Unchained - Why the Crypto Markets Seem So Broken and How They Get Fixed After 10/10

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Rob Hadick and Gracy Chen dig into Bitget's universal exchange shift as more crypto exchanges look to become an “everything app.” Plus, Gracy lets slip details of U.S. plans and how it ties to its transfer of BGB ownership. Bits + Bips is spreading its wings Starting soon, new episodes will only be published on our brand‑new feeds. What you need to do: Click the links below. ⁠YouTube⁠ ⁠Apple⁠ ⁠Spotify⁠ ⁠X⁠ Smash Follow or Subscribe. 🎉 Done. Bitget since September has said it is much more than a centralized cryptocurrency exchange. Dragonfly General Partner Rob Hadick and Bitget CEO Gracy Chen peel back Bitget's universal exchange branding to reveal the trends driving the company's expansion and really that of other exchanges both in TradFi and crypto. The main takeaway? “Users want a place to trade everything.” Gracy also teases Bitget's U.S. market entry plans and lets slip the real reason the company transferred ownership of BGB.  Plus, why Gracy is not so optimistic about AI agents materially impacting the crypto market and what Rob says needs to happen for altcoins to accrue value again. He says it is no longer a market where everything goes up and down together. Guests: Rob Hadick, General Partner at Dragonfly Gracy Chen, CEO at Bitget, previous appearances on Unchained: Why All Financial Institutions Are 'All Systems Go' on Stablecoins Stablecoins Are Popping Up Everywhere. What's the End Game? When a Crypto Treasury Company Is and Isn't Worth a Premium Why Crypto Has 'a Good Setup' for the Long Term Right Now: Bits + Bips Links: Unchained: Inside Robinhood’s Big Super App Plan: ‘There’s Still a Lot of Work to Be Done’ Coinbase Launches Stock Trading and Prediction Markets Crypto’s Black Friday Was Its Largest Liquidation Ever. What the Hell Happened? Uneasy Money: Why Peter Steinberger and Non-Crypto People Hate the Crypto Mob Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream. Before we get started, a quick reminder, nothing new here on Unchained is investment device. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guest tonight may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit Unchained Crypto.com. Quick note before we get into today's episode, Bits and Bits Now has its dedicated feed. We're spinning off from the Unchained feed and moving to a new podcast and YouTube channel. So if you want to keep up with our weekly live streams and macro meets crypto breakdowns. Make sure to subscribe to to Bits and Bips directly. We won't publish there until March, but subscribe today so you can be ready

for launch. Be sure to subscribe to the new feeds at Unchained Crypto.com slash Bips and Bips. Today's topic is the crypto markets. Here to discuss our Rob Haddock, General Partner at Truck and Fly Capital and Gracie Chen, CEO at BitGut. Welcome, Rob and Gracie. Thanks for having me, Laura. Hi, everyone. So in 2025, we saw Fintech and fintech and crypto start to converge on the same competitive space. There's been a few attempts to create an everything app, and we're already seeing some of the players maybe pivot away from that while others are continuing in that track.

This is a concept that's actually mostly from Asia. We chat is probably the most commonly cited example of that. And meanwhile, we are seeing others like BitGet, Robin Hood, just merging crypto and TradFi. And BitGet is a prime example with its universal exchange. So Gracie, I would love to hear more about the universal exchange and what your vision is for that. Sure. Yeah, in crypto world, we are very familiar with the term CX and DX, centralized exchanges and decentralized changes.

After FTCX collapsed, there were a lot of debate on whether there should be more DFI trading, DEX and maybe CX have too much power because we are the custodial platform together with the trading platform. And some users also have their assets on CX's doing some earning, etc. I think after three years after FTS collapse, things cool down. Definitely people still trust CX. The UEX kind of market share went up about 20% from it was probably like 5 to 10% to where it it is today Tony Press in terms of a total trading volume market share. But for us, a merge or a trend, a few trends that we observed from 2022 until maybe 2025, and that made us want to pivot to new X. The trends being the first one, again, still DX is

becoming more popular, especially for new tokens. A lot of people realize, you know, CXs have a relatively tedious listing process and we do have team we do have resource for them we need to get the market maker ready when we need to list any centralized exchanges token but still there are only probably 600 700 tokens available on cx trading and big get Binance Coinbase may have slightly smaller range of tokens and then what what if people want to trade those tokens who are not who are outside of this top 600, 700 tokens. So we embedded our ability from bigger wallet,

which has already enabled unchain kind of swap and trading. That means, again, outside of these 600 listed DEX tokens, people can trade them on DX or decentralized wallets. So we embedded their ability into CX and have our users be able to trade the decentralized tokens, the tokens or slightly much more choices out there. So that's the first trend, embedding or integrating CX experience with the DX options, the DX tokens.

The second trend that we saw, especially from 2025, is the rise of RWA's. For example, tokenized stocks, tokenized commodity like gold silver, copper, oil, etc. are becoming more popular. And it is, of course, people talk about that for a long time. But it's until 2025 that we see some good players in the space. For example, X-Dox and UNDO, they both provide tokenized stocks with a relatively comprehensive structure of technology structure using like Oracle's to feed the price and an auditing process. Every single stocks, the underlying there is a specific SPV that holds the real stocks, and then they mint and burn the tokens accordingly when the users needed to trade them. So assets or players like this made

RWAs and tokenized stocks and commodities more feasible and more popular. So we also partnered with them to enable those assets on our platform. And then of course AI, we can change more on AI. But basically these are the trends that we realize as an exchange ourselves. It's not really accurate to call ourselves just CECs because now we have all those DEC's assets. And we're not just serving crypto users. We're also serving some sort of like TREDI-Fi users or at least users who may be going to use stable coin to buy TREGYASETI assets. That's why we think calling ourselves a CEC is not accurate and we pivoted to UEX universe exchange, universally asset classes. We want to enable our users to trade, to be able to trade again universally valuable assets.

