Unchained - The Chopping Block: Tom Lee the New Saylor? DAT Consolidation, Token Wrappers Under Fire - Ep. 893

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

DAT mania meets market reality. Tom Lee becomes the face of ETH as BitMine amasses 1.5% of supply and mNAV premiums start to collapse. We break down Japan’s MetaPlanet tax arbitrage, SharpLink’s buyback tactics, and the coming wave of DAT M&A. Plus: Robinhood launches tokenized stocks in Europe using Arbitrum, the WFE fires a warning shot, and Stylus lets fintech devs go Rust-first onchain. Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week, Arbitrum’s AJ Warner (Chief Strategy Officer at Offchain Labs) joins to unpack the rise (and potential fall) of Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs), as Tom Lee emerges as Ethereum’s public face and BitMine amasses 1.5% of ETH. We dive into the collapse of mNAV premiums, Japan’s MetaPlanet tax arbitrage, and the looming consolidation of subscale DATs. Plus: Robinhood launches tokenized stocks in the EU on Arbitrum, AJ shares the roadmap for Robinhood Chain, and we debate whether token wrappers, buybacks, and DAT M&A mark the next era of crypto capital markets. Show highlights 🔹 Tom Lee’s ETH Blitz – How BitMine amassed 1.5% of the ETH supply, why Tom Lee says ETH could flip BTC, and how he’s become the “face of Ethereum.” 🔹 mNAV Compression Across DATs – Big-name DATs (BitMine, MicroStrategy) hold premiums; smaller ones trend toward par or discounts. 🔹 Japan’s MetaPlanet Tax Arbitrage – Why MetaPlanet trades at 2.5–3× NAV: stock taxation loopholes vs. crypto income tax rates in Japan. 🔹 DAT Buybacks, Activism & M&A – SharpLink’s buyback plan, potential for hostile takeovers, and speculation around “DAT piracy.” 🔹 One-DAT-per-Alt Endgame – Why most new DATs are failing, the shift to consolidation, and why each token may only support one treasury long-term. 🔹 Staking ETFs vs DATs – DATs can stake nearly 100% of assets; ETFs are constrained by redemptions and liquidity windows. 🔹 Corporate Tax Drag & Onchain Yield – Trade-offs between tax efficiency and flexibility in corporate vs. ETF structures. 🔹 WFE vs. Tokenized Stocks – Global exchange lobby attacks third-party wrappers as misleading “tokenized stocks” lacking shareholder protections. 🔹 Robinhood’s Tokenized Stock Rollout – Launching in the EU under MiCA, built on Arbitrum One, with a full Robinhood Chain to follow. 🔹 Stylus & Arbitrum Stack Strategy – Why Rust/C/C++ compatibility on Arbitrum helped win the Robinhood deal; flexibility for fintech devs. 🔹 Hyperliquid’s Bridge to Arbitrum – $5B+ in assets sourced via Arbitrum; why Arbitrum’s partner-first posture beats chasing L3s. 🔹 DATs as the New CMOs – How charismatic leaders like Tom Lee and Saylor act as public-facing evangelists for their ecosystems. HOSTS: ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  Guest: ⭐️ A.J. Warner, Chief Strategy Officer at Offchain Labs  Links: Disclosures⁠ DAT Mania Potential & mNAV Compression on the Chopping Block https://youtu.be/rF8TGVWWRTU?list=PLySrw1Nvf-srh6ZnJ033Jb440VKUjVNgX&t=2249  Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:10 Ethereum's Market Performance  03:02 Tom Lee's Media Blitz  06:37 Digital Asset Treasuries in Crypto 08:47 Tax Arbitrage and Premiums in Different Markets 10:58 Challenges of Digital Asset Treasuries 16:20 Corporate Form vs. ETFs for Staking 19:25 The Role of Spokespersons in Digital Asset Treasuries 27:59 Equity Heavy Strategies and MicroStrategy's Leverage 29:10 Market Signals and Liquidity Challenges 31:29 Adversarial M&A and Stock Buybacks 33:57 WFE letter to SEC: attack on “tokenized stocks” 45:32 Robinhood & Arbitrum Partnership 53:51 Hyperliquid vs. Arbitrum's Ecosystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Like, Tom Lee, I kind of remember, you always see the headlines of like Tom Lee predicts $10,000 light coin. I'm like, what the, like, who is this guy? And then somehow he is like perfectly found his fit in, and also just simplifying the ETH story into, no, no, no, no, it's stable coins. It's the Wall Street chain. And it just kind of worked. It's kind of miraculous. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two fun.

Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. I'm named the trading firms who are very involved. I like that ETH is the ultimate problem. DFI protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together

and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro is first you got Tom, the DFI Maven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. Next, you got Robert, the Crypto connoisseur and Tsar of Superstate. Yo.

Joining us today, we've got A.J., ecosystem envoy at Arbitrum. Hey, thanks for having me. I like that one. Absolutely. And I've received the head hype man at Dragonfly. We're at least stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see Chopin Block that X, Y, Z for more disclosures. So, boys, Ethereum just scraped an all-time high. And I say scraped because it sort of scraped

against it and then hurt itself and fell over. It's almost back again. Come on. It's basically, you know, it's like 4,600 now. It's like trying to fight for 4,600. That's within submitting distance. Yeah, so it hit 4,900-something, like 4950-ish, I believe, spitting distance of 5K, all-time high was previously 4885 in August of 2022. That was three years ago. So unfortunately, after that, there was just a cascade of liquidations. Markets pulled down quite a bit over the week, or, yeah, I think over the right, right on Sunday, Monday time frame.

But there's been something of a recovery. It seems like animal spirits are back, even though a lot of the leverage has been flushed out of the system. So we've seen so far year to date, despite the fact that Bitcoin has had a pretty historic rally, Ether is actually up relative to Bitcoin this year. Ether is up about 45% compared to Bitcoin being up 25%. There's been a lot of excitement about the macro environment changing. And then, of course, the main catalyst for all of this has been the Ethereum DATs. So just remind the audience, DATS stands for digital asset treasuries.

These are micro strategy-style companies that go out and buy a bunch of the underlying token by sometimes issuing debt or doing at the money issuances. they're just selling stock and using that to go buy crypto. So the biggest today is BitMine. BitMine now is on a tear. They've now accumulated 1.5% of the total ether supply. So they are multiples larger than the Ethereum Foundation. They are now basically, I think they own more of ether than Sailor owns of Bitcoin. Is that right? Am I getting that right? I believe that's correct. Yeah, yeah. So they are massive, massive portion of the overall ether supply. They're now the number two, that behind Michael Saylor, of course. And Tom Lee has just kind of been everywhere. He's been blitzing the media. He's been, I just saw this clip that he was

talking about how Heath is having a 1971 gold style moment. He says that it's high probability that ETH is going to flip Bitcoin. He's now posting TA charts, TA meaning technical analysis, you know, people draw lines on charts. He's doing that stuff now. So he's kind of all, he's like just full scale, just kind of blitzing. He's the new sailor. He is the new sailor. He is the sailor for... He is saying crazy stuff to grab people's attention.

