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- [00:00]
Podcast Host (Ad Read)
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- [02:19]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Crypto 101 podcast. I'm your host, Bryce, not joined by my notorious compadre Brendan. Today he's traveling around the world and he's unable to make it. And so I am so excited to have the solo pleasure here to discuss all things defi. All things markets with co founder and CEO of True Markets, Vishal Gupta. Welcome. How are you doing today?
- [02:47]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Doing great, man. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:49]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Yeah, really, really excited. You know, you've got a great pedigree, you know, former Goldman, former Coinbase and Circle. And now you're branched off on your own, building your own product. You've raised a bunch of money. Walk us through a little bit about your story and just a little bit about who you are so that we could kind of get a sense of why you're building true markets and why you think this is such a, you know, honorable endeavor.
- [03:16]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah. So background computer engineer. Ended up. Actually my first real job was on the trading floor at Goldman on the electronic trading side. I used to, I was one of those nerds that would try to like, spread trade in college. And this is, you know, I'm a little bit older than probably most of your audience. I graduated in 02. So this is before the markets had really gotten fully electronic. And you know, I joined the. Then, you know, what was then like the Goldman Sachs electronic trading desk. And, you know, I learned a lot. I was there for almost 10 years. I ended up working on equities, futures, FX and then running their options business. I met my co founder there 17 years ago and this is our fifth business together. So he's ex Goldman, ex Coinbase himself. You know, I, you know, we, we ended up taking the options business from essentially like a very small, like zero business to almost 10% in market. We were doing everything from institutional to retail wholesaling, including payment forward flow businesses. So some of our biggest clients were like Fidelity and some of the other big brokers out there. You know, I left traditional finance knowing that, you know, we had lost the kind of the plug on like what innovation was, right. We just kept going faster and faster and at some point I'm like, that's not really innovation, right? That's just leaning against Moore's Law and saying, hey, let's just trade faster. And so, you know, I kind of pivoted towards fintech and crypto. I was an early guy at a place called Moneyline, which is an online lender that was run by a bunch of ex Goldman Citadel guys. Retail focused, app focused. I wanted to dig deeper into crypto. I was trying to actually build like a prime broker in the space when that wasn't like, I think bitcoin was still under 1000 bucks at that point. I couldn't raise the capital I wanted. People just weren't interested in crypto at that point. I ended up. There was really kind of just a handful of companies that you could work for that were worthwhile. I talked to Coinbase initially, but I ended up taking a job at Circle as head of business development. But more importantly, they had handed me the white paper and they said, well, how do we launch this thing? So I was in charge of launch and growth of USDC from zero to half a billion in market cap. You know, at the time there was really kind of a battle, right. Like Tether was out there already. There was kind of a cluster of initial stablecoins like GSD, TrueUSD, Paxos Dollar and USDC came out last. So we really had to kind of lean into our messaging, which was like, we're fee free for Mint and Burn. We're multi issuer, which is really important for people that were worried about the risk of burn. Like, hey, if I give you $10 million of, of USDC, I want to make sure I can, I can like burn it and get it back to dollars as quickly as possible and multi issue. Yeah, I mean, we had a couple of caveats that like, really let us like kind of lead the market and people saw that as the benefits of usdc.
- [06:16]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Yeah, I remember like trading, you know, between USDT and usdc. And I think, you know, USDT was really the primary choice originally because it was a trading pair.
- [06:26]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Right.
- [06:27]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
It was just first. And so like on all these different, yeah, Binance, Polon X, like Bittrex, like all these things like traded against actual tether, like not US dollars. And so when USDC came on the market for, for me as a trader, like the big selling point was like, oh, tether is unattested and they're offshore and they're, you know, again, you know, things have changed radically now. And I just saw the president shout out to Paolo Arduino and say, you know, tether, like what, what a great business.
- [06:52]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
I was on a listed tether at Coinbase. So like I also, you know. Yeah, for that too.
- [06:58]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Yeah, yeah. USDC always had that sort of stamp of like. Yeah, regulatory approval almost.
- [07:04]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah. And you know, I think one of the Big key reasons why USDC was winning was also besides being fee free at the time and multi issuer, so less risk. It was also like, like fast. So we were the first to integrate with Silvergate Send. So it was really, it was like a couple seconds to mint and a couple of seconds to burn. And if you're a large scale market maker you like don't want that risk of like how long is it going to take for me to get in and out of this thing. So that helped us kind of get there. You know I did everything I could do at Circle at the time. They had sold Poloniex and sold the OTC trade desk and pivoted the entire business towards usdc. And I kind of saw the running on the wall where I went from having very few bosses to all the bosses at one time and kind of just went off on my own again. Ended up getting an offer at Coinbase to join pre IPO as CEO of the exchange business. And at that time the exchange business, we only traded 20, you know, 20 token spot us. You know it was kind of a simple business. The, the matching engine was, was pretty bad at that time. Yeah, Patrick, my co founder joined us. This is, he built his seventh matching engine and true and true market. So he's kind of a matching engine expert.