That includes Forex, commodity, stocks together with cryptocurrencies. So that's a very important strategy we shifted or we came up with in 2025. End of 25 around September in my seven-year CEO letter, I wrote about the UEX for the first time. And of course, along the way, we also see some, I would say, great minds share, great minds are alike. Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, and quite everything's changed. OKX is also, in my opinion, in my opinion, leading going to the same direction. NASDAQ last year also mentioned that they want to tokenize their U.S. stocks and enable 24-5 trading hours. And NYS.E this year, January, mentioned that they want to.

also head to that and enable 247, which is more aggressive in terms of trading hours. So we are all building towards this kind of trading platform that provide RWA assets, more tokenized options, using blockchain to settle the transactions and broker the unbrokered. I would call that maybe short in that. Yeah, so that's the UEX. world that we have building. And Rob, as an investor in Bitgett, you know, what interests you about his vision or, you know, why do you think this makes sense for the future of BitGat?

Yeah, I mean, I think Gracie, she kind of talked about like the high level trends that we're seeing, which we're seeing as well as investors. We, you know, talk to not just, you know, all the centralized exchanges, but also all the decentralized exchanges as well and the teams behind them. It's very clear when you look at just user behavior right now. Like, users want a place to trade everything. They, we're seeing this a lot in the crypto space where people are talking a lot more about trading equities. We're seeing this on things like trade XYZ, who obviously has been offered in perps on hyperliquid for real world assets and commodities.

We're seeing this. And, you know, a lot of the spot equities as well. So, Grace, you mentioned things like X, stocks, which Cracken acquired. And so there's a lot of demand to be able to try. trade cross assets to be able to do complex R, we're able to do complex strategies that are only enabled on-chain or maybe being on-chain and off-chain and having both this X and the decks opportunities,

like Gracie mentioned, but doing it across different types of assets. And so it makes complete sense that Gracie and team are one of the first to really think through what this could look like. A lot of the competitors are also thinking through, you know, being the everything exchange. But generally in Asia, people have been quicker to adopt, you know, kind of new digital technologies. We've just seen that over time. We've seen that with payments over time.

And, you know, Bicitt's been at the forefront of that. So we're super excited for what they're building. And we think it's going to be quite interesting to see kind of how this plays out. I do also think the one really interesting piece that is true about being in tokenized equities, tokenized stocks, tokenized commodities and crypto together. is that it allows you to serve a global audience in a different way than you can in the current structure of how things work from a regulatory perspective. And because of that, that means that you can bring these really awesome platforms like Pickett has, which primarily might have just been

Asian, to a European audience or to Latin American audience, an African audience, an American audience even. And vice versa, you know, Coinbase is going to try to go international as well. But I think historically you've seen that, you know, a lot of the Asian audience. Asian exchanges, they understand customers a little bit better than the U.S. ones do. And so kind of that convergence and being able to go global provides a really interesting opportunity that just doesn't exist outside of this space. Yeah, I was actually going to ask Gracie as my next question. So this is a perfect setup about Bitcats customer base because obviously, so it's non-US

is very global, but I'm sure you have certain regions that are more popular. And I was wondering, so first of all, you like who the traditional customer base is. but then also now that you've rolled out these things like the tokenized stocks and the Forex and all that, if you're seeing that a different type of customer is either coming in for these features or if there's like certain geographies or certain types of customers that like we're existing customers but are now, you know, taking taking up these more tradfai kind of investments. Yeah. Yeah. So Biget started off seven years ago, seven and a half years ago, which was mainly based in Asia.

For that reason, even until today, we do have more than half of our users being Asians, East Asia, Southeast Asia, some areas that we see a lot of growth for the past few years. Then, I think in 2022, which is exactly the same year when I joined Begett, when we started globalization. So since then, we have more users coming from the world,

let him Europe, we see some growth there. In 2022, we did struggle whether we should have a Biggat-U.S. kind of setting in the United States, but that was still a question around the FTX time, but after that, we decided not to go into the U.S. market. We even ended lots of collaborations and development in the U.S. market with, for example, partners or KOLs. But this year, 2026 we are reconsidering entering the US. So hopefully there might be some interesting and good news coming up about the specific US market end of this year or later in the first half of 2027. But other than the US, we are quite globalized, I would say. We serve more than 100 different countries and regions in terms of our users' profile. But again, Asia is a big base that we

have. Then back to your second part of the question around the UEX version for users. I actually want to clarify because this could be a common misunderstanding that is Biggestio a crypto exchange or is begin like directly competing with companies like Robin Hood or in Asia. There's Foo, Mu, Mu, they're the same company but with different brands of the more low brands versus more global brands, but basically some traditional brokers. Are they our direct competitors? I wouldn't agree to that. We are still serving the need of our users who hold a stable coin rather than a fiat currency.