Is it crazy, though? Is it crazy? I mean, the lines and the charts are... It's going in that direction. How crazy can it be? He's saying salacious things. Design to enrapture. Yeah, designed to enrapture the public audience.

Okay, okay. AJ, what's your take on a great Tom Lee? I think it's, like, amazing, like, how quickly the person the personality of it as all come together. Like, Saylor, I can remember. I think he started in 2020. And it probably wasn't until 2020 that everyone's like, Michael Saylor is the face of Bitcoin. And I remember you guys had like, you're like on stage somewhere.

I don't remember you guys were like, who should be like the face of Ethereum? And then like Tom Lee showed up like 60 days later. And everyone was like he's the face of Ethereum. And I think that- I think that pace is like the most insane part of this whole story. I mean, the amount of Eats that they've been able to accumulate, it's been incredible. I think it's going to be really interesting to see what they do in terms of getting yields up, obviously, beyond maybe potentially just staking yields. I think that's potentially like an angle in which this becomes more interesting and also has more appeal to like a non-commandity style Wall Street investor.

So like I think the jury's still out there. I think the coolest part of this story is just how quickly this has happened because I think it's been like sub-60 days. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Is Bitt my doing anything with the Eath or are they just staking it? I think they've I could be wrong I think they're starting to stake

and for now I think that's it I think I don't think all of it's staked yet to the best of my knowledge I think they've started staking I think the sharp link one with Linnea is starting to look at doing more on chain

as like part of their broader strategy I think like the one that you know Joe Shalom and Joe Lubin are I think co-running so it's yeah I think just generally on the ETH that space I think that's probably the most interesting component because they're like running this narrative

about like you know the appeal to Wall Street and just like finding ways of like stacking yield, I think is just a much better, broader part of the story than like, for example, like the Bitcoin one. Obviously, I would say Bitcoin's been around longer, more people are aware of it. But yeah, that's my take. Yeah, I mean, I think it explains also why ETHDATs have relative to ETHs had so much more traction addition to sort of Tom Lee. I mean, speaking of also ETH hitting all-time highs, someone was making the point that ETH actually did hit new all-time highs. I think earlier this year, maybe a year ago, if you take staking into account.

And so it sort of like also underscores this, you know, narrative around, hey, more yield and the dads can obviously stake more and be more aggressive with it than like a normal sort of standard staking ETF, which obviously has to keep, you know, sort of sort of liquidity. And there's restrictions on how much that can be staked. And so I feel like all the, it's just everything is kind of kind of fitting together like a, like a glove. It's, and yeah, I agree. Like Tom Lee, I kind of remember, you always see the headlines of like Tom Lee predicts,

like $10,000 light coin. I'm like, what the, like, what, who is this guy? And then somehow he is like perfectly found his fit in, and also just simplifying the ETH story into no, no, no, no, it's stable coins. It's the Wall Street chain. And like, it just kind of worked. It's, it's, it's kind of miraculous. So what's also striking is that you're now seeing this big divergence in MNAVs. So just remind the audience, MNAVs are multiple SNAP that basically means how much is this basket of digital assets worth relative to their underlying holdings. And what you're seeing is increasingly the MNAVs are really compressing outside of the big boys. So if you're sailor, sailor is sitting pretty. He's still sitting at 1.6. I think previously when we started talking about

the stuff this year about MNAV compression, it was like 1.7. So he hasn't moved that much. Microstrategy still remains a pretty strong premium. If you look today at Bitmine, I'm seeing different numbers from different people on what Bitmine is, but everybody agrees it's above one. I see one source is telling me it's 1.3, another source is telling me 1.15. But I guess, like, it's, you know, to your point earlier on an earlier show, Robert, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's Wall Street. And so we don't actually know in real time what they own or like, we don't know how many shares they have. We don't know how many assets they have. So it's kind of absurd, but we literally do not know what the MNAV of that asset is. And so presumably also the traders also don't know. So the people who are pricing this thing at the margin, they also don't know what it's supposed to be worth.

But fine, you know, we sort of have some trailing awareness of this. But many of the other vehicles now are trading at, you know, I'm just looking at the Sharplink S-Bet, which is the number two Ethereum Treasury, which is less than half now of a sharp, sorry, of a bit mine. They're sitting at 1.06. And according to the other source I have, it's actually below 1. So it's right around 1, basically. And some of these other ETH ones, few of them are trading below 1 at this point. Same thing with Bitcoin. Some of the, some of the Dats are now trading at par. The Solana ones have come down quite a bit. Some of them are trading above two. Now they're all below two. So you're seeing this MNAV compression, and I think this is good, but I suspect what we see going

forward is that the people who are staying at an elevated premium to NAV are probably only the big guys, or people who are in these maybe alternative jurisdictions, so if you're in Japan or you're in Korea or something, and so you have some kind of unique market access that other people don't have, then okay, maybe you have some justified premium to NAF. interestingly, so I'm actually in Tokyo right now for WebEx, which is the big Japanese crypto conference. It's my first time ever being at a Japanese crypto conference. And one thing that I learned is that so Metaplanet, which is the big Japanese Bitcoin treasury, it's trading at a really high premium to NAV relative to anything in the U.S. It's higher than Sailor. I think it's like

two and a half or three X, something like that. And the reason why is that actually there's a tax arbitrage in Japan, which I did not understand until I got here. So the tax arbitrage is that Japan is an extremely high tax rate for crypto. So Japan taxes crypto as income. And the highest marginal tax rate for crypto, if you're a crypto whale, it's 55% that you get taxed on like crypto trading gains, which is insane, right? It's extremely high. Stocks do not get taxed that way. Stocks get taxed at 20%.

So it's like a capital gain, even short term, it's at 20%. So there's a lot of energy now from the prime minister and the finance minister to try to change the laws, but it's going to take. a while. But if you buy Metaplanet, MetaPlanent's a stock. And so because it's the stock, it gets taxed at 20%. So you actually, even though you're buying it, this huge premium to NAV, it's tax efficient if the premium to nav is constant to just buy Metaplanet, get the Bitcoin beta. And then if Metaplan holds to maturity of like when the tax law changes, then Metaplan never has to sell its underlying Bitcoin and like incur the double taxation. So this is a weird thing in Japan specifically that I think explains why Metaplanet is trading at this.

Ironically, it's the opposite in the U.S., right? In the U.S. paying corporate tax, like corporate tax is like sort of double taxation, right, because the company's being taxed at the same time as, and you have to pay the management team and blah, blah, blah. So there is an implicit drag to having your money in a dat as opposed to owning a Bitcoin ETF, right? The whole reason why we were so excited about ETFs, because ETFs are tax advantaged. Like they have all these wonderful properties of ETFs that are so great.

