Unchained - Bits + Bips: Where Is the Most Wealth to Be Made in Crypto: DeFi or CeFi? - Ep. 913

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

Crypto’s bull run may be far from over, but the battleground is shifting.  On this week’s Bits + Bips, Bill Barhydt of Abra and Robert Leshner of Superstate join Ram Ahluwalia and Steven Ehrlich to debate:  The current state of the markets with a looming government shutdown  SWIFT’s move to build on Linea, an Ethereum layer 2 Hyperliquid vs Aster The future of perps vs. spot  Why some DATs are starting to look like grifts  Whether DeFi billionaires will ultimately eclipse their CeFi predecessors  Plus: Binance’s and Tether’s valuation, CZ as the entrepreneur of the decade, and why the industry may be entering an era of “perpification.” Thank you to Xapo for sponsoring this episode! Hosts: Ram Ahluwalia, CFA, CEO and Founder of Lumida Steven Ehrlich, Executive Editor at Unchained Guests:  Bill Barhydt, Founder and CEO of Abra Robert Leshner, Co-founder & CEO of Superstate Links: Steve’s story on the DAT that claimed it raised much more than it actually did Subscribe to Bits + Bips newsletter here Timestamps: 🎬0:00 Intro 📈 3:26 Why Bill believes the bull run is far from over 🧐 5:10 Why Ram is pushing back on market FUD 🏛️ 9:10 Will a government shutdown impact markets? 🌐 12:48 Why SWIFT building on Ethereum’s Linea layer 2 is such a big deal 🏦 22:15 Whether it even matters if banks embrace crypto ⚠️ 27:50 How one DAT may have been the “ultimate grift” ⚔️ 35:58 Inside the DEX perps wars: Hyperliquid vs Aster 👑 40:32 How valuable Binance and CZ really are to the industry 🚀 50:39 What advantages make Hyperliquid stand out in the perp battle 🤔 53:14 Why picking winners in trading isn’t so simple 🔄 57:29 Winners in stablecoin race plus why perps are better than spot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The bull run is not even close to having played itself out because it relates certainly to crypto. Who are you fooling when your debt is for a blockchain that doesn't exist? The D5 billionaires haven't come yet, and I think they're going to be bigger. I think we've now entered purpification. I think it's a superior form factor for most users, and I think that spot markets are going to slowly die out relative to perps. Welcome to Bits and Bips, the show where we explore how crypto and crypto and macro collide one basis point at a time. We have a lot to discuss today.

Hopes for a renewed October. A new competitor to Hyperliquid that's getting a lot of attention. Swift, getting in on the crypto game, perhaps I would say about 10 years since they first started kicking tires on it and much, much more. But first, just a couple of quick introductions. I'm your host, Steve Erlich, High Scribe of the Unchained Kingdom. And I'm here with one of our special guests today. We are going to have more.

But first we have Bill Bard, the keeper of Abra's on-chain oats. So, Bill, thanks for joining us. It's great to have you. That's good to see you. Thanks for having me. One early bitcoiner sold 30,000 BTC too soon, missing out on over a billion dollars. Don't want to make the same mistake? With Zapo Bank, eligible members can get instant cash without selling their Bitcoin.

Check out Zappobank.com slash Unchained for more. Yeah, great to have you. I've been following your work for a long time. Actually, since Abra. I mean, you've been in Abra for a really long time. I'm not sure if we've ever met, but I do recall that we've spoken at several American banker conferences

way back in like the 2015-20-type area. But for anyone who doesn't know you, why don't you just give us a quick introduction? Yeah, sure. Again, thanks for having me. So I'm Bill Barheight. I'm the founder and CEO at Abra. I've been in tech and capital markets internet software

for 30 plus years. Started Abra almost 10 years ago. And Abra is a registered investment advisor. We provide wealth and advisory services in the crypto space. We manage separately managed accounts for clients offering custody, yield lending across the crypto ecosystem.

Okay. All right. Terrific. And Ram, the master of wealth leader of Lumida, as always. Good to see you. What's going on? Good to see you. And we are going to have one more guest.

I think he's just running a minute or two late, Robert Lejner, from one of the founders of Compound, Superstate. And for anyone who's needed show, he will also have his very own game of friends. thing we'll surprise them with when he gets here. But why don't we just kick things off. Actually, though, before I do, as always, a quick disclaimer. Nothing that we say here is financial or investment advice for full disclaimers, disclosures. Please check out Unchained.com backslash bits and bibs.

Bill, why don't we start with you? A fun question, or I guess a good one. After last week's, I don't think I'd call it a bloodbath, but a disappointing week, markets are looking up today. I know there are some renewed hopes for an October. What are you saying right now? Yeah, look, I mean, there's a bunch of macro factors that we track. They all clearly point to the fact that the bull run is not even close to having played itself out as it relates certainly to crypto, probably macro in general. We can go through what those are. But in general, I think, you know, the, like, we start with the Treasury General account, right?

I mean, it's depleting. So it's moving in the right direction. And so from our perspective, we are pretty bullish on Q4 and certainly think that, you know, I don't know, plus or minus a couple of percentage points. I'm not a macro guy in the big picture, but it feels like a local bottom is in. But we'll see. Yeah, I have to certainly hope so. I know that sentiment was a bit negative last week.

We spoke a lot. I mean, Ron, on the show, about, I guess, some level of disappointment with just the 25 Bips. Rate cut, although I think there was also, I remember someone was talking about how, if they actually cut 50, that would lead to more panic. So I'm not quite sure that there was a Goldilocks scenario for the Fed anyway. But I do find it encouraging that, I guess, like, bullish, long sentiment is already coming back in, open interest is ticking up, funding rates are going up again.

And that's across Bitcoin Ether, a bunch of the other tokens there. I always find it hard to sort of overestimate the bullishness and the positivity in this community, especially as we move into what is historically the, by far the best quarter of the year. So it's outside of just a very specific catalyst. And I'm encouraged to see the market already kind of turning the page. But, Ron, what are you saying? Well, Stephen, I was really impressed here. Talking about funding rates, open interests, exactly.

I mean, all that's improving. That's good. Look, we talked about last week that the worst two weeks of the year are last week and this week in terms of seasonality. That's for broader risk assets. That was one. Number two is, I don't know what people are kind of fearful about. Like Ethereum's above 4,000. Bitcoin's at 114,000.