Also when they trade, even if it's traditional financial asset classes, for example, US stocks, it is tokenized US stocks rather than direct to US stocks. the traditional financial world has been around for 400 years. I guess that leads to the first stock exchange in Amsterdam in Netherlands. But for the past, you know, less than a century, the financial world isn't evolved a lot. It's still on the quite, you know, T plus two kind of settlement period. You need to have a quite T plus this process to open the account, etc. In our opinion, we don't want to go back to that old financial system. We think blockchain, just like how stable coin and crossborder transactions

are much faster and cheaper than traditional cross-border transactions. Similarly, the current tokenized stocks and tokenized world, probably liquidity-wise, we can improve. But in terms of the settlement and the technology itself is just faster and cheaper and more advanced. So we're still focusing on the enabling the crypto users. The major difference is they used to use Staplecoin, for example, use D-T-USDC, to purchase cryptocurrencies on us. But now we want them to use Stapagoyne to trade many other asset classes. But again, when I clarify, it's still mainly crypto users and

the tokenized version of everything, rather than going back to the traditional financial world of settlement, et cetera. And then in 2025 and six, after we rolled out at UEX, we did see a slightly structural shift in terms of we have more VIP clients, we have more institutional clients interested in this goal. still, again, still crypto users, but many VIP clients, you know, shifted some of their money at other exchanges or even at traditional financial brokers to begin because they can now trade all the different assets in under one umbrella, under one room.

And then, yeah, it's just like slightly different over there in terms of selling more, more valued assets, more valued clients and more VIP clients. I know I just want to follow up on what you said about entering the U.S. So are you, would you do like a typical kind of create a U.S. entity to do that? And then, you know, so similar to like a finance, finance, U.S. type situation. Is that how you would do that? Well, honestly, it's not because it's not what that I don't want to tell you. It's indeed we haven't decided. We're still in the period of time of acquiring some license.

and talking to our local partners. That's why I estimated this will only be done later end of this year or earlier in 2027, maybe after a year later. Right now in Q2 and Q1, our key focus in terms of compliance and global expansion is actually to get the Mika license and Dubai Vara license. Actually, the Dubai VAR license was supposed to be done in Q1, but given the war in the region, it's definitely delayed to Q2. to kill two. But for the first half of the year, those are the key things. But if we, what I would, what I am able to share is that when we are thinking about the US strategy, we don't necessarily plan to do it just by ourselves. We will definitely do it with some partners, whether it's a joint venture kind

of setting or we acquire some partners, etc., to build that foundation, are both, feasible. So rather than, you know, ourselves applying all the licenses by ourselves, I think it will take a much longer time, if not a lot of more money as well. But yeah, that's roughly the current plan. Okay. So I do also want to ask about one other new feature that is, you know, really tapping into kind of like what's happening in the wider world of crypto, which is you built this AI agent hub and obviously right now everyone's wondering how it is that crypto and AI are going to intersect. It's very clear that this is going to be probably one of the biggest new areas of crypto. So, you know, tell us what the AI agent hub is and, you know, how it works.

Yeah, you are very updated because we just announced our Bigget agent hub, I think, within 24 hours. for today. Yeah, well, I'm going to Twitter. Thank you for doing that. Yeah. So a key thing is we do see AI evolve a lot for the past, what, since 2020, and of 2020 when chatypt came out, right? From the stage of, you know, only chatbot to start with, then to more kind of like

protocol, like anthropic MCP, and then to more things. things like Clough Hub and GPTs that provide skills, some domain expert skills and reusable capability modules to where it is now. That's why OpenClaught is so popular, because OpenClau has the persistent memory, have like the active, kind of more active and multi-agent collaboration, cross-platform collaboration. So in my opinion, OpenClaught is probably the first open source framework that can successfully integrate all these abilities of chatbot, MCP, skills, agent, etc. That can be included into one deployable system. And then we see a lot of potential in that in terms of helping our users make better investment decisions or trading decisions. those open claw or this kind of operating system agent OS we call it agent OS kind of setting can

really understand our users own portfolio goals behavior habits etc so that help them make a better decision that's one thing we have heavily investing and then very very I would say pretty fast in in terms of rolling out our open claw platform as well as integrating many abilities to and to help our users to pay better. Another thing is our AI team, which was formed earlier last year, actually wrote out more than 25 different scenarios within Biggat where AI are used. For example, customer service, translation, those are, you know, simple things that you can, anyone can think of, but maybe more subtle kind of applications of AI in terms of a CX or UEX kind of setting could be know your transaction, KYT, in order to detect fraud or any potential

risk from hack or from sanctioned accounts, etc. KYT, that's one thing. A lot of marketing campaigns that they actually just wrote out a Gracie AI a few weeks ago. And that was just a fun experimental project that AI'd me put me in a cute avatar. And they detected, they collected my voice and made an AI voice of mine. And also the whole memory of Gracie AI was built on my past interviews and my opinions, not just for crypto, but also for some like personal growth, career advice, etc. Anyway, it's some fun project that we wrote out. And then Get Agent is a more serious kind of chatbot that help our users make better trading decisions.

All these things that we realize we have accumulated a lot of ability. And it's time to share with our clients what all these different AI tools can do. And that's why we pulled out all the, I think we published 58 tools in nine major different modules to cover the whole trading life cycle in terms of different products like spot products, futures product copy trading, ERM, P2P, etc. And using all these different skills that we mentioned earlier, MCP, API, chatbot, etc. And Rob, I'm sure Dragonfly is looking into this area in a big way. You guys just raised your $650 million fund. Congrats. And I heard Haseef talking on bankless about how he thought the unique use case for AI agents

that humans can't do is crime. I'm sure you're not investing in that. But talk a little bit about, you know, how you think crypto and AI will come together and, you know, how you think BitGat or other centralized exchanges are just like, existing, you know, crypto entities will begin to adopt more AI. Yeah. We're definitely not investing in crime. So I appreciate you saying that.