But we're in this weird moment now that I kind of think it's going to be sustained that The big debts are the only ones that are going to sustain these premium. And the smaller ones, like number three, number four, number five, they're probably just going to slowly glide down to one X and stay there. Yeah, well, I think this all comes down to the brand value of the shell that holds the crypto. And I think that comes down to the spokesperson for the debt. You know, I think there's, you know, an extremely high correlation between how enrapturing the face of the debt is and its outperformance. And the data's where no one knows who runs it.

Nobody knows they've never heard of the CEO. There's nobody going on CNBC. It's basically just launched and prayed that it would trade in a premium. The pseudo-anonymous stats are all struggling. And to your point, a lot of them are trading at discounts now because they look like closed-end funds run by questionable outperformance or management teams or whatever. and closed-end funds with fees oftentimes train at discounts to their NABs. That's the history of Wall Street, right?

You know, you can't actually take your assets out. You can basically just hold this box of assets that is worse than holding the underlying. In a lot of cases, because there's fees and there's costs and there's taxes and there's all of these things on top. And so this goes back to why was their outperformance in the first place? Why did micro strategy grow so big? And it's because, you know, the charisma and the brand of sales, and being able to tell the narrative to an extremely large investing community, not just of retail people buying the stock,

but also of hedge funds buying convertible bonds from the issuer. And coming up with all of these like corporate finance strategies and tools, that's what led to its growth. And I don't think you're going to see the debt and the convertibles and the leverage. And like the toolkit come to be for companies that are essentially like an on shell. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I think that's also why you're starting to see the end of the private part of datmania. So, you know, datmania is there's kind of two sides of that I think a lot of people, a lot of retail investors don't fully perceive, which is there's the data that are on the public markets that are going out, buying more stuff, issuing more shares, and driving demand for the underlying. That's still in full throttle. You know, that's not selling any signs of showing down. And you see that with what's going on now with BitMine. The private side of datmania, is that we've, I mean, you know, as investors, we're constantly getting pitched on these pipes, pipes standing for private investment into public equity, which basically means that going around

to private investors and saying, hey, I'm launching a new debt, I'm raising 200 million, 300 million, whatever, you know, put some money in and hopefully this thing will trade at a premium. And if it does, you're going to make some money. We've been getting pitched on an insane number of these, and that number is finally slowing down. And it's slowing down because people realize that it's really hard to make these things traded premium. And unless you have a shot at being number one, you just have no right to basically exist in the capital markets. The capital markets are now rejecting every marginal new debt that's like, okay, here's the next Ethereum debt, here's the next Bitcoin debt, unless you have some unique

distribution or a unique geography. But what about an arbitrage of debt? What about an arbitrage of dad? AJ, anything you want to tell us? As you could imagine, like, sort of on the investor side, you've been getting hit a lot from people being interested. I think there's a lot of people that are interested in doing this for arbitram as well. Without commenting on where things are, I'll tell you how I think about it personally. Like what Robert said, to me, the most interesting thing about this is there's two interesting things. One is, who's the person who's going to be doing this? I think that there's a very compelling story to tell about arbitram, but like there needs to be somebody who's, that's their job to do it. And if you don't have that person, I think it's a very challenging

proposition to keep this thing a relatively interesting vehicle. And I think the thing that actually it kind of gets lost in all this and it's less relevant for like Ethereum and Bitcoin because of the ETFs. The most interesting thing about the dots to me are like I want people who want exposure to arbitram or blockchain technology

scaling solutions to be able to kind of get it however they want. So like I have a lot of friends. They heard about the Robin Hood news. They're like, well, how do I get exposure to this? And I'm like, well, not financial advice, but there's the arbitram token. There's this, there's that.

And that doesn't interest them. They're like hedge fund tradfied guys and they just want to buy equities. Right. So that to me is like the most interesting and somewhat maybe the least told part of the story of the Dats, which is like how do we actually get assets into the hands or exposure into hands of people in the way that they're most comfortable with, the way that like fits their investment operations. So that's to me the reason, most interesting reason to do it. But I agree with Robert.

Like unless there's somebody who's really telling the story. explain the narrative. I think it's a very short-term thing in the overwhelming majority of cases for, I would say, particularly like protocols of the size of arbitram today, like earlier stage than something like a Bitcoin or Ethereum. So yeah, that's my take on arbitram. I think probably generally across like I would say projects of similar maturity. I think there are some that have released them. I haven't been tracking go closely. They've been like in demand. But I know that definitely it's been something on a lot of people's minds. Just to go back to one thing, Haseeb said, I thought was interesting. I wonder if this would have changed on the ETHDAT side

if there was staking ETFs because one of the unique parts about this structure is that you have the ability to actually put the capital to work, be able to, like, let's say, borrow against cash flows in a way that the staking ETF, like the lack of staking ETFs don't let you sort of mimic on like an individual or personalized basis or even for a hedge fund, right? So I wonder if that's like kind of feeding into this a little bit in terms of like the premiums to nab and obviously the bigger you are, the more leverage you have to be able to borrow against your cash flows, the more better cash flow opportunities you might even be able to get. So I wonder if it's not even just like the brand side, but there's actually a structural advantage. Like in Bitcoin,

there's not as, I mean, Michael Saylor obviously has it because, you know, I don't even know how relevant the micro strategy cash flows are today. But that's originally how it started. Right. He's he had this cash flow business, very high gross profit margin that he was just leveraging against. And I wonder if that's sort of what the play has been versus like the ETS, ETS, which didn't take off. But I don't know. Curious where you guys takes. Well, Tarun made a really good point last one. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Two weeks ago on the show. I was going to Rood's point. Yeah, yeah.

