Unchained - Bits + Bips: What Could Spark the Next Crypto Bull Cycle? - Ep. 980

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Thank you to our sponsors, Mantle!On this episode of Bits + Bips, hosts Ram Ahluwalia, Austin Campbell, and Chris Perkins are joined by Elisabeth Kirby, Head of Market Structure at Tradeweb, for a wide-ranging conversation about the future of crypto markets — and who will control them. They unpack why US market structure legislation stalled, how the SEC’s enforcement-first approach shaped the last cycle, and what it signals that JPMorgan, BlackRock, and others are moving forward with tokenization.  The group debates whether Ethereum’s institutional edge is durable, whether Canton can scale beyond early adopters, and why Solana’s “decentralized Nasdaq” vision still faces hard questions. The episode closes with a sober look at macro conditions, risk appetite, and why crypto may be stuck waiting, even as the long-term institutional thesis quietly strengthens. Hosts: Ram Ahluwalia, CFA, CEO and Founder of Lumida Austin Campbell, NYU Stern professor and founder and managing partner of Zero Knowledge Consulting Christopher Perkins, Managing Partner and President of CoinFund Guest: Elisabeth Kirby, Head of Market Structure at Tradeweb Links: The S.E.C. Was Tough on Crypto. It Pulled Back After Trump Returned to Office. Timestamps: 🎬 0:00 Intro 🗳️ 1:56 Impact of crypto market structure legislation getting pushed into 2026 📰 12:55 Howthe New York Times articleof the SEC’s regulation of crypto missed crucial context  🏦 22:12 How JPMorgan’s tokenized money market fund on Ethereum changes the tone for TradFi onchain 🏛️ 32:18 Whether Canton can become the real institutional chain and what could derail it 🧑‍💻 45:10 What Solana’s “decentralized Nasdaq” pitch gets right and where it still looks shaky 🌍 49:58 How macro, Fed expectations, and a rotation into “boring” assets are squeezing crypto risk-taking Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ethereum, I agree with Chris's point. It is, in a way, like traffic chain. It is traffic chain. It's designed for that. It's got the Lindy effect. It's got the history. The Biden SEC systematically missed or failed to interdict every single major crypto fraud one after another. Like, they did not get FDX.

They did not get Terraform Labs. They did not get Celsius. They did not get three arrows capital. When you have one of your biggest competitors run by a guy named Larry Think, saying, I'm tokenizing everything. Well, he probably has a reason for doing that. Welcome, everyone, to yet another episode of Bits and Bips, where we explore how crypto and macro collide one basis point at a time.

I am still your host, despite the best efforts of the SEC, Austin Campbell, high scholar of zero knowledge group, and I'm here with my usual two co-conspirators, Chris Perkins, the Golden Hand of Coin Fund, and Ram Al-Alawalia, maister of wealth, the head of Luminah. And today we're joined with Elizabeth Kirby, the High Lady of Market Structure at Trade Web. And for those of you who are super crypto natives and unfamiliar with Trade Web, I will summarize them only as thus, a huge amount of trading volume goes through Trade Web. They are actually genuinely part of markets infrastructure. So on that note, we have a bunch of things to discuss today, but I have to give you some disclaimers first. One, nothing we say here is investment advice.

Check UnchangedCripto.com, bits and bips for more disclosures. And second of all, a quick word from sponsors who make the show possible. Mantil is launching the Global Hackathon 2025 to accelerate the future of real world assets. With a $150,000 prize pool, backing from a $4 billion treasury, and direct access to buy bits 7 million plus users. This is the ultimate ecosystem for builders. All right. Let's start with some breaking news. So in our lead up and discussion of what we were going to talk about today, news dropped that the Senate Banking Committee, quote unquote, has run out of time to mark up market structure legislation this year. And the hearing will now be pushed into the new year. I know we've discussed this once or twice and expressed maybe some skepticism about timeliness in the past. But I'll start. Chris, what do you think is going on here? I think both you and I, Austin, I don't want to say I told you so, but I told you so. Like, we knew this was way too complex.

Genius was like next to impossible to get across the board. Now everyone's freaking out that, you know, there's this whole interest issue going on. It's such a difficult piece of legislation. It's not even funny. And it's no surprise to me that it's getting pushed. We talked about some of the issues that we're holding it up, this maniacal focus on Donald Trump ethics that seems to be stopping everything. Additional issues maybe around Defi where, look, we saw Citadel come out really, really hard against some of the Defi provisions. Citadel's amazing in DC. And so, like,

there are battles everywhere. You know, my sense, we talked with this with Patrick Witt when we had him on with the White House. And we asked him at the time, Patrick, you know, can we modularize this thing? Can we break it up a little bit? And at the time, he's like, that's not my intent. I don't know. that my sense personally is that's the direction that we're heading. But all that said, I think it's really important that the most important thing that we've been missing all this time is a taxonomy. What is a security and what is a commodity? And I think these two agencies are going to give us that either way. And I think that's going to help open the institutional door, because if you have a future, you're a commodity. If you're a commodity, we know how to treat you.

if your security, you're not going to the grave anymore. Paul Atkins, Chairman Atkins, is going to help you with a viable path, you know, via internet capital markets. So anyway, does it matter? I would say it'd be nice to have something enshrines as we're going through election season, but we're going to be just fine. But I would love to hear what Ms. Trade Web has to say. Thanks.