What are people talking about? This is holding up pretty strong, old things considered. I mentioned last week that I thought good buy points, at least tactically, that means for like a couple of week kind of concept, was Bitcoin at 112 and 107. It touched 112 briefly, then rallied from there. And you're seeing some of the digital asset treasury names do very well in the last few days. And things are fine. I mean, markets are acclimating to this higher altitude, which is very constructive. right? Bitcoin acclimated to 100K plus altitude a few months ago. Now it's doing it at the next

stair step higher. So all that's constructive. And then you also had the GDP report come in, which was strong and exceeded expectations. So we had all this fear. Remember, we talked about a few weeks ago about negative revisions to non-farm payrolls and disappointment. Well, we're back now. We're back. aren't we at historic low volatility? I mean, people's idea of a pullback and bare market, I mean, you know, it used to be that you could see Bitcoin fall 25% in 10 days and sky was falling until it wasn't and then it would recover in two weeks.

And that volatility, it feels like it's gone. Yeah, well, that's the disappointing thing, actually. It's both disappointing and good. It's disappointing, you know, there are a lot of traders. that like that volatility and they're finding that sort of volatility in the equity market. They're getting their fix in the equity market now, especially with Bitcoin miners. But yeah, look, you're having more stability in the price, which was the vision. But it's disappointing when you get there.

Sometimes when you get to your destination, it doesn't feel as satisfying. You know, Teddy was interesting. Like, virtually all risk assets were up and yet the volatility index or the fear gauge was also up. Now, a lot of that, I believe, is because you have quarterly operations, options expiration coming up on Wednesday. So people will be risk ahead of that because you usually have some weakness right after that. But those are smaller, you know, there's like there's the squiggle and then there's the trend. And I agree with you, Bill, on like, Q4 seasonality. You should generally be constructive.

The time to be fearful was maybe like a month and a half ago. I still think like 107-112 are tactical buy points overall. I think Ethereum is well positioned here. You know, there's a nice news article we saw about Swift building a layer two on Ethereum. So the international payments that banks use to move money in large sums of monies across countries is talking about building. It's like a test, by the way. It's not, you know, it's a test. It always starts with the test.

It's building on Ethereum. Like the battle against CDBC's has been won, and they're building an Ethereum. This is extraordinary stuff. This is pretty encouraging. And then you have tax cuts coming. You have some government shutdown news. That's always a nothing burger, right?

That's my new title. I can't give nothing burger. But yeah, that's another nothing burger. We need to get you signage made, Ron, because you have a question for you, Mr. Nothingburger. I need a nothing burger diet so I can trim some pounds here. but at Wednesday morning, there might be a lot of federal employees that don't go to work.

And again, like my sense is unless this somehow becomes very protracted, and I'm talking about months, not days or weeks, it will be a nothing burger. But Democrats do seem to, I guess, at some point they're going to have, they do seem, I guess, what's what I'm looking for, resolved to, like, plant their flag. in the sand and maybe stick up for a couple of these funding or pools of funding related to health care, et cetera, that they really want to get done, maybe roll back some of the Medicaid cuts. Could this be protracted?

I mean, what do you think? I mean, define protracted. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if something happened that went on for six weeks. Is that protracted? Yeah, I guess maybe the way to look at it is like typically, I saw some stats in one of the newspapers about every week the government shut down how it shaves off GDP. And it's not a huge amount, but it can add up. It's like a tens of a percent a week or something like that.

But it can shoot up again, if it stays longer. So I don't know. I'm all for cutting government spending. It's insane. Doge was a failure. When we have these interruptions of government services, at least from me in my own personal life, I really don't notice much impact. look, if you've got to apply for a new passport, that can be an issue.

There are scenarios where it can be an issue. But people are spending 35% to 43% plus of their income on services where no one even notices the government shuts down. So this is just theatrics, politicians trying to be relevant. We did a study at Lumida around what happens during these government shutdowns. What we found is this. The vast majority of the bad price. the impacts and negative price shocks happen on the day of the government shutdown.

And that's the low. And that's the low. The market prices in instantly. By any chance, Rahm, do you have a screenshot or something we can put up? Because I'd love to- I'll see if I can dig it up. You guys carry forward. I'll see if I can find that.

As I recall, I mean, under Obama, right, they had these triggers on spending when either you didn't agree on a budget or shutdown happened. And those triggers actually turned out to be fantastic. because they kept spending under control. And sometimes the best solution is to do absolutely nothing, it turns out. Maybe this is the new balanced budget. We just have a government shut down a conversation. Look, I'm joking there, obviously, but I'm glad that people are having a conversation

around what's the appropriate level of spending. That's important. It's an important headline for people to focus on. This is all theatrics, though. It will get past. It's unfortunate that the United States has to deal with this as a brand for our debt that we have to kind of deal with this. But, you know, it is what it is. Continuing resolution to continuing resolution.

Right. I think people are tired of this stuff, too, especially in recent weeks. We think about school shootings and the assassination of Charlie Kirk and this tragic incident at a Mormon church in Detroit. I think people are tired of being partisan. I think they really want people to get stuff done. And I think they're really, really tired of that is my instinct. At least I'm tired of that. Yeah, well said.

But you did raise a couple of interesting points related to SWIF. I know we were going to talk about it at some point. So why don't we dig in now? For one, I actually do think, I mean, it's worth restating your point, Rob, that the war against, against CBDCs or the war between CBDCs and stable coins is probably over. Maybe China will try to do something with the digital of

yuan, but for the most part, I mean, it's dead in Europe. And Euroland is still alive. I guess, but I mean, unless the Euro, I guess somehow is going to replace the dollar if, when the dollar ever drops, it's like, I guess maybe the easy way to say, in my opinion,

as long as it's not going to happen in the US, it's not going to happen it's not going to happen anywhere truly significant, and there's not going to be a lot of copycats that want to do something that the U.S. is not doing. They'll just follow on our stable coins. But I think it's, again, you guys disagree with me if you do, but I think it's worth stating that. Two, I mean, Swift, again, we've all been in crypto for at least a decade, I think. And, I mean, I remember the Ripple saying they're going to go after Swift, and there are plenty of projects on hyper-ledger, not hyper-liquid, and R3. And so many other people were trying to grow up with Swift.

And it was this messaging giant that had these network effects that just seemed insurmountable. And the community really seemed to rally around this announcement from Swift more so than perhaps I expected. I mean, maybe it's because of just how popular stable coins have become in general. I mean, maybe at this point tokenization does seem a little bit inevitable. But for years, it seemed like just a lot of pilots and POCs that never amounted to much. but I was personally impressed and happy with the reception that it's getting. And I'm interested to see how it's going to grow from there. But I'm curious what you guys think.