Tarun made a great point like a couple weeks ago on the show. Look up the episode on Spotify or YouTube. To Root's point was, even if there were staking, ETFs that were approved, that were live, that were operating, the corporate structure of the dad's is actually superior and we'll have higher yields and we'll probably crowd out the staking ETFs and actually probably, you know, in a lot of ways, eliminates the need for the staking ATs. And here's why. So if you're a company, right, whether you're, you know, Sharp Link or Bitmine, you're staking 99.9% of the ether you have. That 0.1% that you're not staking is probably like subcommodation of rewards and or purchases from the last like 24 hours, right?

it's entirely staked. And this works because in a lot of ways, it looks like a closed-end fault, right? You don't have to make any redemptions. There's no creation and, you know, in redemption. You're just putting more and more ether in over time, and it's never really needing to be unstaked, and it's never needing to be removed. Whereas with an ETF, you have to be able to meet the liquidity needs

of the, you know, creation and redemption process by the authorized participants who mint and burn, so to speak, ETFs. because if you have an AP coming in and saying, hey, I want the underlying back, right? If it's staked, you can't give it back. So you can only stake a fraction of the total assets, right? You can't stake 100%. Maybe you can stake 70%. Maybe you can only stake less than that because the ether withdrawal queue has gone from

like a couple days to two weeks now. And it's incredibly busy. And so as an ETF, you run into major structural issues if the staking rate rate. gets too high. Maybe it's a higher utilization rental, something like Salana, it doesn't have as long on withdrawal queue. Maybe it's longer on ether so you can stake less. These dynamics haven't been seen yet and haven't been put in the practice. But fundamentally, the closed-end structure when it comes to staking utilization is superior to the open-ended structure. So, okay, here's my counter-argument to that. So the first thing is that, like, obviously

the corporate form is not designed for this kind of thing because of the tax drag, right? When you're doing staking in the corporate form, you're paying taxes on the staking income, which means that if, to your point, you're 70% utilized, but then you're paying corporate tax, it's kind of a no-op, right? You're basically getting the same outcome, except, you know, if you're actually selling the ether at any point, then you have even bigger tax realizations that are just going to absolutely murder you if you're investing into a company versus an ETF. That's why ETFs were created is to be this kind of tax advantage, pass-through exposure to the underlying. Now, I think you can ameliorate a lot of the problem you described of like, oh, hey, staking queue,

blah, you know, what about liquidity? By, instead of having 30% of the assets unstaked, for example, you can have 30% of the assets sitting in, you know, STEth. And that gives you the ability to pretend, or, you know, whatever, some portfolio of, you know, staking tokens plus, you know, natively staked Eath. And my guess is that if you're the ETF, you have the ability to really negotiate down the fees that Lido is taking on, or any of these protocols are taking on, on basically, staking tokens. So I think this is a problem that can very much be solved, especially now the

SEC has stated, that stake tokens like STE are not securities. And therefore, you know, you can, you can basically, it's just as good as totaling ETH in terms of the issues with actually putting them into an ETF. So on the whole, I think that the story that makes the most sense to me for why the corporate form would be more attractive for ADAP would be doing some of the fancier shit. right so not just staking but if you want to do like leverage staking you want to do you know on chain yield farming or all sorts of other crazy stuff like if you want to go really far down the risk curve then i think the corporate form is the way to do that obviously that doesn't fit into an etf because maybe there's some flavors of etf for each strategy but having a portfolio strategy is just that's not

really an etf thing well not to add one more layer onto this so an etf or an investment company lays out in a prospectus exactly what the risks are how it's managed what the stress strategy is it's incredibly nuanced, it's incredibly detailed, and it's reviewed by the SEC. And when you suddenly switch to a corporate form, I think you actually lose a lot of this transparency in a good way and a bad way, right? The good way is the company can do a lot more things with a lot more flexibility and change its strategy on a second's notice. They could say, oh, we were staking this through Lido. Now we're going to be, you know, lending the ether in an on-chain protocol, oh, now we're going to be restaking it. It gives them a lot of flexibility because

nobody manages how companies operate with their balance sheet fundamentally. Everyone, right, like the SEC regulates exactly how investment companies manage the product because it's not a company. It's essentially like a basket of financial assets that are managed to a strategy. And that strategy is disclosed in detail. And so the opacity of what happens inside the company, I think primarily is more investor-friendly in a sense. But there's also hidden risks, and at some point some company might make a boo-boo. They might use a protocol wrong or who knows what.

But I think in the short term, it's definitely to the advantage of the investors that there's a lot more tools in the toolbox. If you assume that what's happening on chain, like the best way to earn yield, the best way, the best risk reward is dynamic and changes over time and you don't actually want to be locked in

to the same strategy, you initially launch your ETF prospectus, then yes, the corporate forum is superior for doing that. But that really does entail a kind of more active, more creative strategy. And the reality, and this is the argument I gave to Turin, I think, on the last show,

is that, like, Bitmine isn't doing any of that shit. And Bitmine is obviously far and away the biggest ETH dad, which tells you, like, that's not actually the story, right? The story is Tom Lee's on TV, saying that, you know, Ether's going to hit 16K. Like, that's the story. And I think the delta between, like, okay, we earning, you know,

3% a year on the story. staked, is the ETH staked or not? Like, it's so immaterial relative to an asset that's moved like 50% this year. So that's also part of the reality is that when you have a large set of investable products that represent different strategies using that the ETH that you have in a reserve, I think that potentially can be differentiated. But then you go down, you know, to what you were talking about, AJ, with Alcoins. I think for all coins, the end game is that there's one dat per all coin, and that's kind of it. And it basically, to my mind, I think if you think about what these debts serve as, a lot of it, even at equal, let's say, let's say the market calms down completely.

Let's say even micro strategy, even bitmine, start trading at 1x nav, right? And let's say that all the idea that there's a premium to these, these dats goes away. The question is, has there been any social value created by there being these alternative vehicles in corporate shells? I think the answer is pretty clearly yes. I think the answer is pretty clearly yes, right? Sailor would not be the CMO of Bitcoin if this strategy were not available to him. And actually, I think it's been very accretive to Bitcoin itself to have this kind of outsource CMO, right? It's like one of the functions of a CEO normally is not just that you build a product and you like, you know, manage the team and manage the day to day, is that you go talk to Wall Street and you go, you know,

tell the story and represent it to a broader set of investors. And for largely regulatory reasons, but also be, I think, sort of constitutional reasons, the leaders of crypto, projects have not played that second role. They were sort of not allowed to. Like, if you're Vitalik, you can't, you're still, it's kind of seen as like unseemly almost for Vitalik to go out there and be like, yo, yo, yo, Ethan's going to hit 10K. You should buy now. I drew a chart. Like, he can't do that, but Tom Lee can do that. And so you sort of have this like almost co-CEO thing where like the leader of the dat sort of becomes like the voice to Wall Street and to investors. And the other person is like the product CEO. And I think this is something that crypto has always needed, but never

really quite had, and that's give you a vehicle to like both incentivize and to attract the right kind of person to be the voice of the chain, so to speak, to a broader set of investors than the crypto-native guys can really appeal to. Yes, but that's good for the spot, right? And so like the question is, is spot crypto going up societally good, right? And like, yeah, I think for the most part of this. It's just so societal good. Right. Yeah. I mean, is any of societyally good? I don't know. Right. But it comes with a lot of like dead weight loss, right? So like if that's the the endgame and you have 300 debts that literally there's 300 public companies that are all

reporting, that are all hiring lawyers, that are all doing, you know, financials and 10 Q's, that all have a staff, that all have a team that all add no value, right? There's sort of at some sense taking the place of 300 companies that could be doing something unique or value add when they're just like shells that probably over time deserve to die by getting acquired by larger debts, whatever, whatever. I don't know if you have one per coin. I don't know if it's such a deadweight loss. But there's not one per coin or one per coin?