And first of all, thank you guys for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I'm excited to dig into some of these topics with you guys. Look, I agree. The unfortunate truth is I don't think it's terribly shocking that we didn't get this done this here. It's a massive, giant, multifaceted, hulking piece of legislation. And, you know, as you guys have rightly mentioned, there are different groups that are focused on different elements of it. There are vastly, vastly different degrees of knowledge and understanding of these markets by the people, you know, who are kind of tasked with.

pushing it through. So there's a lot that has to happen. I think, like, the idea of modularizing it is kind of interesting, actually, because as much as we'd love to just get the whole thing kind of done, if that's not likely to happen or not likely to happen in as expedient a fashion as we would all like, then maybe there's some merit to trying to kind of break this apart and move pieces through that are maybe, you know, a little bit more straightforward or a little bit less controversial to certain groups. So, I think that's interesting. But I also think, Chris, like, you bring up a good point, which is that, you know, the SEC and the CFTC, in the meantime, are still giving us some stuff to work on and work with, you know, and the SEC put out a no action letter at the end of last week or on the DTCC and some of the tokenization stuff.

The CFTC has been, you know, really pretty active over the past few weeks, even with the sort of like impending departure of the chair. So I think it's encouraging that both of those agencies are continuing to move forward a pace. Can I ask a question? So, you know, you're at the heart of institutional execution. And, you know, do you think that there needs to be a law passed for institutions to come in? Or, you know, are they coming in every single day? How do you think about it? When we talk to sort of like our constituents about these markets and we talk to them about, you know, crypto markets,

We also talk to them about tokenization of sort of, you know, real world existing, you know, assets. And one thing that I keep hearing is that there is a desire for sort of more traditional intermediaries. And whether that's in the sort of realm of like liquidity provision, maybe a little bit. I almost think even, you know, that's a more kind of critical ask in the areas of sort of like custody or prime brokerage. type activities. And so I think the question comes down to like, are those large kind of entrenched institutions that tend to provide those services in traditional markets going to be comfortable pressing ahead in the absence of like real kind of regulatory clarity and certainty? And that's where I'm just not sure. There's absolutely progress for sure. There's progress happening. And I think there's also a lot

of like really good progress that's happening away from those traditional intermediaries. And we see that with, you know, the growth of these sort of crypto-native PV and custody providers, absolutely, definitely the continued growth of crypto-native liquidity, you know, providers and market participants. So things are happening for sure. Will we still have this really interesting inflection point when the more traditional guys get involved? I still tend to think so. And so I think some of those more traditional guys are just going to want a little bit more clarity and certainty than what we have so far. Unintended. Yeah.

So I, yeah, I'll pile in there and raise a couple of things. One is, if you remember back at the start of the genius debate, the Trump administration at that point was saying we want this link to market structure. We want them to pass at the same time. And I think as the summer went along, people realized, well, One of these is pretty achievable and we might have a compromise that we can execute on right now. And the other one of these is, oh boy. And so they did break them apart and eventually have to have that moment of realization of we've got to take the parts we can get because otherwise we're probably going to get nothing. And that compromise was made.

I can see a similar process playing out here. But two, I think some of the fight that we're having here is call it legitimate, business interests colliding with each other. For instance, if I'm Citadel and right now I'm sitting on top of a massive proportion of U.S. equities trading, I don't want this stuff tokenized, right? I don't want AMMs taking business. I don't want other market-making firms and a new market structure framework to step in. Like, I'm the single biggest beneficiary of equity's market structure to a point that it's

almost a monopoly. Of course, they don't want that to change. Fine. You know, and then you have the countervary, like, forces from all the non-incumbents who want to disrupt them. And quite frankly, in this one, and this is a weird alliance, some of the legacy banks who want to get back into the game who have been kind of forced out, right? And that's a real divergence. But two, I think there's also a stark divide here on just straight up education. Like, stable coins were hard enough to explain. And those are, you know, honestly pretty simple financial

instruments. Explain some of the defy stuff to people in Congress who are like still somewhat skeptical of how that magical like payments app PayPal works inside of their phone is like another whole level of Hill. And I say that, you know, Richie Torres has talked about this in Congress. But I say that in the form of some of this is just literally generational. Like if you were 75 years old than the Senate, you did not grow up with the internet, right? This stuff is all new to you and you're kind of like feeling your way around in the dark. We may have, I think with market structure, a bigger educational lift to do anything in D5 than people realize. Yeah, I would add to that, Trump's political capital is significantly diminished after

the October elections and there's division in the MAGA wing. He's got to pick and choose his spots. The crypto group is essentially captive at this point. It's unlikely he's going to win or lose support on the margin. So he has crypto where they need to be and you need to win another election. and you have to have a battle to fight for. So I think politically he's going to focus on Main Street. That means tax cuts, rebates, stimulus checks, those kinds of policies, housing and affordability.

So I agree with all the comments that have been shared. It's just unlikely to see this come together. And on the policy itself, it is very difficult to make a principle-based distinction between rewards and earning interest. We could go again on a whiteboard and stare at it for eight hours, and it'd be very hard to demarcate that line. I mean, on the interest point, I was having this discussion maybe with somebody in the legislative space,

and I made the point that, like, what do you think you mean when you say ban interest? Because, like, the interest doesn't go away. It's a question of who gets to keep the money, right? Like, we did not pass a bill saying if, like, money is it a state? stable coin reserve, the treasury itself doesn't have to pay on those T bills. Right. That is not what we did here. So we're having an argument about do Paolo and Jeremy get bigger checks or do we distribute that to users? And I think when you start framing the discussion properly, you start sailing into interesting waters. I also published a paper over the weekend pointing out that the banking industry,

among many other things in there, literally argued the reverse of this not too long ago to get rid of rank queue. So it's quite interesting to hear them literally reverse the argument because I will remind everybody, the phrasing was not being able to pay interest in a modern market is uncompetitive and renders our products unusable. And they said that about bank deposits that couldn't pay interest. So this is what I mean. I think there's a lot of complicated forces that are going to be sailing into each other. And I think the government has provided anti-clarity, if anything, on this point. We have to protect end users from receiving interest, right? That's the goal. Very, very dangerous. Chris, think of those bank executives who might have their bonuses reduced.