So right now it's still very much, it's very early today, right? And so there's a lot of conversation online about, okay, well, you know, what role will AI and AI agents play relative to, you know, crypto, whether it's permissionless crypto, whether it's, you know, obviously permissioned or centralized exchanges, et cetera. a lot of what Grace is talking about is, you know, really interesting modular tooling that people can use for trading, which are better than, you know, the things that have existed before, but are not necessarily, what I would say, you know, agents in the way that, you know, most of the conversation that we talk about agents, when you can let them go free and you can let them go and kind of learn and constantly learn and do new things and to be able to, you know, potentially see them go in really weird directions as we've seen with things like MOLPOT and, you know, etc. And so it's where those two will play in the intersection, I think it's still actually very much up in the air. We've seen a little bit of interesting, you know, kind of work around things like, you know, decentralized inference and training. A lot of these things have not worked, but we're seeing a little bit of signs of life in a few different parts of the market right now.

So far, it's definitely, you know, net worse than we're seeing, call it and, you know, our non-decentral. centralized counterparts. We've also seen things like, you know, there's VVV, which is, Eric Voorhe's project right now. You know, they're doing, you know, sort of a permissionless, you know, sort of, I guess, like private wrapper of a lot of the models on top, or you can get access to both, you know, call it the models that you and I maybe use every day, like, you know, a clod and Opus and Open AI, etc. But also to some of the, like, you know, permissionless models that, you know, don't have the same rules, then allow you to do things like, you know, potentially, you know, create, you know,

people's likeness that you can do otherwise or something's allow you to do like porn and things like that, which you can't do in, you can't do if you use OpenAI. And so we've seen some, you know, kind of this, what I would tell us, like, cypherpunk ethos in some parts of the market right now really start to pop up. And then, of course, there's this long conversation around, okay, well, you know, agents will need to pay with stable coins or crypto to be able to do agentic payments. I think there's a part of the market. Well, that will definitely be true. There's some conversation around micro transactions, but it is also true today that you can do kind of one-time use tokenized

credentials and a tokenized credit card, and you can bring those costs way down. And the networks can kind of sit on top of some sort of like, you know, stable coin infrastructure. And so where I actually believe, and I actually think, Steve and I disagree on this, So if he was on this podcast, him I would start arguing right now. But I actually think what we're going to see a lot of is we're going to see a lot of this, you know, stable coins replace, call it the settlement infrastructure for what still exists underneath like a Visa network. And a Visa network will still actually be quite, you know, useful in things like agentic payments.

And so there's a lot of these areas where we're seeing a lot of, I would say, just, you know, sort of experimentation today. And there's a lot of tooling that can help you be more. more efficient. It can help you do really interesting stuff on the trading side, but it's really, really early days today. I think Bicke out, again, is kind of at the forefront of experimenting around this and providing access to their customers. And it's going to get a lot better, a lot very quickly. We're seeing that, that, you know, kind of iteration cycle speed up. So that is exciting. And I think it's one thing that the markets will tell you right now, if you look at how volatile

the equity markets are, look how volatile some of these other crypto markets are. I think the number one thing that is being said and being expressed is that nobody actually knows what AI is doing and where we'll be in a year from now or even sooner. So I think it's as exciting time as I need to be playing around and experimenting and trying to be on top of everything that's going on. Okay. Last question that I have about BitGet before we dive into the wider markets is just about the integration with Morph chain, which is an L2 that has ZK fault proofs. But of course, as many L2s have a centralized sequencer.

So to start the partnership, BITCAT transferred all of its BGB tokens to Morp, and 50% were burned immediately, and the rest are going to be gradually released for liquidity incentives, other types of initiatives. So Gracie, why don't you tell us why you decided to do this integration with Morph chain? Sure, yeah. Morph chain, we know the team for a long time. we were initially their investor for, I think, two, two, three years ago. And basically last year, we were navigating our strategy for globalization and probably

for potentially, you know, it's probably not a secret anymore, but it's also not highlighted that in the upcoming maybe two, three years, we are looking for potential, get listed in the US. So BGB became a platform and it was a platform token for a long time, even before I joined the company, but if we have a token on ourselves, it could be a little bit of comfort of interest if we're also looking for an IPO plan. So that's part of the reasons that we thought about transferring the ownership of BGB. But even if we transferred all the BGB to Morf Foundation, we get wallet and Morph.

We are still supporting BGB as ecosystem providers, especially us as the exchange, where we have a lot of BGB used scenario for launch pool, launch pad, for VIP users to get a discount, et cetera. Those things remain unchanged. Yeah, but the key thing is we do want to, separate BGB from Beget and we thought holding it to more foundation is a good plan because we know the layer two very early. We are one of their investors and incubators. I think I think

Dragonfly backed them up as well and along the way supported us many of the important decisions we made including this one. Okay. So before we dive into all the things going on in the markets, There's just the last question that I have, which is about, you know, you're, you're, you have a big user base in Asia and obviously Dragonfly invests in both Asia and the West. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how you think crypto differs between Eastern West, you know, and this question is for either one of you. Rob, do you want to go ahead? Yeah, I'm happy to start.

I think. So as you mentioned, Laura, you know, Dragonfly, we've got. offices in New York and Singapore. We've got teams on both continents. We've been investing, you know, I think globally and far more globally than any of our competitors for, you know, call it eight years now. And our perspective has always been, like, what does this technology do? And I talked a little bit about this. What does tokenized stocks allow? What do tokenized commodities allow? What do these types of products sell? They allow you to go more global. They allow you to meet a global audience wherever they are. And they allow people access to things

that they might not have in traditional technology infrastructure that exists today in these normal markets. And so our perspective has always been that to understand where crypto is going, you have to understand the end user. The end user today is a global citizen, right? For a long period of time, most of the end users of crypto were actually much more likely to be Asian than they were to be US or much more likely to be on that continent than they were to be here. And so, Our perspective was when you're going to launch a new protocol, you have to understand that your customer base is going to sit in all of these different countries. And you want to understand their user behavior.

