's interesting.For our largest customers, they're pretty well banked, and they can do near instant transfersof cash.
20:32for kind of our medium clients or our clients that are offshore,they have real trouble with banking rails from two perspectives, right?One, being able to transfer across jurisdictions or two, just the cost, right?When you get charged, you know, $60, whatever it ends up being,for each transfer that you're trying to move back and forth,when you're moving funds on a regular basis, it adds up pretty quickly.And so we're definitely seeing those customers move over to stable coins,not only because fees are lower, but because time to get cash to land in various locations is a lot
21:08quicker than if they were relying on banking rails. So, yeah, it's a trend that we continue tosee expand, and we think the OCC guidance will only probably leapfrog the adoption of stable coins.You mentioned USDG, obviously, before. I know it's been wildly popular that you've been able to offer7%, I don't want to miss quote, 7% APY on USDG.Maybe just talk about USDG, you know, where it sits in sort of the stable coin frameworkversus all the others, you know, why Robin Hood decided kind of to focus there.And then let's talk about how you offer that yield and who's actually taking advantage of that.Yeah.
21:49So USDG is a consortium of, I would say, crypto, institutional crypto players,where we really thought that the premise behind us getting involved with the consortiumwas that there was a power in creating utility in having a group, right?So not having just, you know, a specific stable coin that's for one platform.It's that we wanted to make sure that when we were transferring funds, you know, globallyor when our partners were transferring funds globally,that it wasn't like, oh, well, I don't take this stable coin or you don't take that stable coin.And now I have the friction of having to go between stable coins and paying bid offer on that.
22:29And so that's really one of the reasons why,we believed in having this consortium to help build on.You know, being able to unlock with morpho vaults,the additional yield for our users was a product that we were pretty excited to bring to market,not only because, you know, it sits squarely within the, the defy space,but we were also able to layer having insurance on top of it.You know, it's one of those things that defy gets a pretty bad rap for, you know,making sure that there's safety and security around it and adding that additional layer of
23:06insurance on top, I think was the key unlock for our retail users. And, you know, the team herehas been really hard at building that and working to make sure that we can scale it as it scales globally.Robin Hood is uniquely positioned, though, in my opinion, I've kind of always said thisbetween the two markets, right? You have this 28 million users, is that correct? Something like that,ballpark. And, you know, a lot of them, obviously, the majority of them did not come in forcrypto initially, right? And so you're in this unique position where you have all these usersthat are probably the perfect demographic for crypto and can kind of find their way into thatfrom the other side. So how many of those people see 7% and click the button? And if they do,
23:55do they even care that it's a morpho vault in USDG? Or are you at the point actually whereYou know, your customers say, I want to earn passive 7% yield on my holdings.I'm just going to do that without being a crypto person.Yeah, I think the beauty of this product is that we've taken a lot of the complexity from thedefy space away and the user doesn't have to understand it.We want to make sure they understand what they're investing in.So we spend a lot of time trying to break down complex problems for our users into somethingthat's easy to understand, but maybe where they don't need to know all of the details
24:28like in all of the technical details about how funds move and how it move, how cash moves on chain.But I will say that, you know, it's shown in some of our stats, right?In Q1, 50% of our users were first-time investors.So we think we're pretty good at taking some of these complex problems and breaking themdown into something that people can understand.I mean, that's been the biggest problem for crypto in general, right?I mean, first of all, it's like narrative.We're terrible at marketing.
24:57People don't need to know about a morpho vault and whatever and the blockchain side.But just UXUI, right?Like it's always been really complicated.So once again, you're uniquely positioned where people are already familiar with your UXUIand they can just push a button, right?They don't need to go like get a private seed phrase and save it and, you know,and separate it into four pieces and send to the grandma or whatever we do now for custody.But, you know, and so you can just bridge those people right over.
25:26I mean, I have Robin Hood. I have Robin Hood wallet. I find it to be exceptionally easy. Do you think that your average person is finding it exceptionally easy as well to get from one to the other?I do. I always use my family as a good proxy for if they understand it, then typically, you know, maybe the everyday user will understand it. But, you know, we spend a lot of time with our users and users that are unfamiliar with the space, making sure that it is intuitive, right? So before you get a product, we've done a lot of user interviews. We've made sure that it's intuitive. We've probably iterated through on 16 different designs.So this isn't something that, you know, is taken for granted that we're getting the U.S. and the U.I. right.It's something that for every product, we're making sure that it's intuitive and self-explanatory and easy to understand.So talk to me about Robin Hood Chain.Obviously, it was a wildly popular from launch, you know, it was it been four or five months now?Yeah, we launched in July.So, yeah.