Yeah, I'll go first. I mean, look, they had to do something. They couldn't basically just sit this out, in my opinion. Right. I mean, there's just too much action going on for, you know, the largest messaging router in the world as it relates to money transfer to be sideline. Right. So let's break it down, though, right? So at the end of the day, Swift is not a money mover.

They are a message routing system. Okay. So when you initiate a cross-border wire person to person, that's what's called an MT 102 message in the SWIFT system, that is a message that gets routed from one bank to another via, you know, often via a correspondent bank if there's a small bank in the middle. And everybody takes a fee for routing that message. And then there's a physical settlement process, which happens later. Okay. And so the question becomes in 2025, in the age of the Internet, in the age of, you know, real time, near real time finality with crypto transactions, is a message broker architecture from a third party required?

Or could the banks actually end up bypassing Swift eventually altogether with their own, you know, kind of, messaging system that simply bypasses them and settles in real time. Now, there's a whole bunch of things that have to be worked out here because when we talk about stable coins, by and large, so far, we've been talking about dollars. And that's not the way Swift works, right? I mean, you send dollars, you receive euros, you receive euros, or you send euros, you receive dollars, right? And so you have the exchange component to this, which is not prevalent in most crypto transactions today, the vast majority of stable coin transactions outside the U.S. initiating dollars and and settle in dollars. And so it's possible that that creates a new type of dollar hegemony,

but I don't think so. I think we're going to go the other way where you're going to see a plethora of international stable coins created and then we're going to have to figure all of that out. But my point is, I don't think, I don't think that they had to do, that doing nothing was an option, right? So, so, you know, we'll see where this goes. But Look, crypto gets excited about any large tradfai company making an announcement in general. And that's fine. I don't, you know, we shouldn't mind that. But, but in general, I think I am not bullish on Swift's long-term prospects.

Let's put it that way. I think it's the surrender as much as the excitement about bringing someone on that. That could very well be true. And that's a good way to look at it. Yeah. But before we go on, we have our fourth guest here, Robert Lesinger, one of the co-founders of compound from way back. You're the CEO of Superstate right now, the project that is tokenizing the shares of all the Dats. And you're also one of the hosts of the popular chopping block podcast that also airs on our network.

And most importantly, you are the Cryptocontosaur and Tsar of Superstate that's your given Game of Thrones nickname. So, yeah, I mean, Robert, we're just talking about the Swift News. And in general, we just started off talking about just kind of like the bullish start to the week after a tough one last week and what that might means for October. So feel free to just kind of chime in on any of those if you want to quickly. Yeah, I haven't dug deep into the Swift news. You know, what I picked up on Twitter, which could be inaccurate. So I'll preface by saying that, is that, you know, they want to create their own ledger, you know, working with consensus. Create another chain potentially. Is that good? Is that bad? Is that bullish? The chain link

Army seems to be excited about this because they believe that another ledger is good, especially if they're using chain link to connect their ledger to a different ledger. But in terms of how it impacts other blockchains and other usage, I mean, at a surface level, my read was that we want to take stable coin volume and activity away from Ethereum. We want to take it away from Solano. We want to take it away from Tron. And we want to use our own system to transmit value between. different geographies and different banks. I think it most directly, you know, infringes upon the mindchair of Ripple, and there are these cases, you know, as sort of mentioned.

But I think a lot of it is wait and see, because the ability of incumbents to launch new projects, I think it's overestimated pretty frequently. And oftentimes someone sees an announcement. I'm like, it's coming next week. And it's like, okay, let's wait six months. Let's wait a year. Let's wait 18 months. it might be longer to see tangible progress than people expect.

So the bigger something is, the slower it is to steer the giant ship. And the smaller something is, the faster it is to get through a destination. So I think it's a cool announcement. I think it's big. I think it's bigger than Stripe launching a blockchain, frankly. But I think therefore it's also slower. Okay. Ram, I know you wanted to share your screen.

Do you have? Yeah, check out this. There's a post that. Mike Dutis, a friend of Six-Man Ventures, posted, which I thought was a very good take. I think it's consistent with Robert or sharing around, don't get your expectations too high. I want to expect others consortia. So he says, you're going to see many headlines like this. Reminds me of mobile payments consortia 10 to 15 years ago.

Meanwhile, many net new giants like Heather will be formed building 10x better products to directly connecting businesses and people with 24-7, 365, lower. cost open internet money. So I think that's the right instinct, right? Every time there's a new form factor, the incumbents are at risk and some new dominant market player emerges. Why wouldn't that happen here? I do think Stripe, their layer two is something to keep an eye on, although I do think they woke up like the grizzly bears. Like, Stripe has no more friends now. Stripe is going for all the marbles on the table, including the marbles of Visa and MasterCard, even though Visa co-participated in this, but sometimes these institutions co-participate so they have a leading window into

the disruptive technology that might, you know, disrupt them. Yeah. I kind of see a similar thought process with that too. I mean, like companies like Stripe and Plaid didn't get massive by working with like the JCPennings and Macy's of the world. I mean, they, they were internet-focused businesses that dealt with like e-commerce native platforms. It's almost the same thing, Rob, that you're doing with Superstate. I mean, I'm sure you'd be thrilled to get JPMorgan or something on the platform, but you're, I mean, it seems like you're really going after or having a lot of success with that. It's like companies that are forward thinking and are bracing this new technology.

And then within the vein of Swift, I mean, what they're doing, sure, I'm sure they're excited. But I studied these things for years and years and years. And frankly, like, I used to work at banks. And I have to say most of the people I dealt with, they were studying this stuff, hoping that it wouldn't make sense. So they didn't have to go any further as opposed to crypto-native people that really solve this as the only way forward. There are only two banks, to my knowledge, right? There's some reports that maybe a dozen banks, but there's B&P Paribon and B&Y Malin that have come out. And so they're testing this.

So I think it's more, it's a balloon rather than real substantive progress. I mean, have they specifically said that they're working on a, layer two at Swift or have they clarified that they're working directly at Ethereum? Because my, I have this kind of growing theory that if you look at Robin Hood, Stripe, even Coinbase, right, they're kind of treating layer two's almost like decentralized SQL. And I'm using decentralized in air quotes because I have to start saying, okay, what problem are they trying to solve by basically in trying to push large groups of people to effectively what amounts to their, and again, I'll just say proprietary layer two,

when we have now scalable layer one technology that doesn't require, you know, this kind of adoption of my layer two, your layer two, the next layer two. And it's just creating, you know, more fiefdoms, and we're reinforcing this idea of fiefdoms, which is not what, you know, to me, what decentralization is supposed to be about. I mean, look, the competition is fine. I think they can do whatever they want. I'm just questioning the viability of what they're doing in the short and midterm. And why would you bother putting stocks on a layer two that no one is going to adopt except for you? So, you know, what problem does that solve? Why would you, why would you, why would you, why would you? would you start putting stable coins on a layer two that no one is going to adopt except for you, whoever you is, right? And so. Right. But if the U is all of these banks across all these countries that are using a system, they can hot swap out one guts for another guts, then there's actually massive adoption. And there's a point to it.