And what we see in, especially in Asia, is the customer base is far more digitally native. In some parts of Asia, Allie Pay has a 98% penetration rate, right? You do not see that type of digital money and that type of comfort with digital money anywhere else in the world, right? you do not the how comfortable people in the region are at things like trading different types of asset classes across you you know like my mother has never put in a trade in her life i don't think and but the you know the moms in Asia are often managing finances that way right they're often managing complex um you know different types of investments right you know the the dads are as well the the the whole family is like It's much more ingrained when you think about how people just work through their financial life

and how they work through their investing interests, right? And you just don't see that exist in other parts of the world in the same way and mass. And so that comfort, that focus, that interest means that we've seen higher rates of adoption more quickly across different types of products and asset classes in Asia than you have seen in the U.S. And so when we think through, okay, well, this consumer application, especially on the consumer side, or this defy application, this financial product, we want to go launch it. How does this application, how does this product, how does it going to resonate in places in Asia as well as the U.S., as Europe, as well as Latin America, is it going to be built in a way that can be multilingual, that can be easily understandable, that will appeal to these different parts of the world, Or is it also true that this is a founder who understands how to reach the types of customers? And that's really important as well.

And so these are the types of things that we are focused on when we want to invest. But it's also true that we're seeing a lot of growth now in the U.S. as it's become more acceptable here. And as we've seen the tailwinds behind the administration and from a regulatory perspective. And so the idea is that, you know, crypto is really just different across regions. way that user behavior is different across regions and the customer is different across regions. So when you invest, you have to invest with the mindset and the understanding of how those customers behave in these different places of the world and how much adoption has taken places in those different places in the world. So that's the way we like to think through.

Gracie, what would you say? Instead of Grace, they actually just wrote out Gracie AI and asked my AI the same question like how is crypto users differ from each other in terms of west and the east side of the market? While Gracie AI said there are few key differences for swan investment philosophy and time horizon, where Western users tend to have a longer-term investment perspective, view crypto more as store value or portfolio diversification, while Easter shows any more trading or speculated behavior. Second thing, raise appetite, leverage use. Third thing, asset preference.

Fourth, regulatory mindset that Rob also mentioned. Fifteen, community and social influence. I find interesting that sometimes I also forget how many interviews I've done in the last four years and how greatly I just collected all those information, which I actually agree. So to build on what Greasy AI shared, the real AI, sorry, the real Greasy, I would think before crypto, sorry, when we were only doing crypto, the major difference that we saw are very much aligned with what Gracia was sharing. For example, some, you know, social file or had to earn kind of game-fied kind of activities were much more active in Asia. For example, we all know XO infinity was highly, it was a very successful project at that time,

where users came, a lot of, most of the users came from Southeast Asia. And Tap to Earn, Telegram kind of era the end of 24. We also saw a lot of users from Asia and even Africa. Tap 2R is relatively easier, but of course it's not that popular nowadays, especially with, the introduction of AI. But basically, these kind of trends are quite obvious when we only serve crypto market. But now adding the RWA markets or the universal exchange kind of vision, in terms of RWA or stratify assets, I kind of see at least the users who are trading RWA's, for example, tokenized stocks, on the get whether they come from east or west,

doesn't make a huge difference. By default, our RWA, especially tokenized U.S. stocks, do attract more Asian users than Western users, because Western users probably have already have very good access to some U.S.-based brokers or European-based brokers, such as Robin Hood. But many Asian clients, they especially based, in East Asia. Some of them have very limited access due to capital control or due to the it's hard to open an account, etc. So they tend to trade a lot of tokenized U.S. stocks with us. But the trading behavior is a little bit similar in terms of the winner takes it all. The M7 stocks or some more ETF kind of stocks like QQQQ, RR, R2.

taking the major share of those trading probably top 10 tokenized stocks on big get take about 80% of the total trading volume although we provide more than 200 stocks to our euro users for example yeah so in terms of the rwa kind of asset classes i so far we don't see that much kind of difference in west and the east but when it was only purely crypto users uh i would say I agree, generally agree with what Greasy I said, and it's probably quite comprehensive and thorough coverage of how the two markets can be different. All right. So in a minute, we're going to dive into what's hitting the crypto markets today. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Quick note before we continue with today's episode, Bits and Bips now has its own dedicated home. We're spinning off from Unchained and launching a standalone podcast and YouTube channel focused on the Fed,

macro, AI, and how it all collides with crypto. If you want to keep up with our weekly live streams and macro meets crypto breakdowns, make sure you're following Bits and Bips directly. We won't start publishing until March, but getting set up now means you'll be ready on day one. You can find the new Bits and Bips channels at Unchained Crypto.com slash Bits and Bips. You can also find us by searching Bits and Bips on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Back to my conversation with Gracie and Rob. The U.S. and Israel, have been engaging in war in Iran for a couple of weeks now. And we are now seeing the price of oil just shoot through the roof. And that's because the Strait of Hormuz, which is where a fifth of the

world's oil passes is closed. So, you know, a few days ago, we saw oil trading or about a month ago, we saw it trading in about $70 earlier today. It spiked to past $110 a barrel. And I wondered, you know, do you think that crypto right now is just going to be at the whim of these macro Or, you know, what do you see affecting the price of crypto? I don't think there's any doubt that macro is going to continue to play a big role in crypto, right? And this is true across all risk assets. It's unavoidable that, you know, this conflict in Iran and the Middle East is going to continue to drag on risk assets generally, right?