How can you do that to them? Can't do that. All right. So before I get myself into more political trouble here, actually, let's just get into more political trouble. So recently the New York Times dropped an article talking about the SEC, the Biden administration's effort, under, call it, the previous regime around securities regulation. And to some extent, defending them and saying that Trump has, quote, co-opted crypto and, like, brought them in. All right, I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I'll hold my fire first and ask, what do you think of the New York Times article out there? We could start with our guest, if you want.

Sure. No, thank you. This article, look, I mean, I think it didn't read to me as being like terribly kind of like objective reporting maybe to make an understatement to begin with. Look, it's like you're comparing these two administrations, which are so wildly different in their approach. And the article really took this stance of sort of glorifying, you know, the way the cancer was looking into these. you know, issues or enforcement actions that he was trying to take. And really, obviously, the intent of the article was to draw a really clear line between the, you know, the sort of fact that many of those enforcement actions have gone away and Donald Trump's personal business interests. I mean, I think even putting that part to the side, there's so much to unpack without even touching the Donald

Trump part of it. And what the article, of course, kind of like fails to really capture, is that Gary Gensler era of, you know, regulation by enforcement was in and of itself, like, kind of first almost unprecedented in its nature and scope, but also was, like, not terribly popular. And so certainly, you know, commissioners who were at the SEC at that time, UADA and Pierce specifically, and Uaida is currently there today, were, you know, during that entire time of, you know, Gensler's. chairmanship really speaking out about how they were not in agreement with this kind of like regulation by enforcement. And so I think there are plenty of questions that really could be raised around whether the SEC in a number of those cases either exceeded its authority or, you know, in fact, there was basis for a lot of those enforcement actions. So while the article kind of talks about, look, there were all these enforcement actions, and now a lot of them kind of went away.

It doesn't really get into, like, were those enforcement actions legitimate to begin with or not, which I think is, like, super important here. Obviously, the Atkins SEC is more deregulatory than Gary Gensler's SEC was. I don't think that's a particularly, you know, scandalous statement, but that's a fairly objective. Fact, I think, like, we, you know, hopefully are getting to a point now, though, where we can be deregulatory in a way that spurs innovation and market kind of evolution at a pace that we all want to see. But, you know, I really do believe, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this, collectively, all of you guys, I think if we can, you know, if the official sector can kind of get some of this right,

it can really act as an accelerate for these markets to take off in like a super meaningful way in the U.S. And we've obviously been, you know, massively kind of stymied here in the U.S. and in digital markets and their ability to grow. So, I mean, I'll pause there. I agree. I could talk about this topic for a while. Yeah. All right.

So as somebody who's been a long time critic of the Biden SEC, my biggest complaint with that article was the complete and utter lack of context, right? If you look at the track record over there, the Biden SEC systematically missed or failed to interdict every single major crypto. fraud one after another. Like they did not get FDX. They did not get Terraform Labs. They did not get Celsius. They did not get three arrows capital. They did not get blockfine. Not that they're a fraud, but they did go bankrupt. Like one after another, users just got burned, got burned, got burned, got burned, got burned, got burned, and the SEC did nothing, either because they were way too slow on

the draw or didn't even notice it was going on. At the same time, they spent a huge amount of political capital destroying, and I'll go down a checklist here so people remember this, a decentralized library project, an NFT project to make an animated show about cats that were getting high. They threatened, though, didn't proceed with a musician like issuing NFTs on the blockchain. And then they went after Coinbase, Crackin, et cetera, none of whom were alleged to have done anything wrong to users. So like, I'm just going to put it to you this way. Random guess it would have hit more targets among the bad guys than what the SEC did, right?

If you just randomly sent people notices among that group. And so it's hard to look at that and say, well, it's fair to write a journalistic article that fails to mention that context, right? Because it proceeds from, well, the Biden, like SEC was legitimate, therefore what you. But hold, hold on, slow down, right? Like, what did you just say? Right, that's like being like, well, Enron was a legitimate company. So how could it have collapsed? It's like, well, maybe the counterreaction, but hold on.

And so I look at this whole thing and it just tells me like how broken a lot of the reporting apparatus is at some of these places to have an article like that hit a mainstream media publication with none of this context. no quotes from people on the other side of things and really like no informed skepticism at all. Because like Chris likes to joke about this, but real talk. When I was on 60 minutes, right, like I'll tell everybody I was sitting with Scott Pelly and the editorial and reporting team there. And we were talking about things like CZ's pardon and they were asking about it and comparing it to like what had happened with HSBC. And it really helped them hone in on a story that was more about governance of the pay to play. rather than the legitimacy if like finances actions or not, because they were able to correctly identify like,

wait a minute, some trad-five people actually did some awful stuff and did not go to jail. Okay. Right. And there was just none of that in the Times, right? Like, no context. Yeah, I'll be brief on the Times.

I don't read the New York Times. I also don't read the Economist. It's a backward looking. It's negative alpha. Modern media is mostly confirmation bias. There was also like a hit piece on David Sachs, on AI the week before. Yeah, I don't think it's a good use of attention.

You know, I don't know. I think there's still a big battle for the mainstream mind. You know, we talked about crypto being on 60 minutes, like three weeks in a row between Austin, prediction markets and finance. So I don't think mainstream really has really got their head around crypto just yet. Looking at the New York Times, and by the way, funny aside, I was actually with Scott Peli in Ramadi. I almost got him killed.

next time you see him, tell him, I'm sorry. But when you look at that article, you always got to go to the referee in the courts, right, during the Biden administration. And Gary Gensler lost. He lost over and over again at the cost of the taxpayer. And so without really diving into that track record, it's awful, right?