Yeah. I mean, that is the question, right? Meaning is crypto ultimately its own parallel universe or are the banks going to be the purveyors of how we end up using stable coins. And I remember making this point on a Peter McCormick show six years ago. And not much has changed since then, other than the core crypto community has ballooned, right? The use of tether and circle outside of the banking system. And we're still talking about what the banks are going to do, but they haven't done it yet. And so I don't think the banks are going to be purveyors of anything.

I think crypto is going to continue to involve in its own parallel universe, and I think that's better for everyone that it does. I think that's 99% right. I would say there will be a handful of banks that generate windfall profits by being the back end. Oh, sure. A fintech that's on the front end, like a cross river or a lead bank, which powers Sprite. And maybe that's what B&P Parabot and BNYMellon are gunning for. most of these regional banks and community banks just aren't necessary in the future.

It's whoever controls the customer relationship and can move the money compliantly. That latter part is why some handful of banks will still be relevant. Obviously, the mega center banks will still be around. I'm talking about regional as a community bank. Those are the folks that have a lot of issues ahead of them. The regional banks is going to be. I actually used to spend a bunch of time trying to, and I was a consultant trying to sell consulting services to regional banks on crypto.

And like once you got over the education hurdle, and this was like 2016, 2017, 2018, which was considerable, especially back then. I mean, this blockchain stuff, like they were concerned about cybersecurity upgrades and being able to have like multi-user accounts and better treasury services and FX services and all sorts of other stuff. Like crypto and blockchain was so far down the line. I mean, maybe that'll be different at this point. But, uh, I'll give you the defense of banks now. Now that we all kind of, you know, through the banks over the cliff here. So there's two startups. One is called StableCore, another is called Omnia, both venture back. StableCore is a team that's found out of Coinbase.

And they represent between the two of them that they have a couple dozen banks as customers. What they do is provide stable core banking services. They plug into the legacy bank core infrastructure and you as a bank and then have a front end that you offer your consumers or enterprises. And you can now bank their stable coins. And there's other ambitions beyond that, think like lending against digital assets. So there are a couple dozen banks. At least one of them is a top 25 bank, too. Now, JP Morgan is already active in this stuff.

JP Morgan's in tokenized deposits, right? But they can invest in their own technology. So there are these picks and shovels infra players that are helping the banks try to adapt and move forward. The issue with most banks is they can't get the regulator comfortable with compliance and safety and soundness. Second is they may have a vision, but they have no idea how to execute or build products or attract a team to deliver on the vision. Yeah. Yeah, I think, first of all, having banks figure out how to put digital assets on the balance sheet via the core system is super interesting in the short term. I'm very skeptical to your point that the Fed is going to just to basically do a rubber stamp.

That's fine. And second, you know, I am a little skeptical on the problems that they perceive that they're going to be solving with these mid-tier banks. But we can come back to that. I think it's a longer conversation as well. Well, before we do, we have to take a very quick break so I can tell you about the BIPs and Bits newsletter. Every week, we publish multiple stories, original reporting research looking into sort of the macro and crypto. and crypto trends that are moving the week. I'm actually excited because as we were talking,

we just published my latest story. You guys probably saw this. The zero stack, dat focused on the zero gravity blockchain, the AI focused blockchain that went live this week on Mainnet, or I guess last week on Mainnet. There were a lot of headlines over the last week or so about how they raised $401 million in order to launch this debt. First time I think it's ever happened,

for a debt that launched before the blockchain itself, but went through the SEC filings and basically I found out that there was only $13.7 million of new money actually raised. The vast, vast majority of it were in-kind donations from the founders. And then about $22 million came from one of the Salana, Defy Development Corps, one of the Salada Treasury companies that basically loaned them $22 million worth of Solana in exchange for 8% APR with basically,

a free convert at some point in the future. And we talk a lot on the show about how people really need to do their own research, read the fine print, especially when you get these massive nine, 10 figure headlines for DATs, especially now that MNAVs are starting to go down. And this is just another example of it. So we always appreciate the feedback. And if you guys want to subscribe, you can just go to unchained.com backslash newsletters. Selling your Bitcoin just to get cash? One early Bitcoin or a day. and missed out on over a billion dollars. With Zapo Bank, you can access up to $1 million instantly without selling a single set.

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It's securely held until your loan is repaid. Check them out at sapobank.com slash unchained. So you have a dad that launched without a blockchain. They raised a boatload of money. There's an in-kind contribution. They didn't raise it. They said they did, but that one's here. Robert, what do you think about that from like where we are on the cycle and private?

market valuations and sanity, overall sanity levels. Yeah, I mean, I think it proves very directly that there's a lot of facade when it comes to making a digital asset treasury, right? These are ETF wrappers when you start to get to this level, right? This is an ETF using the public company shell and not an investment company shell. Okay. Like, that's what this is. Like, you can't have a company naturally saying, oh, we.

We've decided to adopt, you know, the token of a blockchain that has not launched yet as our reserve. Like, reserves are originally meant to be like, here's the cash and cash equivalence and like balance sheet that we're keeping for our company, which has a purpose, right? To me, like, we're getting into the nutty territory that's sort of making a mockery of the registration process. And, like, I get why the NASDAQ is so pissed about like these companies at this point because they're. you know, starting to get more and more ludicrous as time goes on. And like, and the check is in the mail. Yeah.

But trust us, it'll be there. Yeah. Like, you know, who are you fooling when your debt is for a blockchain that doesn't exist yet? And it's an AI blockchain, of course.

I mean, like, remember Long Island blockchain? Yeah. It's, it's like a venture investment in a, you know, not an investment company rapper.