Because I'm talking about one per coin equilibrium. Fine. One per coin, then I think it's actually a societal benefit because it becomes like an investment management company product almost. Right. But there's not one per asset. Like look at Bitcoin, look at ether, look at Solana, right? There's an increasing number by month.

for each one of these majors. Okay, the end game, but I think that, like, the assembly line has basically frozen. The assembly line is basically frozen at this point. Like, now that these things are trading below Nav, like, if you're, if you're Bitcoin or Eith, how are you going to get a new one off the ground?

I think it's just like, I think it's basically done at this point. I don't think we're going to see new ones for the major. We're still seeing new ones launching, like, every week. I'm only seeing new ones for all coins and then for Solana, because I think Solana still doesn't have this, like, ascendant debt yet. And so I feel like there's competition

for people to try to take the spot for Solana. But for Bitcoin, I think it's basically over. I mean, I don't know. Tell me if you disagree. I don't know. I could see another Bitcoin or Ether one launching with like a different capital structure to it, right? I think, I know this sounds a little bit bonkers, but like I don't think we've seen

that much experimentation in the launch approach here. I think we might see people experiment where it's more debt. There's more leverage built into the launch. There's more corporate finance involved. I think because everyone has been. been racing to get to this starting gate of the race. They're all just doing these like pretty much equity only or equity heavy pipes. They're not even using the sailor playbook. I kind of think there's actually room for companies to get to the starting line, you know, going back to basics

and using a seller playbook and saying like, oh, we're going to like launch this debt with like a whole bunch of convertible debt and a whole bunch of like unsecured debt. And like all these things to like give it the leverage that originally built strategy. Strategy didn't start with like pure equity by Bitcoin. Like it always was trying to use leverage. And this was the critique of micro strategy for years and years and years. Everyone's like, oh my God, it's going to blow up. It's a levered long on Bitcoin.

The thing that drew people to strategy slash micro strategy was the inherent leverage on spot. And I think there's like a frozen assembly line because the same boring zero different strategy might be dead. But I don't think that dads in general are dead because I think we're going to see more creativity being forced in order for these things to get on the ground. Creativity. Creativity, meaning like taking on more debt. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like obviously, part of the reason why it's hard to see another one is because of the fact that Saylor had an operating company. He had revenues and cash flows under which, you know, you could, you could

underwrite a debt or convertible issuance. He had a liquid options market so people could hedge the, the exposure to these convertibles, nobody else has that. You know, like if you're raising from scratch, maybe if you're a big company and you're kind of a flailing, you know, sort of dying software giant the way that micro strategy was once part of time, maybe that's in the cards for you as like a Hail Mary. But if you don't see the premia out there in the market,

like that's markets working, right? That's markets telling you through the price signal, hey, we want you to do this. We want you to come into this market and load a bunch of Bitcoin on your balance sheet. The market's telling you, don't do that. There's nothing here for you, right? So I think people are largely heating that, that price signal.

Tom, what's your perspective? Yeah, I tend to agree. I think also I'm very curious to see what happens when these start to trade below MNAF for a longer period of time. I mean, there's a lot of sort of theories around, hey, there would be more consolidation, will it be sort of activists going in and trying to sort of raid the treasury? Will sailors go up and roll up a bunch of these kind of things or the alt-coin ones and sell up for Bitcoin? But I tend to agree, like you need liquidity. I think there was inherently sort of consolidation effects here.

So I don't know, maybe there will be some creativity. Like, I'm a little skeptical, but I tend to agree it's kind of like, I think of like a little bit, frankly, like the early gray scale trusts where it's like, yeah, you can disagree with a lot of the structure, but they did provide access to a lot of assets that people can otherwise get access to. And like, they still persisted for a very long time. So I don't see why this is not just an enhanced version of that. I mean, by the way, I just want to like favorite that thing you just said because I hadn't heard that before, which is, you know, seeing like a strategy coming in and buying up ether dats and converting them to Bitcoin.

Like I think that would be so entertaining and caused so much conversation on Twitter. I can't wait to see the crazy narratives that emerge when there starts to be like debt M&A and people cannibalizing each other and being like, you know, a salon of dad buying an Ethereum debt and being like, we converted the ether. or to soul, you know, like in all these things. So I think that's such a cool idea. High-sees piracy, you know, you loot the booty and then you, scutle of ship. It's interesting. It ties back to the whole, a little bit to like the whole adversarial M&A stuff that was going on last week with Layer Zero and Stargate.

But interestingly, so one thing I've increasingly started to think. So you saw this recently, the Sharplink announced that they were basically, they were potentially going to buy back their own stock, meaning that they were going to sell the underlying if they traded below nav. And this caused Sharp-link to rally, I think, some, I don't know, I don't know if it was a large amount, but it rallied on the back of this. And unsurprisingly, because like, yeah, okay, as a shareholder, I want my shares to be worth the most. And like this, but this, this, this concept that I will sometimes sell the underlying token if my shares are trading below nav in order to bring myself back, you know, sort of financial engineering, which is kind

of what you would think that is the mandate of a company like this. I think this is something you can only really do if you are the second largest or third largest or fourth largest dad. If you are the largest dad and you start selling the underlying to buy back your stock, then it's game over, right? That's how you start a death spiral. And so I think Sailor knows that he can never sell Bitcoin. And I think Tom Lee knows that he can never sell Eath. And they have not said this. They have not said, we will potentially sell the underlying in order to buy back our stock for trading below NAF. And I think it's wise to do so because there really is a delta. If you're Sharplink. If you sell Eath, it's kind of like, well, you know, whatever. Tom Lee will buy

it. It's fine. Like there's still a story there that like why the debt buy pressure will continue. But like if you're Tom Lee, you got to go down with the ship. And so I think there is also this this very difference, there's very large difference in behavior. So if you're, let's say you're the fifth largest ETH debt, okay? And you're trading below Nav and you're just like, well, shit, you know, we should either sell our stock or buy back the thing or somebody else comes in and acquires. Okay, let's say Sailor does this malicious acquisition. He's like, you know what? I'm going to buy this ETH debt liquidated for the underlying. I think Tom Lee then has to come in and like bid over the top and say, no, no, no, I'll acquire you at 1X nav.

And not sell the ETH. And like, just keep the ETH. And not sell the ETH, right? Exactly. So you get, you'll probably get these adversarial bidding wars start to take place from like the sort of captains of each ecosystem would be my guess of how this plays out if you start to see MNAVs really go below far below one. And like this becomes a more attractive form of, as you put it on piracy, dat piracy. It's going to get so spicy. I cannot wait to watch. It's like just an observer of this. It's going to be interesting.