And the damage that Gary Gensler did, I would say it's directly related to the stress that we saw in 1010, where retail got obliterated, because he'd be forced to rivets offshore. That's on him. And then also the things that you specified, Austin. So look, it's shameful. But the biggest issue that I have right now is the polarization

and the politicalization of crypto. It makes no sense to me. In 1999, Al Gore came out and talked about how he invented the Internet. And you got a lot of flack for it. But he was a Democrat, right? And he was saying, I'm pro innovation. I did this, right? The internet is here.

It was me, right? And now we have a party or elements of a party. I wouldn't say it's a party because I've spoken to plenty of Democrats and they're bullish. But we have fringe elements, right? Yeah, like you, Austin, that are now saying, wait, I'm anti-technology. I'm anti-innovation. That's not American. And so I don't know why we're departing from these values.

And even when you dissect the ideology of this part of the party, they're progressives. They want to give people the right access that they've been denied. So it like confounds me that this is like the most progressive technology out there. And they're more in favor of the way things are, which I just don't get. All right. So speaking of the way things are, let's talk about somebody coming from that past. world and moving into the future. So J.P. Morgan just launched a tokenized money market fund on Ethereum. Looks like it's seeding it with $100 million of its own capital. I believe it's called

Moni. It is a private fund for qualified investors. You can subscribe via cash or USDC. And to be honest, it seems like one of the instruments that already exists coming out of a Black Rock, coming out of a Franklin Templeton, coming out of Wisdom Tree. coming out of Super State. Like, time and time again, we've seen people starting to tokenize, call it the raw material, which is money market funds. But what's interesting to me is two things. One, this is an OCC regulated bank.

So that's new. The fact that this is coming out of somebody from the bank regulatory framework with how negative they've been is eye-opening. And two, although this is a tiny amount of money for J.P. Borgon, because to be clear, we're talking a well over $3 trillion dollar gallon sheet over there for the listeners. Like, this is an institution where the CEO has been openly skeptical of Bitcoin and blockchain technology in the past. So what do we make of JP Morgan in particular starting to enter this space?

Who's the target customer for this, first of all? So you have to be a qualified purchaser, a million plus. That's right. Go ahead, Chris. No, no, that's what it was. You got it. So is it institutions or high net worth? I think it qualified, it's probably institutions, is my guess.

Like, or, yeah, or they're just guessing, right? Because I think you've kind of begged to the question of do they know who the target audience is? Oh, I'm sure they know. J.P. Morgan, and you know this, Austin. J.P. Morgan was a customer first business. They, they know the customer target. If it's institutional, then they're going after real-time settlement. and they're going after capital markets use cases.

They're trying to free up the capital that's tied up in T-plus-3 settlement, depending on what instrument you're discussing. Obviously, TradeWeb is a part of that ecosystem, too. I would love to, Liz, does this make it easier for you to take his tokenized collateral? How do you think about it? Yeah, I think, well, the collateral thing is definitely interesting, and we've seen, you know, the other tokenized money market funds, too. You know, I think it's a good question.

around who's the target customer because the other issuers, Austin, that you were mentioning, I mean, there's been some modest kind of inflows to those products, but, you know, I'm not sure that it has, they've been like total, total game changers. So while I think the product makes sense, and yeah, again, I don't know who the target customer is. I don't know if it's sort of like a corporate treasure type person, you know, or somebody who wants to utilize kind of on-chain, you know, collateral for other reasons, which seems like a slightly like, you know, more niche audience at this point. But it might also be like, are these just sort of a kind of path of least resistance to

start dipping a toe into the water of, you know, tokenized issuance and maybe, you know, we're going to see it expand from there. Yeah, I don't know. I think these are all good questions. So my two cents. you have their so jp morgan this is actually the asset management side of the business right they're about a four trillion dollar asset manager which is separate and distinct but related to the bank right and when you have one of your biggest competitors run by a guy named larry think saying i'm tokenizing

everything well he probably has a reason for doing that i think the reason is you know amongst other things better collateral mobility you're seeing the cfTC coming out saying hey this is going to be great we're going to enhance collateralization it's going to be faster and real that provides demand and utility amongst those institutions that need to settle their derivatives obligations. And gosh, if BlackRock's doing it and you're not, you're going to get left behind, guys, sorry about it. And so it's no surprise. Like, when's GSM going to have their tokenized money market fund, right? And I think everyone is going to tokenize. We've talked about this in the past. The equity market is going to tokenize. But when I think about money market funds, the real utility,

do treasurer sweep them? Yes, they sweep into money market funds all the time. And the faster you can affect that sweeping. You can maybe clip additional yield. I think Franklin Templeton has a, their money market fund. I think they literally capture interest to like the minute or the hour or something. And so if that's your case and you're sweeping it, you know, every day you're going to maximize your yield to that product.

If you're moving it to your CMEA or your ICE obligations on the derivative side, there's utility there. So you got to do it. No, and it's a me too response table stakes. You got to be in the game. I think that's where the industry is, right? It's not even me too. It's like if you don't have it, what are you doing?

Because you're not going to have that utility for your end users. Again, like we go back to like equities markets, right? There's going to be a day when the equity market tokenizes to $127 trillion, right? I'm a fiduciary, you're fiduciary, ROM. If there's enough liquidity, you've got to buy the token. You have to buy the token. There should be one standard that emerges, especially if it's used for settlement and clearing. There should be one standard that gains adoption.