You know, it's like, it's just getting a difference. that an ETF has to maintain a one-to-one peg. Well, it doesn't have to, but generally, we'll maintain a one-to-one peg for obvious reasons, right? Whereas here, you know, it's hedge funds, it's leverage, it's barring behind the scenes. So I think the transition that we're going to see is, okay, strategy people will more or less trust that there's no shenanigans going on, even if they don't agree with all the strategies that they're imposing with all these different versions of the,

stocks. But I do think we're going to see a transition now to operating companies that are basically either going public or are going to be adopting, you know, real treasury plays, but they're, but they are real operating businesses. It's not some beauty product company that is becoming a debt. It is literally either a crypto operating business with a huge treasury or a viable, you know, tech business that is also saying we are committed to putting our profits in crypto. And I think that that's the next wave here because I think that the hedge funds and the pipe investors are feeling a little played now on this topic. I don't know. I'm reading the TV. I don't think the pipe investors care. It's heads they win, tails, you get that they fell back.

But overall, it's actually retail investors. Those are the ones that are most at risk. And deal quality is just getting worse. I don't think that turns around until the next cycle, actually. And if I could just add on quickly, I'm led to this story to big red flags because I spoke to some people who got the pitch deck. I spoke to just some debt experts. One was they somehow, and this is all the SEC filings, they arbitrarily gave the tokens a $3 value when it came to like pricing options and warrants and things like that. Which meant that with a $1 billion supply, it had an FDV of $3 billion.

again for a blockchain that didn't exist or it didn't go live. No idea how they came up with that number. It launched on Binance. I think it launched on Gate.I.O. and BitGeddegd and it seemed to do okay, but the price is down, I think 50% since launch a few days ago. And then the other one, and this was a big one that came up a lot. The tokens that were put in from the founders of the blockchain were locked. And now once the business combination agreement is finalized, once the file of the S3,

and get shares registered or whatever, they can exchange that for liquid equities that they could then sell if they want. And that certainly, and people I spoke to for that story, really felt like it's like circumventing the spirit of locked tokens. And I know that what it means when a token is locked

can sometimes be a moving target, but that certainly seems to be in the eyes of the people I spoke with, kind of breaking a cardinal rule of how vesting and all that type of, stuff is supposed to work. So, yeah, it's, it's upsetting. I mean, there are some debts that are doing things the right way. And then there are some that are just looking for a quick cash grab. I'm not necessarily trying to say that this particular company is called zero seconds to me,

anything nefarious or wrong or even fraudulent. It's just, it appears they're taking advantage of a, of just a situation. And it may end up hurting some of the retail, Buster, Sue by the stock, it could be a play to sort of piggyback on the AI hype. I also think the consolidation hasn't started yet, right? And we don't really know how that's going to play out, whether that's going to basically help maintain a one or better nav or whether it's going to get much, much worse, you know, vis-a-vis the old gray scale, you know, days. And then that happened for different reasons, but still the analogy holds.

We'll see. We don't know yet. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about Aster and Rain. Who wants to first crack at that? I have not followed Aster's. 1,000 leverage. Yeah, 50X, 50X leverage, right?

I thought it was 50X. So Hyperliquid was built on Ethereum and is a largely centralized decks that enables high throughput, high leverage trading on chain. And it's grown quickly and they're making money and they're profitable and they're doing buybacks. So that's been the darling of the last couple of months. That's hyperliquid. Now, Binance rolled out Aster, which is the new kid in the block. It's a bigger, better astor.

Sorry, Astor is a bigger, better hyperliquid. So it's even more leverage, even more tokens. And it's also centralized. Of course, it has to be centralized. That's how you offer the convenience to the user. You have to have some centralized entity providing that role. They're very aggressive with the marketing. They have aggressive air drops.

They have essentially the concept of like multi-level marketing where you got like bonus and incentives for enrolling people in your community. They're starting to take market share, although hyperliquid still has dominant market share in these deckss, but it is growing quickly. So now there are others emerging, right? So the gap here then, what about Salana? Now, Salana's whole thesis of layer one was to provide, you know,

internet capital markets and decentralized trading at speed and high throughput and all this rest, right? So now Salonnas, I think there's yet another chain that's, you know, or protocol that's launching soon. But it reminds me of like back in 21 when you had like D, D, Y, DX was the cool kid on the block. Right? It's like, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. I was at a hyper liquid event. I'm in Singapore for token 2049. There was a line around the corner.

I am not exaggerating. It took the 25 minutes to get in the building. Yeah. It's like the hottest. It's the hottest project right now. First of the line is. Right. Exactly. And it was all kids.

It was crazy. And so, you know, I look at what. B&B is doing with, you know, with Aster. And it makes perfect sense. I mean, obviously, people want leverage. And it's just, that's been the consistent thing from cycle to cycle, whether it was, you know, Bitmex or, you know, now this, it's, or, you know, pick your favorite, you know, degenerate gambling solution from cycle to cycle. And this is clearly it now. And I think we're going to see a lot of these competitors coming up. And I'm a hundred.

How old are those kids? Are like teenagers or young 20s? Like, how do you define that? They need to hire these kids. I still think of myself as a kid. I don't know, 20s maybe. It all looks this name to me at my age. So I don't know.

Anybody with stable coins in a VPN, you know, it could be any age. Right. How does the Robin Hood and Coinbase bringing purpose, especially to the U.S. play into this? Because, I mean, it seems like Hyper Liquid and Astor or Binance. I mean, they're fighting for, for rest of, world. But, I mean, they're also thinking of, of the U.S. How does that play into this? Well, you can trade Tesla shares on Aster, right? Or the equivalent of Tesla shares with,

with, what, 500x leverage? I mean, that's insane. So, right? Yeah, you got to be CFTC regulated to offer perps. So, yeah. No one is saying this isn't compliance with the U.S. Yeah, this is not a U.S. story. Yeah, I know. I'm just, I'm just thinking, because I wrote a story a few, a couple months ago about hyperliquid. And I think we found, we, we looked it up on similar web data. I think we found something like 25 to 30 percent of all their website traffic to their trading interface came from the U.S. although like when we tried to attach a U.S. wall, it was geo-blocked. So I'm not sure to say like 30 percent of their clients are America, but like there's just so much demand. And the U.S. is still the biggest prize.

I'm curious in this world. When it comes to these levered products, you don't need to basically offer workarounds for Americans. There's such a big market and such huge demand for levered bets globally that people will just take the move the U.S. now. I think this is the consequence of housing in affordability. People said, well, I'm going to speculate. The boomers got the houses. I'm going to put the cash I would have put in a down payment into digital assets and crypto and speculation. I think the other take here, though, is CZ is an incredible. and formidable competitor.

This is a big win for CZ. I don't bet against CZ. I wanted to invest in Tether in their private round, but looking for access, obviously they don't need capital. The multiple is like 60 times EV to sales.