There's, I think, a broader conversation around, okay, well, what is your time horizon? And how do you think through, you know, the structural backdrop of like what is happening? happening in crypto. And we talked a lot about this, you know, even through this podcast, which is, you know, stable coin usage continues to grow very, very quickly and significantly, especially across a lot of institutional use cases, tokenized equities and tokenized real assets continues to grow. We've seen a real excitement around, you know, getting, you know, kind of this regulatory backdrop in the West to be more conducive to using, you know, crypto in a bunch of different ways. And we've seen just like mass adoption of, you know,

like tokenized rails for a lot of these, you know, fintech, et cetera. And so like when you put all that together, you in a lot of what Grace talked about with what BitGat's doing really well, which is bringing this kind of everything exchange to the market and bringing it more global, you know, that's a really exciting time for this space. But in the near term, you know, the Iranian conflict is going to be the most important, uh, the topic that is that we continue to talk through, especially, um, you know, when you think about, like knock on effects. So, you know, the price of oil, as you mentioned, right, you know, how does that affect, well, you know, relative growth in GDP? How does that affect inflation?

How does that affect, you know, the excess capital that, you know, households have and the ability to continue to invest and, you know, consumer sentiment? All of those are going to be negatively affected by, you know, a sustained conflict in the Middle East. I think it's also, you know, it's not just the straight of your news, as you talked about, Laura, but, you know, we're seeing attacks on different oil refineries outside of the straight of Rameaus. We're seeing 70% of the world's oil comes from the region, even though it doesn't pass the straight, right? And so we're going to continue to see concerns there. I think it's also just true that the risk of, you know, call it, you know, like the risk of terrorism has gone up in the

U.S. as well, you know, based on this we've seen. I think it was the Kansas City Airport or the St. Louis Airport, one of them was had a risk of a terrorist attack over the weekend and had to be shut down. These types of things are broadly going to affect the consumer. And so, you know, though there's just shorter that this conflict is, the, you know, more likely that the, that the markets can find their footing. But when you take that into account with a little bit what we talked about earlier, which is just all of this, I think just uncertainty around how AI is going to affect the market. And we saw Block, you know, lay off 40% of their of their employees and the Cetrina report

a couple weeks ago and the market sold off quickly the day after. And nothing was literally just like science fiction. And, you know, but, you know, we still see this, a lot of this, you know, discomfort and in the markets. And so it's a bit of an odd time. But I think if you have the right, you know, long term understanding and the right long term conviction, like both crypto and non-term. crypto risk assets are, I think, you know, very, have very good backdrops for growth in what is happening in our market, what's happening in AI, and what is happening, you know, more broadly in technology. And so I'm excited about the future, but it's short term. It's, it's really tough,

I think, to be, you know, really long, any sort of asset, risk asset right now. Gracie, what do you think? I agree. I think right now, first of all, I would say the tension in the Middle East actually feels very, very personal to me because we do have an office in Dubai. And I've been to all these places that was affected during the war, Bahrain, Dubai, Qatar, actually you name it, just every single country. And then even in Dubai, all these places that were hit. For example, three months ago, I was just walking on Jumiravid with my seven-year-old son and my mother, and we just passed the Fairmont Hotel every day admiring the Palm Tree and pool. And now the same hotel was hit from the head of had a fire at the courtyard. Because, of the debris from the intercepted missile. So the whole kind of instability or geopolitical tension

feels extremely real and of course it's impacting the global market. And this directly affects how I invest in general because right now I would say risk of sentiment and diversification is no longer just a bus word. It's a necessity. You can't put all your faith in one region or one asset. And of course, for us, we are quite convinced that our users should diversify and they should look for different asset classes, not just crypto, and especially Bitcoin, is more of a risky asset today than a risk of asset, but also diversifying to some other global asset classes, including commodity. And then, back to Bitcoin itself.

Sorry, do you have a follow-up question, Laura? No, well, I was going to ask about Kevin Warsh, but if you want to talk about Bitcoin specifically, please do. Okay, sure, yeah. Yeah, so for Bitcoin itself, I would say right now, you know, 60K to 70K kind of price range is actually a good time to do dollar cost averaging. And I do think everyone should have a personal,

go for Bitcoin accumulation, you know, by by one Bitcoin if they just started off or 10 or 50 or 100. Although Bitcoin wasn't outperforming gold last year, nor right now, I do believe it well. It is the millennials digital gold and it is a pure capture or reflection of liquidity. So if, well, what you have more on a wash, but basically if the new fan in terms of the monetary and physical policy if we have more QE quantitative easing and the interest recut I think Bitcoin will catch up with with gold etc so I personally believe still highly believe in Bitcoin's growth trajectory and I think it's worth the investment especially if you have a relatively long time horizon three

to five years etc but if you're waiting for Bitcoin to just go up right away, very short term, if you're very impatient, I would say it's probably an asset classes that will take a little bit time. Okay, so I hinted out what my next question was gonna be, but it was about Kevin Warsh, and I just wondered how you thought

he might kind of handle what the Fed will be doing this year, and how you thought that would affect outlook for the crypto markets. Honestly, I want our Rob to to cover this question more because I think he knows the US market and he probably have some access to some policymakers and deeper views than than I am for sure. But my my my my you know quick three cents would be I feel the market has already priced in the fact that Warsh is a hawk and that that's probably the main reason that drove bitcoin down from where it was 65k to where

it is now 60 so 95k to 65k that's a huge drop of course when liquidity was pretty weak after 1010 last year the largest single-day liquidation um the any kind of bad news could be pretty bad But similarly, any kind of good news could be pretty good and the market could be quite volatile. But I don't have very strong opinion or anything sort of like insight on the new Fed chairperson other than what the market already knows. Yeah. So I think my take is a little bit is a little more nuanced, which is because I think the market doesn't know what to make of Kevin Warsh right now. So he's a, to Grace's point, he's like very clearly a hawk and, you know, the things that he says and the writings that he's put out and