Black Rock has an incredible edge because they represent the by side, whereas the investment banks are competing with one another and they don't want to use their competitor's product. No, but conversely, right, I think this is why the things we're seeing tokenized first or the government money market funds, because realistically speaking, like a T-Bill fund run by like a J.P. Morgan asset management, a BlackRock, a fidelity, a Vanguard, a Goldman Sachs, and they're all fundamentally close to identical. Like, are they perfectly identical? No, but like you would take one share for another in a way you would not with bank deposits. But who, where are they going to trade, Liz? You know, you have these funny. Exactly. How's that going to play out? Right. So, I mean, Liz, would it be in your

interest to work with a tokenized money market firm issued by an investment bank or a party like like Block Rock? Honestly, from our perspective, like I don't think we really can. We would certainly like, you know, our general thesis is to offer, you know, the full suite of products that, you know, our customers and or potential customers would want to trade. So, you know, we are engaged with all of these tokenized money market fund issuers today. We are, you know, actively kind of working on projects to support transacting and, you know, as well as sort of, you know, purchase and sale of these products. We're also doing a bunch of things around tokenized repo and to allow people to have access to repo markets on the weekends on a 24 by 7 basis when repo traditional repo markets are shut. As of now, the repo trades that we've done, the collateral leg has been a tokenized T bill. But could that be a tokenized money market fund? Sure. Definitely could be. So you guys are talking about very similar products, but with separate companies behind them. my mind immediately goes to stable coins.

And when there's stable coins, somebody's going to capture the interest. And I think there's going to be incredible, incredible tradified demand for stable coin trading. Liz, is that something you guys are thinking about? I mean, just like, like, trade up did $173 trillion in Q3 in volume. Yeah. Like, is that a massive area of focus? That's massive. It's massive.

So, I mean, digital assets writ large are a huge area of strategic focus for us. and stable coins are a huge part of that. I will say, you know, we're still kind of like formulating our roadmap in the space and exactly what that's going to look like. But it's a massive, massive opportunity area for us. And something that I think, like Chris, you said it's exactly right. Traditional financial institutions are going to want to transact in these products. And they're going to want to have access to sort of the best and most robust liquidity pools.

and wideest network of liquidity providers that they can get access to. And that's certainly our sweet spot. So it makes all the sense in the world to us. The thing I'll note about this subject, guys, is that it was done on Ethereum. And we've talked about how Ethereum is very appealing to Wall Street because of its 10 years of history. I just wanted to flag that. And I would love to get our guest's opinion on that as well. Yeah.

Look, I mean, I think, Chris, you know this, but we can talk about this for, for the wider audience, too. The on-chain transactions that I was just referencing that we've done on trade web have all been on the Canton network. So so far, our activities, our on-chain activities have only been on-can. Now, we definitely will ultimately, you know, have support for other chains. And again, that will be sort of dictated as and when client demand kind of pushes us in those directions.

But, you know, to answer your question more directly, do I have an opinion on ETH and why JPMorgan chose Eith? I think, you know, the way that you characterized it makes a lot of sense. It's obviously a very well-known and sort of well-proven DLT kind of technology that people are aware of. It's a great household name at this point. Campton certainly less so. And so, you know, I think that's, it's going to be interesting to see how this all evolves. Solana, Eith, Canton, there's probably room, you know, there is for sure room for multiple winners, but it's early getting. The fact that you brought Canton, I think this is a really interesting chain that we should explore more maybe an hour later, but they're going after a permissioned use case with institutions, including some of the largest investment banks in the world and custodians like BMI Mellon.

and Ethereum, I agree with Chris's point, it is in a way like traffic chain. It is traffic chain. It's a design for that. It's got the Lindy effect. It's got the history. But now Canton Network is going after that same use case from the largest players in the land. So it's yet more intensification of competition. All right.

Well, I have a few things to say on this topic, so we don't get ourselves in trouble. I am technically supposed to say we need to do the second set of ads. So we can go ahead and run those first, and then we'll come back and debate more who's going to win among chains. Mantle has entered a new phase as the distribution layer connecting TradFi and on-chain liquidity. To accelerate this vision, the Mantle Global Hackathon, 2025, is inviting developers to build scalable RWA,

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Let's do this. So I want to start as somebody who's been involved in both public and private chain activities and say, one, I'm strongly of the opinion that there will be multiple winners. As you look at transaction preferences

across markets, these things are not monolithic or even close to it. If you're looking at like real time gross settlement for retail payments or something like sending Bitcoin around, you need a vastly different security model than you would need for something like, say, 24-7 interest rate derivatives clearing. And I just don't think it's going to be possible to build the all-singing, all-dancing chain that encompasses all of these use cases for the same reason that we don't have a single ledger currently in trad-fi is sometimes these things actually functionally need

different capabilities and controls around. Awesome. I agree with that. Wouldn't you you say, though, that specialization for a given use case, for a given customer target, has the edge and will generally win. Canton is specialized on a large tam use case where you don't need many players. You can get critical mass quickly and make a success. And that strips away an opportunity for Ethereum. One, I kind of agree. And the kind of comes with, I think to be a better system, though, you need liquidity, which means you need a better conduit in and out than in traditional markets. Because like, take something that'll be familiar to retail users right now, which is imagine that you've got a Coinbase account. You want to get money to like a Fidelity account,

which does not take stable coins. You're going from Coinbase to a bank over to Fidelity, which is going to take somewhere between one to like a lot of business days, depending on how this thing happens. And a lot may be like five to ten. Like it's longer than people think. I think. I think, Rom, to your point, so long as you have a quick in and out, so this is why I'm interested in like the money instrument and like tokenized money market shares or stable coins is then you have the ability to move between these specialized venues significantly more quickly. And it's not that so like I think here's a thing that people don't always wrap their head around. It's not that all securities need to be able to move or like all derivatives. It's that the money you're using to settle them is what needs to be able to move pretty quickly. to make these things work, right?