I don't know Robert if you looked at it or bill, but it's absurdly overpriced. But I think the move is, will CZ let you into Binance? I think that's the move. Of course, everyone can be in finance right now, B&B. B&B is started on that.

That's interesting. There's equity and then there's a coin that has like this intangible relationship. I have some FTT. It's apparent, right? Go ahead. I was just Jeremy. If you want BNB, I have some FTT. I can sell you too.

You have some serum token to go along with that. By the, I'm looking at the numbers. So 340,000 wallets in the first 24 hours. for Aster, if I'm reading this right. It's just remarkable. Yeah, post-launched. First 24 hours, 330,000 new wallets.

Massive surge in BNB on-chain activity as a result. What would the market cap of Midance be? It would be bigger than Coinbase, I would say, for sure. Oh, yeah. No question about that. Like, no question. Here, let me do us a favor and pull up Coin Gecko. Let's pull up CoinBase's market cap now.

Just take a look. I mean. It's like $100 billion, I think, right? Yeah, the token BNB, which only gets a portion of the revenue is $143 billion market account. So finance is like what? Is it like a half a trillion dollar? Like enterprise value.

I would have. The rumors that they're doing like 50 billion a year of profits and like. I could, I mean, maybe finance is actually cheaper than tether from a price to earnings perspective. Absolutely. It is. Yeah. So we got to go. an SPV together, guys. Let's go do this.

We have to someone actually do a story on this. I mean, the only question is, like, why would Binance ever, I mean, I guess they would take on strategic investors if they want certain doors open. But, like, they wouldn't, I can't see them ever needing an IP. I mean, CZ owns like 90-something percent of it. And in fact, like, when I was at Forbes, one of my researchers did a study. We found out that Binance's ICO was actually pretty much a flop. And finance owns like tens of millions of BNB tokens that people thought,

either didn't exist, the results. They don't need one. No, I mean, CZ is floating in loads of free cash flow. Yeah. And judging by, like, the Twitter picks, you know, he's content. He doesn't need more supervision of scrutiny, right? Right. With that logic, with that logic, Tether doesn't need to do a raise either, but they are.

I think there's a difference there, though. I think, see, Tether wants to get after the U.S. market with their U.S.-based table coin, and they hired the guy that was the deputy cryptosar. So they have bigger ambitions. Right. I guess if minus one, like, finance U.S. hasn't gone anywhere. No. I don't know if they have ambitions to invigorate.

Often, the big issue often is employee liquidity, right? So if you have people who've been with you for years and they can't cash out, right? I know firsthand for, you know, I talk to all of the exchanges internationally. And they all have this issue right now with people who have been with them for years, very loyal, and they're all sitting on chairs and they can't cash out. the shares, right? And, and, you know, oftentimes, like, to your point, like, the CEO owns 90% of the shares or whatever and is not incentivized because he can basically just pay himself dividends. Right. Well, he can pay them in cash. Right. I'm sure he is. Bro just like Tether can.

Yeah. Yeah. I'll say something about the Tether guys, though, because I've, I've done a few profiles on Palo. Like, he has a, I think a pretty massive chip on his shoulder. Like, it's like back from like, like when I first started talking to him in like 2020, 2021, 20, like, like the first thing he ever said to me in one of my interviews, like, he was quoting, like, some song that, like, Americans would say to him, like, calling him a stupid Italian or something like that. Like, like, he was just tired of people telling him, well, you must be a fraud because you're not American. And he would say, well, look at what J.P. Morgan did or look at what Wells Farger did and how much they got fined for not having an NL program or whatever. and like he just cannot get over the fact and and I don't blame him like people like tether had a shady history i mean i don't think anyone would dispute that even if they're clean now and i don't think and like a lot of people just don't take him he thinks a lot of people don't

take him seriously because he didn't go to an ivy league school he didn't grow up on wall street and like who are these people like a couple of which are very secretive running this massively profitable company and like if they're able so like being able to bring on strategic investors is coming to him saying, please take my money and we'll give you like an incredibly frothy valuation has to be incredibly fulfilling for him. How much equity does he have in the business? I actually got the cap table when I, when I did the first story. I think he owns, I forget the number.

Like Giancarlo, I think was the biggest shareholder, but I think they own somewhere between like 8 and 11% each. I mean, that's probably changed because they've gone on some money from Canter. But they've never done. I mean, they never had to raise money. I mean, the actual money you need to launch tether, it was nothing. that. It's only 8 to 11% each.

I'm a little... I would have guessed higher. Yeah, I would have guessed higher. What happened? Like, who owns... Remember, there was a bigger group. There was a bigger group, right?

Because you had... Yeah, it was a bigger... Yeah, it was a bigger... And Giancarla Devasini was the one who owned the most, I remember. Now, so CZ owns, what, the whole thing? Pretty much. He owns... Again, like, this information is from, like, a couple years.

But I think he owns, yeah, I think he owns, like, somewhere 90% of it. So, Larry Elton is the wealthiest guy in the world. nominally, according to Forbes, because he's got Oracle, which is worth $350 billion now in stock. CZ is worth more than Larry Ellison. CZ will go down in history as one of the most successful technology entrepreneurs of all time. And he's not on the Forbes list. He should be. The only person ahead of him is like Vladimir Putin, I guess.

Well, the Forbes list is only for Americans, but Bloomberg does worldwide, I think, the Forbes 400. But, yeah, I mean, the Tether guys, I mean, they're instantly going to be like 100 billionaires if they raise the money at the that level. I mean, they're going to be among the richest in the world. I don't even know what you do. Think about like the wealth creation that's happening in digital assets and crypto. And I still don't think people really get it like outside digital assets. Like there's enormous. I mean, it helped shape and influence an election outcome.

That's how big a deal this is. I don't think people fully understand how significant it is. And it's bigger. Bigger. I mean, the D5 billionaires haven't come yet. And I think they're going to be bigger. We'll see. But yeah.

I think there'll be bigger, bigger outcomes than tether. And then tether. Yeah. You'd have to build a pretty big defy application. Robert was pretty happy with that statement. Yeah, I hope that. I mean, I think, look, what happened post-Celsius block-fi Voyager FTX, right? All of that move to ABE and it's,

it's shrunk, but a significant percentage of that business moved to Avey. And it's barely started yet. Most people don't know what AVE is. So I really think that the coming onslaught of defy applications is going to make most C-Fi stuff in crypto look like MySpace. I'll say maybe. Here's why. It can't come fast enough for me.