the way he's acted before. There was also a lot of conversation is, you know, Warsh was handpicked by President Trump. And I think as all of us can kind of, you know, surmise over the last, you know, two terms of President Trump is what the thing he typically seems to care most about is loyalty. And, you know, people who really want to try to enact his agenda very clearly, you know, he's been, I, my opinion would be, and I think a lot of people would share this, that Jerome Powell has actually done a pretty tremendous job post, you know, 2021 and, you know, and kind of managing the ship. The Fed was a little bit late to the hiking cycle, but it wasn't, you know, it did a pretty good job during that period of time. And yet, you know, President Trump has been out there just lambasting Jerome Powell, basically every chance that he gets. And so I think there's something to be said about, well, you know, what has the conversation been like between, you know, Kevin Warsh and President Trump? And how might that affect the way that he actually does act, you know, going into, you know, post being, assuming that he's confirmed?

That said, the Iranian conflict like we just talked about has made this a tougher job than it previously was going to be, especially if this sustains. And we, I think I saw over the weekend that Goldman is expecting based on how long this goes on, that the inflation will go up from 2.4% to 3% annualized. It's if this goes on for longer and oil continues to be constrained, inflation will go even higher. And if that happens, then it becomes significantly harder for Kevin Warsh or any sort of Fed share to decide to cut rates. And so I think it's very uncertain right now on what exactly will happen. I would lean more towards the path that there, you know, Kevin Warsh will want to work with the administration more than Jerome Powell wanted to. And what that would probably entail would be a more likelihood of a cut cycle. That said, now with what's happening in Iran, I can't be confident what that will look like.

All right. So I did also want to ask, you know, we've been alluding to this throughout the conversation. And I'm sure we all know that there are so many theories about this on Twitter, lots of podcasts about this. But the market, you know, in crypto hasn't been quite the same ever since. 1010. And I wondered if you had thoughts on kind of like what broke that day or do you think it was just the typical four year cycle and we're going to, you know, be in a bear market for a while. You know, I'm hearing other people say that they really think that this will be the year that proves that the four year cycle is dead. So yeah, curious for, I guess, your thoughts on,

was it really 1010? And if so, then what will kind of fix things or what happened? Or is it just the typical cycle. I'll start since 1010 kind of has a lot of issue to do with one of the CX, especially the technical glitch there. So in terms of 1010, what happened exactly we kind of all know already, it was triggered by a sudden macroeconomic event when Trump mentioned that he will start a new trade war with China, although that kind of cooled down later. But then the technical glitch that happened mainly on Binus caused a lot of issue when doing, by the way, it was also a liquidity

vacuum, I would call, because it was, I think, in Asia Saturday morning, and then the U.S. market is also closed. So the whole liquidity is very weak, and it's mainly. reflected on crypto since crypto is a 24-7 market that was one of the major asset classes that was still open. And then a lot of high leverage in CX or in certain DFI protocols went wrong. Especially I would highlight USDA, but USDA was mainly having liquidity on the so-called deep-hanging on Binance, rather than DeFi platform, I think Hasseb tweeted a lot on that clarification, which I totally agree. But other than USDA, there were some WBEs or BN-Soe, which are wrapped

version of Solanin and Ethereum that were highly deep-packed from the original asset, Solana or Ethereum. And that cost some more liquidity. And then all coins were done. So that was probably the the main things that happened on 1010 or 1011 depends on your time zone. But I would call it a series of things that triggered together, triggered by the macroeconomic event together with the high average structure, liquidity vacuum, technical glitch on certain CX, etc. So it's not just like one thing happened, but yes, the whole world looks very different from after 1010.

I think maybe the high level point to make, which is everything that Grace said is true. There's, I guess, two points to make. First is, I think on a more micro perspective, just how much it matters to be able to do appropriate risk management and to think through how your Oracle set up what that looks like and, you know, to make sure that you're able to appropriately, you know, met redeemed different types of wrapped assets and bring them on platform and, you know, et cetera. So we've seen, you know, obviously there was some infrastructure and risk management issues at some of these places, as, as Gracie mentioned. I think the higher level point to make, and, you know, the fact that we look so different today than we did before then is it's not clear to a lot of people from the outside in, but 2025 was an awful year for the consumer in crypto.

It was the, we've probably never seen so much capital lost by the traditional consumer in a year as we had, it hasn't been 2025. At a time when we saw institutional adoption picking up, when we saw stable coin adoption picking up, when there was a lot of excitement around, you know, what was happening, you know, in the space in terms of allowing it to enter the U.S. market. Between, you know, what happened with the Trump and Melania meme coin, what happened with, the liquidations around the tariff tantrum and then what happened on 1010, we saw more capital liquidated last year than we had seen basically in the entirety of crypto before. And so it's been, it's really hard to go to a consumer and say, hey, we know that you've lost a bunch of money, you know, in derivative products on this, in this space. But you know, you need to trust us and

come back and to continue to invest. And so we have to, you have to, as an industry do a good job of, you know, explaining why people should continue to invest in this space. And this is obviously a trading point versus, hey, I have like a long-term buy and hold perspective on like what, you know, Bitcoin accumulation means in the dollar debasement story and digital gold. And we need to continue to make those points. But when the consumer loses money, they don't come back. And, you know, that's the thing that we have to think through around How do we provide value to the consumer that isn't just, you know, trading capital that may or may not get, you know, have them lose money over time? And, you know, I think this is something we've seen like Robin Hood do really well, right, which is a lot of the criticism of Robin Hood for many, many years was, hey, like this is just a, you know, gamifying, you know, gambling, right, or speculation, right?