Like, it's the Simpsons thing of, like, money can be exchanged for goods and services, Homer. And so if I can get my money from, like, call it derivatives chain to, like, equities, like just vanilla equities chain like that, now these are fungibly essentially settleable with each other through that conduit. That, I think matters. I think your point on, like, what is the use case matters. But I think the other thing that matters, and this is what I wanted to bring up,

but is my main point of skepticism about Canton right now surviving, like the test of time, is your ability to essentially build a future coalition matters. And if we look at traditional markets, there's been two methods that have worked really, really well. Number one is get all of the very big people in a room at once and everybody looks at everybody and says, okay, jump. And that's like the DTC model, right? Like when they started, they got all the major players and then you just hit go.

The other one, a good example is Visa, which is to say the mistake is, when you create a thing that says other people can join, but future people join on worse terms than current people over time, what you find is instead they just create a thing to compete against you. If you did not have overwhelming critical mass at the start, people take that as a sign not, hey, I'm going to pay off the old guard. It's, hey, I'm going to do my own thing. Visa, everybody can join as a bank. They're basically on equal terms. Trade Web. By the way, same thing. If you start a new investment bank today, you can plug into TradeWeb and trade same way as like J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, that matters. I'd be curious, like,

what thoughts are on Canton? Like, you need tokens to run a validator, how you get the tokens. What are the, like, what is that model here? Yeah, I mean, I can, I can hop in on it and sort of tell you, you know, from our experience. Now, we've, we have sort of, we're coming at it from the experience of having been a fairly early adopter on the Canton network. And so we, you know, we are a super validator. We run nodes on Canton and certainly, you know, have plans to expand, you know, the number and type of applications that we're running. The Canton network in my experience thus far is still certainly kind of actively soliciting,

you know, greater participation. And so I think that, you know, in all likelihood, the sort of terms around joining at this point are pretty attractive still. I don't know what that looks like necessarily in the future. Now, what I will say about the Canton Network that, again, your listenership may be sort of skewed a little bit retail. So maybe this isn't something that is totally kind of second nature to them, the way that it is probably to the four of us coming from a little bit more of a traffic background,

which is this notion that in order for large financial institutions to move and transfer risk in significant size, they're going to require some level of permissioning, if not privacy, permissioning of who can actually see what's happening. And so there were many ways to skin that cat, obviously. And so, you know, you can certainly skin that cat on a public blockchain. And as everybody's aware, there are ways to do that in ways to. you know, at privacy layers, et cetera. Is it interesting that Canton was sort of like purpose built to offer this to large

institutional players from the beginning? And that's sort of like a core tenet of how this network works and operates. I think that rings true to some of the large institutional players in the market. And I think that that is, you know, a pitch and sort of a, you know, the reality of how it operates, resonates with large institutional players. And so it might not sound so, so great to kind of like, you know, blockchain, you know, purists. And I get that. And I think they get that too. But this is maybe trying to solve a slightly different problem. I agree. Chris, I believe was you coined the term Empire Strikes Back last week.

I think this is another proof point under that theme of the Empire Strikes Back. the Canton network, they're focused on permission to privacy first, let only counterparties see the relevant data, and it's more regulatory-friendly. Intellectually and philosophically, I'm more Ethereum, okay? Probably a lot of us are. Kana doesn't matter, though. Canton doesn't need retail adoption, and retail doesn't even aware of it, or they care, but it matters for the use cases that Ethereum is going to go after. And I think what it highlights is Ethereum needs a stronger, more focused commercial vision. What target customers are they going after with what value proposition? We see that with other chains, right? You just said, Solana breakpoint.

We should have someone come on and talk about that. Does the internet capital markets use case there? Avax is trying to do this. I think Avax is going to hurt a lot around all of this. Canton is just going to dominate Avax here. the bare case recount on is that this is the next R3, right? R3 was a consortium, McMess and Banks that got together. The banks do this every five years.

They got behind R3. They got behind Symphony, which was the response to Bloomberg, really became a negotiation tactic against Bloomberg. Symphony hasn't had traction. R3 hasn't had traction. But people are trying. I talked someone from R3 the day, a leader there, and he's like, yeah, no, we're on at him. Okay, you've been on it for 10 years, but maybe this time.

But the investment banks have this other playbook where they like these consortiums to create equity value. Trade Web was one of them. Yes. ICE was another. IHS partners and market partners. They actually fits into the playbook of Visa MasterCard where the consortium gets together. They say, look, if we can make a kingmaker, we can build this centralized utility. We all have equity interest in.

We'll give it revenue by being customers. We can set the standards or sales. then we take this public, we're sharing the investment banking fees. That's the playbook. They're looking at that when they're comparing Ethereum 2. That is a primary consideration. So I do think Canton is a credible bid for the Trotify chain use case. Yeah, I think, Ron, to your point, it'll come to a question of how do you build that consortium,

given the starting point on the thing. I think the technology is not the problem for Canton. I think it's the governance of, are you going to have some of the early players who are willing to give up some of the gains they would have to get more people in? Because if the answer is no, eventually you're going to like J.P. Morton,

who has dipped like a tiny toe in on Canton, but has on X and they'll be like, nah, we're good, we'll use our thing. And like you end up in this mutual sort of like cluster. And when that happens, you start to see fragmentation instead. Because there are other parts of the market where the banks did not successfully pull this off. they just eventually lost the whole thing.