26:33Oh, my gosh, only three months.That's crazy.I feel like I've never lived in a world without Robin Hood chain.Well, we can't imagine a world without Robin Hood chain.So we like that if that's where your head's at.So, I mean, talk about, you know, why you decided to do that.You obviously had infinite options for how you could approach this and decide to gowith a layer two on Ethereum and to do it yourself, right, as opposed to, I guess,
27:01adopting another existing chain and talk about, you know, where that's headed and whatthe purposes, you know, in your mind. Yeah, the premise behind Robin Hood chain was really that we dobelieve that everything moves on chain and we stopped talking about, you know, tokenized version ofstocks and stocks as two different products, right? I think blockchain needs to be the infrastructurethat powers, you know, finance generally. And we wanted to be the one that was helping todrive that. And that was really the premise behind creating Robin Hood chain. We, you know, the, we definitelydid a lot of heavy lifting, but I would say we couldn't have done this without off-chain labsand the team over at Arbitrum. They were a massive reason why we were able to come to market so
27:48quickly. And they've been great kind of building with us in lockstep and making sure that as thechain scaled and, you know, as we saw volumes increase, they were, they were able to help us, you know,scale the chain appropriately as we kind of saw that growth and it was unlocked.Yeah, so you've had sort of this interesting situation that's always very crypto where like meme coins went crazy,but also like kind of behind the surface, the actually purpose of the chain that was built for is like growing massively.I mean, I'm looking at up.You have over a billion dollars, I think, on the chain, right?And it looks like about half of that is sitting in these vaults earning yield.
28:28So, I mean, isn't that a statement that even though, you know, the kind of crazy crypto people come and go,that the real adoption is for the products that you're actually building it for?Yeah, I mean, if you've seen any of the memes that Vlad's posted on this,you know, I think we do really believe that there is space for both worlds on the chain, right?So you can have the meme coin world and you can have the RWA world,as Vlad calls them, the two wolves in his life.So we definitely think that they can both exist and coexist.on Robin Hood chain.
29:06But eventually will all of the tokenized stock offerings in a perfect world exist on Robin Hoodchain? I mean, is that the end goal? Like, what's Robin Hood chain look like as a part of theecosystem in five years? Yeah, so our stock tokens today are available on Robin Hood chain.You know, we definitely want to figure out how to unlock that in the U.S. So right now,our stock token offering is only available outside of the U.S. We're on the back of theinnovation exemption looking at what we can offer inside the U.S. It's only been four weeks.So, you know, our legal team and our compliance team are actively working towards whatsomething like that could look like for us. But, you know, I do think we want a world where
29:49we're not only talking about public equities on chain, but we're also talking about privateequities on chain. You know, we came out with a product last year or two products last year,at RVI 1 and RVI 2 to really get clients access to the private equity space.It's a space that's been walled off for too long.It hasn't been available to retail customers.And with companies staying private twice as long as they usually do, you know, that'swhere a lot of the wealth generation happens.And so it's an important space that we're focused on and making sure that our retail investors
30:23have access to those investments earlier in not only the company's life cycle, but alsoin their life cycle. And, you know, if you think about it, tokenization is, is the perfect product for thatbecause, you know, if the minimum investment in one of these companies is $50 million,you can make that investment, tokenize it, and then offer it out to your customers in a,in a size that they can think about digesting, right? And, you know, not everybody has $50 millionsitting in their back pocket to get access to some of these investments. So I know I don't. So,you know, I think in that space, I think in that space, it's definitely something that we want to make sure that, you know, in the true sense of democratizing finance, that includes private markets as well.And what hurdles are there to offering that everywhere?
31:14Yeah. So I think.Investor laws. I mean, what, you know, what, what do you, right now, I'm imagining that's challenging the United States.Yeah, you know, you definitely have the accredited investor laws that you need to be aware of and think through.I also think it's one of those things, and we've seen a couple pieces been published on this recently,is in this new world of AI and information that's readily available at people's fingertips,should we be thinking about changing how accredited investors work, right?Should it be based on a knowledge test or, you know, education standards or whatever it ends up beingso that it's not based on net worth?