Okay. So, all right. Speaking of spicy, there was some news from the WFE, which is not a wrestling federation. This is the World Federation of Exchanges. Okay? So this reps like old school exchanges like Nizzi and NASDAQ and whatever. And the World Federation of Exchanges sent a letter to the SEC Crypto Task Force and said, that tokenized equities are bad.

Tokenized equities mimic equities but lack shareholder rights and trading safeguards. They create investor risk and market integrity issues. Basically said, you should not let these guys call themselves equity because it's leading to misunderstandings

in the market and you guys should crack down on it. So Robert, as the Cryptoconisaur and the captain of, sorry, not the president, the Tsar of Super State, what is your take on the WFE coming in and trying to lay the smackdown

on tokenized stocks. Yeah, I mean, a couple things. So one, the WFE is not even based in the U.S. It's based in the U.K., I believe. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, it's not like a U.S. group. It's sort of like a global trade.

Oh, sorry, by fake news. So it doesn't represent the big U.S. No, I mean, no, it has members, I think, exchanges in many different countries, but it's like an international trade association. And they love putting tokenized stocks in air quotes. Like, it's like so-called tokenized stocks. stocks, you know, they keep on using quotes and air quotes and all these things.

And they have a point, but I think this is also extremely sensationalist. So here's the point. They're referring to one very specific flavor of tokenization, which is a third party goes out and buys a bunch of a company stock and puts it into an SPV and issues a token against it. It might be a totally different asset. It is a totally different asset. You know, Hester Perce and her speech a few weeks.

weeks ago, it's not magic or whatever the title of it was, says something similar. You can go out and take a stock and put it into a token format and you've created something new, right? When a third party that's not the issue where it does this, you are fundamentally making something new. It's not alchemy. It's not magic. It's just making a new instrument. It might be a derivative.

It might be a swap. It might be a security. It might be a security entitlement. You know, it depends on what exactly it is. Some of these things might be redeemable for stock. Most of them probably aren't. They're redeemable for a cash value. It's fundamentally different than the actual stock that you would buy in a brokerage account.

It doesn't have the same dividend rights necessarily. It doesn't have the same voting rights necessarily. It doesn't have the same cost structure necessarily. It doesn't have the same credit risks. Fundamentally, it is a different asset. So I will give the WFE a little bit of credit in that they've identified something which the SEC has already identified, which is it might be a different asset. But this is one approach.

And Robert, to be clear, this is the Robin Hood tokenized stock structure, correct? This is the Robin Hood structure, as they did it with Open AI, right? This is creating a third-party instrument that's not made by Open AI. It's someone going out saying- Isn't that also how they're doing most of their tokenized stocks, like to get the 24-5 trading and all that? There's a little bit of nuance there, but like, let's just say generally, right? Generally, you have a company saying we have tokenized stocks that we made, which is different than an issuer, OpenAI, saying we have tokenized our own stock. This is our Class A common stock that happens to now be on a blockchain.

We're using a blockchain for record keeping, you know, in addition to databases, in addition to, you know, the legacy system. Two very different approaches to this organization, third-party rappers versus it's done by the issuer themselves. And the WFE is only seeing the wrapper model and using that to demonize tokenization in general. And this makes sense, right? They represent exchanges. They represent incumbents. They represent people that don't want to see any market share leak into the crypto ecosystem. They don't want trading to occur outside of NASDAQ, NIC, Lundy, London Stock Exchange,

you know, TSE, whatever. And so, you know, I think they're using a little. bit of a straw man here. They're taking one format of tokenization and using it to paint a very broad brush, as opposed to taking what should be a correct and nuanced look at it saying there's actually multiple different approaches to tokenization, as even the SEC understands. This one approach might not be good, but they're painting with a very broad brush here. And I think it's a little disingenuous. And we'll see where it goes, but I think they're telling things to the SEC that the SEC already knows. And so I don't think this is going to change anyone's mind.

Why do you think this is not going to change anyone's mind? I mean, I'd assume exchanges are a very big constituent of the SEC and this lobby getting pissed off about tokenized stocks probably matters, I'd assume? I mean, listen, the SEC in Hester Perce's speech on like the different forms of tokenization already came out and said everything in this letter. Like this is not groundbreaking new information that is not being discussed in the halls of power, right? Whether it's like, you know, Congress or the agencies, they're not saying something that people aren't already discussing and understanding. They're honestly using it to try to be protective of the existing market shared that they have. So I think this is a kind of a non-of-it.

Yeah, it kind of reminds me of there is, I think, also a letter, a bunch of banks sent after a Genius Act, because I think the banks obviously were lobbying against interest-bearing stable coins, feeling very happy that, you know, those got removed from genius. But obviously there is a workaround and that interest from stable going to be given to an intermediary who can then give it to their users who might have stable coins on that platform. And so you can have sort of pass-through interest. And so the banks maybe discovered this more recently instead an angry letter.

And it's like, you know, it's very transparent that you're just talking your book and you're upset that this is like potentially cannibalistic to your core business versus some sort of weird moralistic, oh, this is bad for the ecosystem kind of story. It's like, no, it's just you're trying to protect your business. It reminds me a lot of like 12, 13 years ago, like the New York taxi medallion wars against like Uber. You know, it's like if you, yeah, it's like you don't have a medallion because it's a entirely new paradigm, but we're trying to have issuers use tokenization, which if it

was embraced and welcomed is actually a better conduit and vehicle for consumer protections for enabling voting rights. All of these things that we know you can do on chain could apply through tokenization to traditional real world assets. The only thing stopping it is the fact that you don't embrace it. And it's like a weird, like Tom saying, like, you know, they're protecting their book in some ways. I think it's a short-term thing in the same way that the medallion arguments against like

what Uber. Because I think if you think about just from like a consumer perspective, obviously if you assume that the technology itself can deliver the same. protective rights to users, but I think it can. I think we all probably largely agree can if implemented correctly. It's very hard to argue that it's not a better form of operations. And I think that's the thing that I think is probably over a long enough time horizon. Obviously, there's lobbies and there's enough influential people out there that can have

their own perspectives. But I mean, that's the thing I think in the end of the day, which will win. So I appreciate that. Yes, clearly they're talking their book. And, you know, okay, there's a lobby trying to protect the way that things, the status quo as opposed to the new thing. Give me your steel man for the concerns that they're raising about these whatever structures, these tokenization structures.

Sure. Just to reiterate their straw man first. Their straw man is the equivalent of saying like, oh, my God, there was a scammy pump. That fund token that was racist. Therefore, no crypto should exist. Right. Bitcoin shouldn't exist because, like, let's find the worst example and use it to, like, try to undermine the whole concept of a token.