See, like, let's not go to blockchain. See, for instance, private credit, right? Name for me any of the banks who are a top two or three player in that space. No, it's not a thing. Yeah, the one thing I think about with Canton is it's one of the most important golden rules of crypto, just don't die, right? These guys started in like 2014. I mean, I knew them back in the day when Sunil Harani and Don Wilson founded them.

And I like learned about blockchain. And Yvall and Eric, I mean, and then they went through their trials and tribulations. They had a big dust up with ASX. That didn't end well. And then 10 years later, boom, they launched Canton. And like, so like that's the one rule if you're in crypto, just don't die. Eventually, what comes around goes around. You'll make it.

Just stick around. R3 is really interesting. Did you see the deal that they recently did from? Yeah, I guess we do. Salana. Right? Super interesting. like again, let's see what Salana does there.

What was the deal? So Salina did a deal with Western Union. I think Lily joined the board. Lily that is the ED of the Salina. Was money exchanged? Who paid who in that one? I don't know.

Remember the Western Union deal, right? So it's dance partner season here in crypto, right? Right. Yeah, yeah, really interesting stuff. Western Union got $30 million from Solana. I want to know like who's paying who in all these transactions. We should talk about Solana a little bit because that's, the other chain that's really trying to find its way. I think you're right. Canton is trying to go

toe to toe with Ethereum for the institutional bid. And then you got Salana. Salada since this beginning, you said, we are going to be the decentralized NASDAQ and they've stuck to it. They just launched an house fire dancer, which is going to ultimately give them a million TPS transactions per second because why they want to have that high throughput, high volume. And I'd love to get Liz's take to see if she thinks that that's viable. But one of their challenges, they had product market fit with meme coins, boom. And it really helped prove their tech and showed the throughput. But then in the meantime, big bad hyper liquid came in and really, you know, I don't want to say they won because Purp's is a very flaky market.

You know, you go to later, you go to Aster. But Salana hasn't seemed to be, they haven't won the derivative space. And like really, if you don't win the derivatives and you're the decentralized NASDA, and you're the decentralized NASDA. you got to solve for it. Now they have the internet capital markets, which is really, really interesting in my seat. But that's tough too because Citadel's coming after them, right? Citadel is not like internet capital markets, guys.

And so they're trying, they're going to have to find their way there. So it's a really interesting time for that chain. Every time they've been, their backspin against the wall, they found a way, like they launched Bonk and galvanized everyone last cycle, meme coin season kicked off, coming off a breakpoint. But I guess Liz, like, you know, when you look at a chain, like a Solana, monolithic, high throughput, like designed by traders for traders. How do you guys at TradeWib think about it?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think this is another area where for us, we're going to ultimately take a lot of cues from our clients and our users. And so definitely there are some, and I won't name names, but some of the guys kind of more in the high frequency trading community who are all in on Solana. And we know that. And they made that very, very clear to us. And that's kind of where they're going to be. And they're like, you know, kind of meet me there. So, you know, I think for us, it's sometimes a matter of trying to figure out, you know, how can we read the tea leaves and optimize against like if we are, you know, an institutional markets provider, where is the right place for us to place some bets for, you know, institutional risk transference on chain. I think Solana is absolutely has to be part of that conversation. Yeah, it looks like Solana has the retail use case. I think equity issuance on chain and debt issuance on chain. Like, how do you do public capital raises without an S1 filing at a lower standard of compliance?

But you got to make that square with securities laws, which are still not compatible with digital assets. If you have a public offering, then you must fit under an exemption. like reg S for foreign offers of securities, or if it's U.S., then an S1 or crowdfunding, both of which are not really compatible with digital assets. But that is an opportunity for Solana to differentiate from Canton, and it plays into their retail base with meme coins and all the rest. It goes back to the specialized venue thing, right? Like, in some ways, you know, I was talking to some folks who have been at Breakpoint,

and I think Solana really is trying to find its way here. Like people are asking what's the new thing? And what's interesting is when you get a bunch of tech people in a room, the new things they talk about are all like, call it more crypto for crypto or very tech related things. And that falls into the story of like what stood out on Solana historically has been like deep in type things, meme coins, like very crypto native stuff. Nobody is built like hyperliquids probably the best, but that's very much an alpha version of derivatives trading online. And we've criticized them in the past for some of their like liquidation. problems and things of that sort that are not solved and like Chris has had some very intelligent critiques there. I think Solana exactly, as you said, Rom, right, is very much in the retail game.

And I think if they're going to succeed, it's going to be focusing on that street. Like, they're making phones. That is not an institutional play, right, as you think of it that way. But on the other hand, name me a chain that's done a better job of genuinely attracting retail and new users. Right. Everybody, if they're going to survive, as Chris said, is going to have to find their niche. Me, like, let me pose a question to the group, though. Do we think the blockchain that will have the most financial transactions 30 years from now has even been created yet? Great point.

It might not be right on the mark. All right. So before we run out of time, one last thing that I'll flip to everybody. This is a global macro show. We should talk about markets for a minute. So let's just say that crypto prices in general have not been great, but specifically on Bitcoin. So it managed to tag 86K today. Sailor just announced he bought a billion at 92K each.

Like that guy needs to stop buying the top constantly at all these weekly regimes. And Jeff Park in particular was out there saying Bitcoin's upside is capped by OG holders, both continuously selling options and dumping on the market. We've been in a, call it slightly chopping downward trend with lower than usual volatility in some ways for Bitcoin. I'll start with Rom. What are you making of the market here? Yeah, look, I think you see similarities between AI, which is the primary driver of animal spirits and energy in markets and crypto. And the common theme is intensification of competition, which is the enemy of profits.