It's a really interesting point. It's something to show on. I'd say whoever owns the customer is the long-term winner, right? Binance has the brand. They own the customer. Tether has a brand in USDT. They have the relationship. They have a lock.

they have the network effects now. For them, it's not the customer. It's the network effect. I don't know if a DeFi protocol will be kind of front of her. You're assuming the customers are all people. You're assuming the customers are all people. I don't think that's going to be the case. That's true.

That's fair. Yeah, I'll give a couple numbers just about the defy. So, Feather actually raises money at this point. They're going to be like what, like the second or third is big. As big as like the second or third is third biggest bank in America. I mean, I think J.P. Morgan's around 800-something billion. City Bank's $191 billion. I think Wells is under $500 billion.

Like these guys, like, that's the league they're playing in right now. I mean, let's see if they close the deal. I mean, at this point, a $300 billion valuation will seem like a disappointment. It used to be the Swiss banking system. It was a Swiss banking system in the United States. Now, UBS is thinking about decamping Switzerland, by the way, and going to like a U.S. regulatory regime. That's it. So now it's the U.S. versus like Tether and Binance.

those are you two big monetary regimes now and tron throw tron in the international mix too we should all be a token 2049 that's my conclusion from all this i am and it's five a m but but yeah but that's haven't but but but again i i kind of see it a little differently and it's a really interesting conversation because to me that the cfi is closer to banks than it is to what i call crypto and and so the question is how does this evolve over the next five to 10 years? Because the shadow system, the parallel shadow system that I want is not C-Fi,

because it has no choice but to eventually merge and buy banks at some point if you think it through, right? It's inevitable that crypto companies, C-Fi crypto companies start buying big banks in the coming years or asset managers, especially with the tokenization. I mean, they'll want to buy banks. I don't know if they'll pull it off for the regulatory reasons. So you're saying, hey, look, it's not real,

crypto because of C-Fi, but isn't the lesson of hyperliquid that the customer wants convenience, decentralization be damned? I share your ideas, but I'm all about the self-sovereignty and decentralization and self-cuss. I like those concepts. So you're saying that people use hyperliquid because of the convenience? Yeah, the convenience of speed of settlement, you know, the access to leverage, a clean U.S., no gas fees to low no gas fees, low transaction costs, the air drops.

You know, people will trade. I think it's generate leverage with no KYC. Yeah, yeah. It's not about instant settlement. Every per family. I don't think it's about settlement at all. I think it's leverage and it's no KYC. It's getting around.

And liquidity. Liquidity. The cause Bitnex to basically lose market share, which was all of a sudden they had to go C-Fi legit. And that's what's driving it. A hundred percent. And listen, we'd mentioned D-Y-DX earlier, right?

Any PURP Exchange will win when it has that critical mass of liquidity. When another PURP Exchange comes with more liquidity, all the traders move because they're like, oh, I can trade more size with less sliffish here, and therefore I have a better price when you're training with 100x leverage. A certain better price is huge P&L

differences. And so the best liquidity wins the users very, very, very fast, which means these things can die very fast. and it needs they can be built very fast. So in that name, yeah, somebody has to take the other side to these traits. And so it's the liquidity that begets the reasonable premium, right?

And if that disappears, because Binance is now basically giving you hooks to get off of finance sex into Binance or Aster Dex, that's very compelling. If I can trade Tesla at, you know, 100x or 500x leverage, as insane as that sounds. Yeah. Yeah.

And Vynos has a balance sheet to back up Aster. Yeah. Right. Like they can, they can apply their own liquidity. They can use principle. They can. But that's not even their advantage here.

Their advantage here is access to the user base that has a balance on Binance. That's their advantage. And having, you know, their trust wallet system that can act as, you know, the DECS interface is the key. So in the vein of like Robert, you were saying, like, they can rise quickly, they can die quickly, various advantages between Binance and hyperliquid. Maybe just to tie a bow on this part of the conversation before we move to just the final part. Who wins? And maybe it's not a zero-sum game. It probably isn't.

But that's the question. I'm sure everybody listening is going to want to know. So go ahead. I don't think there's, I don't think there's like a terminal state where it's like, oh, you know, like, Astro won forever, like, put the crowd on them and, like, it's done, right? If you look at the history of derivatives in general, right, these are derivatives. Liquidity is the game, and liquidity does shift, and it can shift from regulatory changes, it can shift from technology changes, it can shift from user strategy changes.

But, like, there's been lots of markets that were like, you know, in like Trad, right, that were like, oh, they won, and, you know, it's game over, like for oil futures, it'll never change. They're like, oh, for, you know, government bond futures, it'll never change. They'll have changed, right? It's happened in trad derivatives. It happens in crypto derivatives. It's, I think, a carousel that will never stop moving. And I think people are always going to have to compete on cost, liquidity, you know, ease of use, all of these things.

Because it's not a permanent market structure, like equities and stuff like that is, like, much stickier. Derivatives come and go a lot faster. Absolutely. And the fact that we still have to normalize settlement in something else, you know, Bitmex did it originally. They were the people that's founded the idea of real crypto perps and everything had to settle in Bitcoin. You know, now we have, you know, some settling in USDC, some settling in B&B. It's, none of it is ideal. And it also drives, you know, obviously higher spreads or higher premiums.

And we don't have a good cross-chain way of dealing with this. and that's why we're backed into this approach. But again, consumers, retail doesn't care because of the leverage they're getting. Why do I care if I'm paying 8% or 9% premium if I'm going to basically go for 50x leverage, right? But if you want to normalize this against kind of like applying traditional trading principles to crypto, we're going to need a true cross-chain perps model that we don't have yet. Not that I'm aware. Fair enough. Yeah, like the fact that Hyper Liquid achieved success with no venture backing and was community led, I think is a great point. You can have another one spin up. On the other hand, I agree, Bill, with your point that Binance has advantages, has customers, has awareness. They also have a balance sheet. So I think they'll still be an enduring player. But it's not hard to put your hand in the ring.

But you said something earlier, which is they're basically using the tricks and economic models of how BNB launched. And they know what worked because that's what made CZ a billionaire ultimately. It was the burn game of B&B and how he could buy business doing that, which created ultimately long-term stickiness. Because once they had the balances in this X model, the churn wasn't as high. Whereas to your point, like the Dexes can come and go and there's very low cost of change. And so he learns, I mean, he knows that those economics better than anyone. We need to get CZ on the show. I mean, he has the most incredible hero's journey that's tracked like the political climate.