And, you know, something like 70% of options traded today are zero day options. A lot of that is these retail bases in places like Robin Hood, which are. more speculative products. But what have they done as done well on the side of that is they provided, you know, a really broad set of now wealth management products and spending products for consumers that now see Robin Hood as a place for their call it financial future. And now they can invest in across different asset classes, right? And that gets back to how this podcast started, which is, you know, what is BICET doing when they're launching their kind of unified exchange is they're providing universal exchange.

Universal exchange. They, that's not unified exchange. that they're allowed to, they're able to do all of these different things that affect their financial lives and that are allowed, that are providing value to them. And so I think that we have to continue as an industry to focus on that versus, you know, just like this speculative, you know, trading products. So earlier we also talked about Bitcats new AI agent hub. And, you know, given the state of the markets, and I agree with you, Rob, that like when you have $19 billion in liquidations, that people literally don't even have the money to come back in, you know? So that might just be what's also going on in crypto. But when I look at the AI agent thing, that's kind of the one area

where I'm like, well, that could pick up. Because I've heard Gracie talk about before how she thinks all coins are just dead. Like she doesn't think there's going to be an all coin season coming. And so, you know, that typical trend that we would see of altcoins kind of having their season after the majors take off. Like, it didn't happen this cycle. It may not happen again. I don't know. But when I look at the AI agent thing, that is kind of the one area where I'm like, well,

this is clearly something new that's blossoming in crypto. You know, I don't know. Do you think that we might see that materially impact the markets at any time soon? And if so, like in what way? Okay. I just quickly build on what Laura mentioned around my very, bold statement about all coins are dead. Yeah, of course, it sounds a little bit extreme, especially as a CEO of one of the largest

UEX or CEC, crypto or all coins are the foundation of our business, saying they are dead is a little bit too much, I would say. But my point is, in general, investing in all coins, it's on average. On average, it's harder to outperform Bitcoin. Still, there will be a lot of all coins that has growth opportunities. They are seriously building on something. Dragon Fletcher makes a lot of investment into those space as well. And then in terms of AI plus crypto kind of outcoins, I do struggle with this.

Actually, a year ago, I made a prediction in January that with the development of A.A. AI that those AI outcoins could be a growth sector and even could be the only growth sector. I was only half right about that. AI is growing very, very fast. But the AI all coins are not. If we compare, for example, Coin Gecko, AI sector, kind of all the all coins market cap, it's only half at end of the year than the beginning of the year in 2025. So that kind of ties back to when I said all coins are dead.

It's very hard for all coins to grow in terms of market share. Bitcoin is becoming more and more dominant if you look at the total market cap. And then there are so many outcoins coming up every day, especially with platforms like PomtoFaun. It's so easy to issue an out coin token. So with the market total size being same or even shrinking since Bitcoin is more dominating institutions or institutional kind of adoption only go to the major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Ethereum. The market of all coins is shrinking, but the quantity of the all coins is growing. So each individual our coins just by mathematics itself should be

shrinking. And that's what I mean by all coins are dead or it's harder to invest. But now with AI, I think, again, nobody will doubt the trend of AI. But I still doubt the trend of AI tokens or AI outcoins, whether, first of all, many very good AI products, you know, like OpenClau, like Open AI, they are not issuing a token. And then many so-called AI projects or AI outcoins are not really doing a good job in terms of providing their AI services. So that's what I struggle and I still remain very relatively negative towards that sector. But one sector that I am optimistic is we touched upon that earlier in terms of how AI agents kind of communication and growth can enable more cross agent transfer using stable

coins or using cryptocurrency. So that is a sector that I'm optimistic. But if we're talking about some, you know, some project that claims that they're building AI. The AI tool, AI agent, to me, many of them look more like just a meme, just an AI meme. Sorry if this kind of provokes some arguments around our coins or on some projects who are really building. I do again think that many good projects

who are seriously building, but it's just harder and harder to find them out. You know, the only thing I would add is I don't think all coins are dead as a rule. What I do think is true is that there more than ever. There needs to be some story around why a token needs to exist, how it accrues value, and is this a protocol that's, you know, or a token attached to a protocol that's actually, you know, worth owning over time. There's, you know, for a long period of time, and we've seen this in traditional markets,

There's, you know, you shareholders care about how do you return capital? Is there dividends? Are there, you know, buybacks? Like, what does that look like in terms of, you know, creating excess value for, you know, that shareholder? What ownership do I have of this company or over time? And I think it's very important that we get some version of a market structure bill that allows for more innovation at the token economic level and the token structure level, which allows, you know, investors to feel better about. about what they're actually buying. And this has really been underpinned, I think, by the fact that you've seen a couple of these MNA transactions, Circle buying Axler and the, I think it was Coinbase who bought the vector dot fund team or tensor team, where there was some capital that went to equity holders into the team, but the token holders basically got nothing.

And that really underpins this idea that some of these tokens exist, maybe just as meme coins, attached to maybe a really good business or product, But the tokens themselves just are mean points. And so what we want to see is we want to continue to see more innovation at that kind of token structure level. And then when you see that, you'll see people more excited about owning certain types of tokens and certain types of markets. And we're going to continue to see dispersion across, you know, the way some of these different tokens, you know, crew value or not and what performs well or not. in 21 and 22 you used to see everything go up and everything go down together that the sign of

a maturing market is that that is no longer happening that now that there is actual dispersion between the things that work and the things that don't and so that's a good thing for us even though i think it makes it harder than ever to invest in the space all right well it has been so fun chatting with you both thank you both so much for coming on unchanged thanks laura thank you Thank you.