Okay. That's essentially what they're doing. The steelman here is them saying there's confusion about what stocks are. If anyone can go out and make a quote stock, then it's going to undermine real stocks that are traded on real exchanges. And it's going to lead to confusion. And I understand this, right? When you go on Coin Gecko and you type in like the ticker ETH, how many different wrapped ethers are there? When you type in the letters, USD, how many different, you know, stable coins?

are there. And they all are sort of the same thing. And there's like all these collisions of what they are and like how many bridged versions are there. There's like a trillion of them, right? And so there's Steelman, I think, comes down to there's going to be a million things claiming to be stocks. And it might be okay. And then eventually someone's going to get absolutely wrecked because it seems like a stock, but there's no dividend that happens and someone's levered up and it goes to zero because they get liquidated because they didn't get the full economics of it. because of some edge case, like if it's not the actual stock, people are potentially going to get hurt. I think it's, I think there's grains of truth to that. I think those risks are already known

and being discussed and debated everywhere. We're all talking about like, you know, there's so many different models of tokenization. It doesn't mean tokenization is bad, right? People are going to try even crazier versions of tokenization that make synthetics, right? There's going to be even crazier things. They'll say, this is Tesla stock and it's like the Luna model. You know, it's not backed by anything, right? Just like there's so many different approaches to stable coins. And like we've tried a lot as a society.

We know certain models just suck, right, at this point. It doesn't mean that stable coins are bad because of like Terra, right? There can be bad stable coins. There can be bad equity tokenizations. There can be bad models. But it doesn't mean that the whole thing is bad. In fact, you know, there's really good. approaches in there. And I think they're trying to use one model, which is brand new and hasn't really

been tested at scale yet. I mean, all of these equity tokenizations are literally in like chapter one right now. We've seen almost no real volume, no real deployment, no real production on any blockchain. I mean, all of this is like so infant. And I think it's just a lot of fearmongering. Yeah. I mean, if you compare it, I thought there's a very apt comparison. If you compare it to wrapped versions of ether, doesn't really nail the fearmonger. because I'm like, yeah, there are a lot of rap versions of ether and it's kind of fine. You know, like, I don't think there's like pandemonium in the streets or like people scamming each other with rap forms of ether.

Like, yeah, if you find some like random ratchet rap, like the 20th form of rap theater, probably don't want to pay people with that. I'm sure there's a bad one somewhere there, but like who's who has that problem? I've never heard of anyone having that issue. So this feels like one of these things that like, yeah, markets kind of just solve like on their own, you know? Yeah. And I'm sure there will be a problem that appears at some point.

But I think anyone trading these generally is going and sort of with their eyes open. We'll see. I mean, crypto is a bunch of early adopters. People are in this market already taking way bigger risks than the fact that, you know, there's multiple different approaches to tokenizing Tesla stock, right? Some of them are good. Some of them might be bad. But people will generally, mostly get what they are expecting to get.

Yeah. Okay, so let's use that as jumping off points. Talk a little bit about Arbitrum and what you guys are doing with Robin Hood on the tokenization side. How's it work, AJ? Yeah, so explain to us like what's going on. How exactly does it work and why is it not going to explode? So I don't, there's a lot to their different approaches to their tokenization model. Obviously, they're very focused right now on like the mica compliance. I think it's only available in Europe and they're working very closely with those regulators. I don't know if you guys saw the, uh, chalkboard that flat had. I know you guys had on the show last week. I did see the chalkboard. If you look at that chalkboard and you understand all of that chalkboard, then that's really it. So look, I mean, in terms of like the intricacies

of the regulatory stuff, I know they're doing a lot of work both with the European regulators, obviously their acquisition of its stamp. And I may have a very phased and structured approach to how they intend to roll us out. You know, I think to Robert's point, like, you know, it's chapter one, but what's unique I think about the

positioning of Robin Hood is they are at the forefront of that consumer interaction. And, you know, even though there might be a lot of different approaches, some approaches better than others, like they're probably, and you know, this is why we're very excited to be working so closely with them, the most likely to be able to touch the traditional user in a more operationally effective way through their mechanisms. And I think it's important that they get it right. I think it's important that they work closely with regulators. Obviously, they have the platform, I'm sure, to be able to have those conversations. Yeah, but in terms of

us. So I think, you know, a little bit about sort of how Arbitram and Robin Hood are working together. I think one of the things that made, so obviously just, you know, in case your user aren't aware, they had this whole big fancy thing, which I was fortunate enough to attend in Khan, where they had a very elaborate and exciting announcement where they announced two main things amongst other, I would say, announcements. The first is that they're going to be issuing tokenized stocks. They started with like 200 only in the EU. So, like, for example, if you are in either Singapore or the U.S. You don't see the ability to buy tokenized stocks just in European countries.

And they're doing that currently on Arbitrum 1, which is like what most people call Arbitrum, the public Arbitrum chain. And their second announcement that they made is that they plan on launching their own chain, currently known as the Robin Hood chain, in which they intend to sort of build an ecosystem and around their products primarily tokenized stocks. From our perspective, it's very exciting. I think when we think about how we've been trying to position Arbitrum, and we can talk about sort of the business model behind it.

We've been very focused on, I would say, what we call this, like, barbell approach, because we think it makes arbitrage unique in the market, which is, I think, by most accounts, like a top five blockchain by economic activity, right, if you think about particularly on the defy side, perps, swaps, et cetera, and then like a stack that's very flexible and modular and adopted for people to be able to use. And our whole thesis is that we want to build very liquid, deep, credibly neutral, secure block space for institutions, individual developers that want to launch on a public chain. And as they work through their journey, they don't have to think about switching stacks.

They can work with the same team, same technology stack, and continue to launch their own chain. The reason why people would want to launch their own chain, and I, you know, you spoke a little bit about what was Vlad last week, is if you think about the economic models, particularly in an L2 architecture, if you have the users, it's extremely high gross profit margins. So something like Arbitrum 1 and Base, they operate. at like 93 to 96% gross profit margins on transaction fees. And if you have your own users, not only does it stop you from basically, especially if you're paying on behalf of your users from having additional operating expenses,

you can convert that into additional forms of revenue, both in the forms of transaction fees and also priority fees, which is like the equivalent of transaction ordering, which is becoming a larger and larger percentage of fees. So, you know, our whole thesis is when we talk to teams and Robin Hood included, like, we don't tell them you should launch your own chain or you should launch an arbitram one. We try and understand what they're trying to do and then build a structure and cadence for them to make sure that our product offerings can support what they're trying to build. So that's with the high level of it. So, AJ, I would say Robin Hood chain is probably like last cycle, I think the biggest BD deal of the entire cycle was probably when Polygon got Starbucks. right that was kind of like the shot around the world of like oh my god crypto's like it's it's happening guys