I mean, it's really, I mean, extraordinary, extraordinary individual. Yeah, the man is the center of the story and has been for a really long time. Like, he is main character. He's the main character that survived. right that's the position you never want to be in right like the main character always gets taken out oh he did he'd go to jail but yeah he is but yeah but yeah but yeah but yeah right he didn't lose he didn't lose any of his money he didn't have to pay the fees and now he's riding high and doing business with the president so right and he'll probably get a pardon yeah um so quickly

just one one more announcement and then we're going to sort of move into i guess the final part of the show, which is, I think, the most fun part. But first, I know everyone tunes in week to week to week so they can hear from Rom and all of his great thoughts. We had a really good reaction last week when Rom you got into that debate with Vinny. Gold versus the S&P 500, where Bitcoin fits in. There was a demand for more, and so we listened. And Thursday, noon Eastern time, Rom is going to get in the ring with Vinny, and I'm going to moderate and we're going to hash out, which is better, Bitcoin, gold, or. or the S&P.

So, yes, so please check out Unchained.com for more updates, Lara's Twitter feed, Unchain Bits &Bips, Twitter feeds for all the info, but live stream 12 noon. It should be a lot of fun. And if you guys have questions, please submit them. You want to know what you guys want to hear. And with that, all right, so we're getting close to the end. One of the things I always like to do is kind of ask each panelist to start.

sort of share a thought, a contrarian thought, something that, like, I mean, Bill, you've, I guess you just got up and maybe you haven't had your first cup of coffee yet, hopefully you have something you thought about while you were shaving, that either I left on the cutter room floor, a contrarian opinion, just something that you've been kind of like chewing on as sort of a parting thought. So Bill, why don't you go first? I think the stable coin business is going to be as big as everybody thinks it's going to be, but I don't think the winners are going to be who everybody thinks it's going to be.

I don't think it's going to be the banks. I don't think it's going to be swift. And I think that's a good thing. And I think that there's going to be lots of competition for international markets that is barely emerging. And we'll see how the CDBC world responds. But I am not bullish on the banks. Great. Rob.

You want to go next? Yes. I'll say what I'm not bullish on just like Bill did. I am not bullish on projects continuing to innovate on additional spot and dex markets relative to pert markets. I am like calling it right here. I think, you know, we're talking about perps earlier. I think if you look at what was successful in crypto for a long time, spot has been the number one driver.

And then it was, you know, perks on C-Fi exchanges. I think now we're trying to see perps off exchange. I think we're at the point in time where perps, because of the leverage, are just fundamentally more efficient than spot plus borrow lends. If I say this is someone that was the first one to do the experiment with like spot borrow lend. I think this is actually bad for all borrow lend protocols long term. I think, and I think there's a lot of, lot of ramifications of this, but I think Spot is going to lose out to Perps. I think the amount

of interest in Perps is growing, and we're starting to see Perps for the very first time get built into the end-user consumer interfaces in a way that people have not experienced before. It's mostly coming from Hyper Liquid in their builder codes, as in they're paying people a portion of the fees to build hyperliquid markets into wallets. But I think most retail, once they experience Perps, relative to spot, it clicks. And I think we're actually past the point of no return here. And I think the consumer interest in spot generally is going to go down. And I think it's bad for the consumer-facing venues that don't figure this out.

I think that's why Coinbase is sort of like tripping over themselves to like go deeper into perps. Yeah. I think we've now entered perpification. I think it's a superior form factor for most users. And I think that spot markets are going to slow. die out relative to Perps. I think they're both phenomenal takes.

That's very powerful. It means, look, Perps had the first product market fit in digital assets. That makes sense. Speculation was the initial user value proposition.

Well, I think Spot had product market fit first. I remember people training on Buckox, right? You know, and it was like, you know, spot markets were the ones

that started this all. I think for most consumers in their heads, like all crypto. to ways. It was like, spot, it's like, oh, I buy some coin. You know, I hold an exchange or wallet, you know? And I think that's going to change.

No, I think they're both great takes. I don't have much to offer this week. I'll say, look, from a market's perspective, sometimes best just do nothing. I think this is one of those times. Just wait a week, reassess, let things cool off. Okay. Well, then I'll add something in sort of within the vein of what Bill was saying

that I actually found kind of concerning. Did you guys see the story in the FT where a circle exec was talking, to a reporter about potentially looking at reverable or revocable transactions. I feel like the cryptic community is okay with at least sort of blacklisting transactions, but I feel like in many ways, that's about as far as we're willing to go

when it comes to compromising on immutability. That's the cost of doing business. I don't know how, like, just technically a reversible transaction could work on a blockchain. I'm not a car. coder. So I'm sure there's a way you could sort of make it work. And maybe it has to be on like an L2 or something that's not really a block. I know how to make it work, but that's all separate comments.

Or 51% attack. No, no, no. I know how to like do it. But, but I mean, I just like at what point is it no longer crypto? Like if you can actually, if you can do a charge back. I like her. Like, like, like I ordered something on eBay. I ordered an Eagles jersey.

It wasn't what I wanted. And the credit card company gave me my money back. Like there, there's a time. a place for it. But that's not a revert. So the right way to look at this is there are two different transactions. There's the payment, right? And then there's the return.

And crypto basically makes clear that in the real world, they are two different transactions. The fact that a bank chooses to arbitrarily allow you to roll back a transaction in a database was always insane in my opinion. And it was always solving some problem that was imposed upon them. Right. I worked at banks and never was it like, oh my God, like, we need reversible transactions because it just makes sense for the consumer. No, they're different transactions.

You would lay out the T accounts and you would say, okay, here's the first transaction and here's the second transaction. And they net out. And that's the way it's supposed to be done. All the maxis looked at that FT article and go, see, I told you so. And, you know, now, by the way, Jeremy came out and clarified that it was taken out of context. but you know there's not a lot of different ways to take that yeah i'm not sure at what kind of context there was i mean that that yeah and like i like i know those guys i'm sure all of you know them too

and like like like i mean jeremy believes in crypto i mean they they got into the space for the right reasons but like there's certain things and and i'm not especially dogmatic i try not to be as a reporter but like there's certain things that to me are just like inviolable and i i'm not sure how you can create like reversible transactions and anything close to to a decentralized network and make that work. So that was just something on my mind, too. But otherwise, thanks, Bill, for getting up to really to do this. Like, Robert, as always, Ram, as always.

Ron, we'll see you again on Thursday. Thanks to everybody for watching and listening. And we'll be back next week with another episode of Bits and Beps.