Okay. So OpenAI has got Anthropic frontlining them to an IPO. Google has a better LLM now with new releases that they can actually fund their KAPX, whereas Open AIS has got to raise money from the public to meet over $100 billion in future committed spend on $13 billion in revenue. How do you fund that? Either through dilution, you charge your customers, but people are getting free apps from meta and Google.

So that Open AI is the Cisco of this market. When Open AI doesn't hit their revenue growth numbers, you're going to see a pullback in semis, and you're actually already seen it now. Markers are underpriced price in a discount from the Sam Altman top. They're saying, hey, maybe Open AI can't credibly deliver against their forecast. We haven't seen public audited statements on this. So in crypto, we've seen a lot of movement to the actual.

equity markets. That's where a major part of that. So now you have this crypto investor base in equity markets. And they're looking around and crypto investors focus on momentum. The momentum is not in digital assets. Value actually has momentum now. In my newsletter this weekend, the Lumida Ledger, I wrote about a stock with a PE ratio of six times. They provide cable. It's an ancient company. They have dividends. It's called Comcast. Comcast. Comcast? It went up 3% today. They have free cash flow and buybacks. This is the revenge of Warren Buffett. If we're going to use two revenge arcs, once the empire strikes back, the other is a revenge of Warren Buffett. Overall, what you're seen as a movement from high data to the opposite of high beta, right? So if crypto is intangible, no free cash flow, high beta, animal spirits, psychology, thematic news, the future, the exact opposite that. Comcast. Comcast, that's moving. Insurance companies are moving.

Banks are at all-time highs now. I think that trend will continue into the new year. Long, stable coins. When's it going to shift, though, Rom? I mean, one thing we are seeing from a liquid perspective is we're seeing liquidity starting to look. Crypto and liquidity have had very close correlation. And we're coming out of QT now. Liquidity seems to be improving, which generally has been a leading indicator of crypto prices.

Like what's the impetus that you think changes that trajectory? I think what has to happen, people might not like this answer. Okay. Don't shoot the messenger. Okay. You need to see high beta assets get oversold. People have to hate them and want to put them. That's one.

The second thing is you have to. to see that the value play starts to top out, and that's not happening. It's still gaining traction. People are still rotating into it. That I'll perform last week, outperform the week before. I don't see how that dynamic is going to change anytime soon, especially with the backdrop, again, of Open AI and the questions around can Oracle deliver on $400 billion in revenue performance obligations of backlog when their current revenues are, of that and their execution risks. It's like the story hangover is significant.

Then you also have the U.S. voter isn't actually really excited about AI. They're not. Unfortunately, I am. I'm a believer. They're just not. They're concerned about what it means for their jobs. You know, white collar is concerned about it. Blue collar is concerned.

They shouldn't be. They'll be okay. And they're also seeing, you know, you pointed out earlier around like Trump and Trump coin and the political power around this, like those categories just on defense now. So I think you just have to wait for the bad news to get fully priced in, that recognition moment to happen across markets. I don't think that's happened yet. Yeah, I mean, if you look last week at the only one of the previous momentum darlings that

had done anything good, it was in the marijuana space because of the rumor that it was going to get reclassified to schedule. So I guess I'm buying like AI to mirror one. But like, yeah, I agree with ROM values than the thing that's moving. Like Chris, Elizabeth, what do you make of that? I want to ask Liz, like, you know, we've seen that the, these two technologies, AI and crypto are absolutely intertwined. It's hard to look at one without the other in my mind.

You know, look at things like X402, which is a payments capability now at the internet. The internet is turning into a crypto AI version of itself. But Liz, what are you guys looking at at the internet? intersections of AI and crypto space. Yeah, I mean, look, I think on the crypto point, first of all, and this is not sort of like, you know, necessarily like an immediate kind of commentary on where Bitcoin is going. This is a much kind of longer term macro comment. But if you are of the opinion, which I am, that as and when, and I'm still saying when

and not if, we can get all this sort of legislative stuff ironed out, we're going. going to see significant institutional influence with a crypto space in the United States that just don't exist right now. And that's going to fundamentally change how these markets operate and certainly impact the valuation of the assets and sells, of course. So I still believe pretty strongly that that's coming. The flipping institutions in. Retail is still looking at their wounds from 10-10.

Seriously. I was calling around this week. And I don't think people understand how many people got hurt. Market makers, just like it is really hurting liquidity and risk. But I think like all things, it gets prepared. It gets repaired in time. You're seeing new people coming into the market. You know, they start with a gateway like an ETF.

Then like, wait a second. But to your point, Ron, I'm like, I'm sorry, but I think alts are pretty hated right now. Alts have had a rough go last year. And so it's hard for me to think that we're not near a bottom. You know, that said, we've been talking about a constructive setup for the the last three weeks and we've seen what the markets have done. So now that you're a little bit bearish, it seems, I'll bet you next week will be up on Bitcoin week over week. Can I screen share that David Gagin's meme of Sellas are exhausted? You know the meme I'm talking about? You see David

Gagens in the background? It's not an episode if you don't share a screen, man. We've got a screen share this week. What's the find a way to do that? Well, just use that going forward as like the preview for the episode. It's just like Gagins running with the shirt on. No, Nothing Burger's just, Japan is going to raise rates. Is that a nothing burger? We got to get a nothing burger in here. I was going to say,

you're just causing trouble now, Chris. All right. I was going to say, this is definitely the sign that we're at the end of the episode when Chris has resorted to trolling robap. I will accept that trolling. I will get the hat. All right.

So one, future merchandise, the nothing burger hat, but two, as always, thank you everyone for joining us for this episode of Bits and Bips. We'll be back in one week to discuss more about how the worlds of crypto and macro are colliding. Until then, enjoy your nothing burgers.