this feels like this cycle it's arbitrate getting robin hood chain i know there's there's many bd people who listen to the show give a what's the what can you share about the secret sauce of how you win a deal like that okay so yeah there's a couple of different components to this that i think were really helpful for us so the one i just shared which i think in the robin hood case was extremely important. They knew they wanted to get this product launched on June 30th. They had this thing planned in Khan for over almost 12 months. So this product, this tokenized stock product was launching on June 30th, like Kumheller Highwater. They were not ready and they're still not ready to launch the chain, right? To do a chain sort of with the ambition that they want, the infrastructure that they're

going to need, you can't launch that in stealth. It would hurt the product. So if you think about what their options are. They can launch it on a blockchain and then use a different stack to build their own chain. And we had unique opportunity to present to them, which is launch on the public arbitraltar chain and you get immense familiarity with the stack and all the benefits. You work with the same team, the same people. And we can, on your timeline, migrate to your own chain. And I think, again, that was idiosyncratically a very important part of this deal for them because they knew they needed to launch a tokenized stock product. then, and if you look at the market, you know, a lot of the other L2s, they might have a highly adopted stack, but they don't really have a, you know, core economic hub of their own blockchain. And then Solana, for example, which is a big economic hub, what are you going to do? You're going to have to migrate. There's no, like, launch your own Solana L1. So that was, I think, a unique opportunity of Arbitram. The second thing that mattered to them a lot, actually, and this is less, you know, sort of talked about is Arbitrum stylus. I don't know if you guys are familiar with what that is, but I'll give you the,

32nd version of it. So Arbitrim is a fully EVM-compatible blockchain. But it also enables you on the same chain to write programs in Rust, C-C-C-++, really anything that can compile to WOSA. So if you think about Robin Hood, they're not a crypto company. Most of their developers have no knowledge of solidity. They're a fintech company. And for them to be able to plug in Rust or C libraries

and have them still interact with Defi applications that are all EVM-based, that actually mattered a lot to them. didn't have to either hire new engineers or get their engineers to new programming languages, but they didn't also have to compromise on their ability to work with Defi application. So that was a second, the unique thing about Arbitrum. And then, you know, one thing is, you know, we've been working closely with them on the wallet side and doing a couple of other smaller things with them for the past couple of years. I think, you know, one thing in crypto, we like to always talk about, like, yeah, BD deals and

telegram and this and that sometimes, like, especially with like larger enterprises, is just building a very close relationship over a long time. You know, this relationship is like two and a half years old. We've been working really closely with them for a while. And I would say that that was probably just establishing that relationship, growing it, building trust and confidence. Obviously, you have to have the right product. But that was probably, I think, the most important factor of why they chose Arbishop.

Well, it's very impressive what you guys have managed to pull off. And I know that if you look at the surge in Ethereum over the last, a couple months, there's been, actually a lot of Ethereum-based assets have not done that well. They've done pretty well. Obviously, there's been beta kind of pulling up the whole market, but there's been a few standout winners in this eth rally. Among them, you know, like AVE has been one of them and very much arbitram has also been one of the assets, has kind of been pulled up. And I attribute a lot of that to the centrality of this deal and realizing that like, hey, Robin Hood now, the most valuable company that at this point that does crypto, technically worth more than Coinbase on,

obviously they have a big equities business as well. That's a big part of that story. But the fact that they're getting into crypto through Arbitrum being the front door is huge. Now, the other question I wanted to ask you before we wrap, one of the other standout winners this cycle, of course, has been hyperliquid. And hyperliquid, famously you bridge into hyperliquid through Arbitrum. But hyperliquid, unlike Robin Hood, there's a more common. call it somewhat tenuous economic relationship between hyperliquid and Arbitrum, in that hyperliquid, like they internalize their own fees, they're taking the users on their own chain,

and now they're increasingly bridging to other ecosystems. So I'm really curious how you perceive the hyperliquid ecosystem, given that they started with Arbitrum bridge as kind of being this launch pad, but they've very much taken on a life of their own. How do you think about that economic relationship as an L2? Yeah, so it's a good question. And so I think there's a couple of things I would say. First of all, it's like we have a very close relationship. I think I've spoken to Julian like three times in the last two weeks. We've very close relationship with their team. They're an incredible team. We've been working with them for a very long time. I think one, just to sort of been tugging cheek, flip it. And there's a lot of memes about arbitram being like the hyper liquid bridge. I promise you every L1 and L2 wishes they were the hyperliquid bridge. Right. Like the reason they are the hyper liquid bridge, they chose Arbitrum as the hyperliquid bridge is all the things I described about Arbitrum 1. cheap, secure, credibly neutral, liquid, and a good environment for them to onboard users.

So, like, I don't view it as, like, there's, like, tenuous, like, relationship or, like, an insulting meme. I think it's actually a signal to, like, the defy ecosystem that we've built. If you look at, like, hypercore in particular, not the L1, but the hypercore, like, that thing was never going to be built on, like, a public infrastructure blockchain, right? It runs its own engine. It's kind of like, you know, you know what I mean? I can't really describe, like, what it is, but it's not, like, it's not, like,

like going to be built on, it's not even built on the hyper EVM L1. It's built on its own thing. So the way I think about Arbitrim and the way I think about how we should be positioning the platform is I want Arbitram to serve developers however they want to use it. Right. Like I have no advantage and this is maybe like a BD lesson for others. There's no advantage for telling hyperliquid like you should be doing more with Arbitrim. They have a very clearly defined strategy of what they're trying to accomplish. And if they want to source their USC from Arbitrim, that's fantastic. It has a ton of network effects. for us, we should be thinking ourselves and about how do we part with them as they want.

And when we talk to them, we think about how can we make that experience of coming on change through Arbitram better for your users? And that's like where I focus it. So I'm not really trying to focus my energy on how do I get them to like pretend to be an L3 on Arbitrum because it's like a losing battle. We've already lost a battle. That's your perspective. My perspective is they are in many ways the largest customer of Arbitrum.

they source $5 billion in assets from the chain. How do we make that experience better for them and their users? Because that's where the upside is, right? If we can continue to provide the value proposition that we have, hopefully they continue to utilize us as their core customer base. And I think that any other perspective is really kind of trying to like make something that's not like we're a service provider and that's what we offer them. Fair enough.

It's beautiful. Yeah, but a tear to my eye. Thank you. All right. So, AJ, we're up on time. We've got to wrap. Anything, where do you want people to go to check out what's new with Arbitron and how to stay abreast of everything going on in the ecosystem?

Yeah. First of all, you can feel free to reach out to me if you ever want to build on Arbitrum, always looking to bring on more people. Obviously, Arbitrum. .0.io is the core developer and Arbitrum on Twitter. We also recently acquired, just going to do a quick plug, Zero Dev, which is, you know, the smart accounts infrastructure platform. So if you're working on that, we'd love to speak with you as well.

we're trying to basically create the best of user experience as possible to use our core product. So thanks so much for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. But this was fun. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. Until next time. See, everybody.

Thanks, everyone.