31:52and that really allows people to accumulate wealth earlier in their, you know, in theirfinance journey.And that's something that, you know, we're spending time on, we're working with regulatorson, and hopefully we see some change there, not only in the U.S., but across jurisdictions.Yeah, it's interesting.And there's different ways that you're able to offer people exposure, right?there's pre-IPO, which is like basically a derivative that's trading, you know,price exposure, but you're talking about actually, you know, kind of being able to get access
32:26to shares in advance before they even hit public markets, maybe years in advance, right?So we're talking about, once again, it's everything for everyone.I mean, you're going to, like, people are going to be able to get access to every singlemarket that they're currently not able to get access to.Yeah, and we're seeing people, you know, go into some of these offshare,shore markets for, you know, pre-IPO perps. And, you know, the thing about that is you want to makesure that it's done in a regulated space where customers are protected and you actually have accessto the underlying. And so from that perspective, that's really why bringing some of these products
33:02back onshore is really important, right? We want to make sure that the investor protections exist.We want to make sure that, you know, the disclosures or everything else that kind of goes along withbringing a product onshore is in place for our retail.customers. Yeah. I like I just can't imagine. I look forward to like, you know, like betting onTesla pre-IPO or, you know, SpaceX, whatever, anthropic pre-IPO, but like parlayed with,you know, the weather on leverage. I want to know what that correlation model looks like and howyou got there. But I know we're going to be able to do it, right? I'm going to be able to cross-marginmy whole portfolio. I know it's not your side, but I have a really good time on the prediction
33:43market side, just messing around. I find it very.like, you know, it, I can see how someone could go wrong wildly, but it makes like watching sportsand things a little bit more exciting when it's sized appropriately.And I really think it's fun.Like, you know, not having to make a binary bet before something happens and actually beingable to react while the market is moving is just a vastly improved way to do it.I saw a story yesterday.I think I don't want to misquote it, but it was like a restaurant or a bar by Dodger Stadium.
34:15and they hedged out the Dodgers potentially losing to avoid, you know, because they knew they would make like$150,000 extra or something if the Dodgers made the World Series because they knew that everybodycomes to the bar right after the game.But they, you know, they took the Dodgers losing, I think, on prediction markets to hedge outthe losses and made back all the money when the Dodgers lost.Well, and I think it's those use cases, right?I think, you know, you can talk about speculative investments and, and,things like that, but I do think it's those use cases that are really interesting, right? If you can
34:49start to hedge some of your exposure as a business, you know, it's a real, a real option now, I think,with some of these products. Yeah, I think that that's going to end up, it's kind of like we talkedabout, you know, meme coins coming to Robin Hood chain, but then everything else rising. I thinkwith anything, especially when you get even crypto people anywhere near it, they find a way to, like,gamble and speculate it first, and then you kind of see the real use cases. I mean, it's not all thatdifferent than like the internet was only for like criminals at the beginning and any new tech you knowany new technology basically you know starts that way and then matures but i mean i i just findyour platform like so incredible and largely ahead you know i use it all the time that's great
35:32to hear okay so anything else i missed anything else coming from robin hood that you can talk aboutanything else you're excited about uh i mean perpetual futures is definitely something that we'rewe're focused on hopefully coming to to everyone's app in the next couple of weeks.We touched a little bit on stock tokens, so you covered that.I mean, the CME and the CFDC are battling over that too, right?I mean, just you talk about like all the things that nobody sees.You know, the CME obviously hates that perpetuals are coming to everybody and that theywere too far behind.
36:10And the CFTC is like, show us how it hurt you, right?They wrote their letter yesterday.So it's just really interesting to me how many legal battles and, you know, incumbents are threatened by everything that's being built here.Yeah, look, I think we're seeing the pace of innovation increase.And clearly, you know, it's going to raise some questions.But I think that, you know, we're encouraged by what this means for investors and how, and the breadth of product, right?We've pushed so much business offshore by not having clear rules.clear rules of the road onshore.
36:47And now that we're starting to get those rules, you know, I think you're seeing innovationand also money flow back onshore.So that's what we want.We want to make sure that it's offered to customers in a safe and regulated space and,you know, that they're able to get perps exposure, but maybe not 100X.We need a thousand.A thousand or go home.I mean, if you're trading 1,000x, all the power to you.
37:13I don't know that I have the money's gone before you hit by.It's like that South Park and it's gone.You know, I don't know if you ever say that.Yeah, I mean, $1.000 would be a 1% of a 1% move.Yeah, I think you would probably get slurred pretty fast.Nicola, thank you so much for your perspective.Love to have you back in the near future.Once again, I love what you all do at Robin Hood.
37:35Thank you for having me, Scott.And thank you, everybody else.You helped me very good at filling a very slow news day with a great conversation.So I deeply appreciate that.Thanks, everyone.We'll see you tomorrow.Bye.My teammate says he plays pickup basketball, quote,
38:06for the cardio.Well, there's more to it than that, Sean.Like with Bet365,I get paid the second my team goes at bigwith early payoutand can cash out at any timebefore the game ends.Sean's getting his steps,
38:19but I'm getting paid.Bet365, the home of winning early.Must be 19 and older.Ontario only.Please play responsibly.If you were someone you knowis concerns about gambling,visit connects ontario.CA or call 1866 5 through 1,2,600. Terms and conditions apply.
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