- [08:13]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Kind of helped us scale a lucky number.
- [08:15]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Exactly, yeah, lucky number seven. So you know he helped us scale that business and allow us to, to do asset addition. So I was in charge of acid addition from 20 assets to 235. And then behind the scenes, thank you for your service.
- [08:28]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
From the trenches.
- [08:30]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
I was just like, you know, many ways just a head product guy leading a small org at a big company. But the reality was like we knew that asset addition was really important. Brian had kind of pushed us to think about being the Amazon of assets and kind of fighting for market share. And as we start looking at market share we're looking at well the real markets are derivatives. Right. And so there was a real push internally to figure out derivatives. So one of my mandates was to expand into derivatives. So I think the third biggest acquisition in crypto at the time was Fairx. So the company that we bought that was a regulated cftc, regulated dcm. And so we launched Coinbase Derivatives Exchange in the us. So you recently saw them launch like perp style in the US out of that business. We also took that engine and this is before FTX blew up. We took that engine and we, without hiring any engineers, we created Coinbase International Exchange, a perpetual futures Exchange. And so I left on the day that launched and I think on the best days, you know, Coinbase international exchange is 10% of the perps market. So you know, I kind of did the work to kind of scale that business. But I, you know, I was there, you know, I gave myself two to four years when I took the job and I stayed at 3. So I think I nailed it. And you know, really, Patrick and I have always kind of wanted to build businesses together. We've never done anything, venture back on our own. We've always been backed by a company or backed by, you know, individuals. But it just felt like our time. I'm 45 years old and it's time to build our own stuff. I think we've done a lot to build in the crypto industry. We've been putting our fingerprints on a lot of this stuff and I think it was just time for us to try something new.
- [10:12]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Yeah, I completely agree. It's your time and you guys have got a great product and a really interesting product because it's something that's a lot different than what's out there. And so Coinbase holds your keys and they're the custody of your crypto. And if I go to something like Uniswap, I'm only the custodian and there's not really much of an interface. True markets almost feels like a hybrid between a great centralized trading experience, but also the benefits and the pros of having true self custody. So why was it, I mean, of all of your experience, it kind of makes sense why you would go down this route. But tell us, you know, from the horse's mouth, why did you choose like this is my baby?
- [10:52]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah. So like just to define true markets where a non custodial hybrid C5 DeFi exchange that leverages stablecoins as that as a core on ramp to, to bring dollars in. So you know, we saw a couple of things like kind of work really well and didn't work really well on both the C5 and DeFi side. So like a good, good example of asset additional is painful. So going from 20 assets to 235 took years and it took hundreds of people just to get it through the process of this like digital assets listing group that we had at Coinbase just to get it across the line. And I was really kind of like the last, I was like the last guy at the end to be like, okay, let's get the markets up. And like even that was extremely hard. Right.
- [11:35]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
I bet you never want to hear the Word Howie again. Exactly, exactly.
- [11:39]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
I mean it's a process and the reality is like in a world where new assets are being created on the fly all the time and like you know, Trump launches a token and it takes too long for it to be listed on a centralized exchange. Like we see the benefits of defi of just enabling an asset. So we being non custodial we use turnkey wallets behind the scenes which you know, we love the guys at turnkey, they really kind of enable our non custodial wallets. But on the other side of it we use a qualified custodian, Paxo, so a really well known name in the industry to hold things like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and other stablecoins if you want to hold them in a qc. So really kind of blending, you know, in many ways our current version looks like a moonshot competitor. But by the end of September you'll be trading Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana settled to a qualified custodian, which even Coinbase doesn't settle. Your retail, your retail trades to a qualified custodian, your prime trades do we give you the added security of being a non custodial and separation of the execution and custody. So you'll be able to trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana SPL EVM base tokens on our platform by the end of September this year. And that kind of gives us the leg up. And I think the one key ethos that we have here that is different than most players is that we believe in fair pricing. And I think if you look at some of these exchanges, you look at some of these platforms, you know, like some of them are charging an extreme amount of money for like $1 trades or $10 trades. It's still kind of like 250 basis points to buy Bitcoin right now Spot. And so it's extremely hard to get exposure to Bitcoin Spot for example and that's been around for a long time.
- [13:15]
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- [14:03]
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- [14:32]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Yeah man. It's really the kind of in my opinion sort of what the market really needs. It's something the market has tried to do for a long time. I could think of like just the graveyard of apps in the past who just like never found product market fit trying to do something. But like the timing right now is just so sweet. And like you said with turnkey, like having like the back end super dialed in then having the regulation and like having all these policies now that are like you know, enshrining stablecoins as like a key part of digital infrastructure now it's like the timing meets like the innovation and you're like you're doing it right now. That's crazy.
- [15:07]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
We're post ftx, we're a US based company doing US based things. We in last August we came out of stealth before like really kind of Trump kind of pushed his crypto initiative and we said we're going to the US first. And so we were the kind of the first platform that said that. And you know, we've got our own matching engines, we've got our own C5 DeFi settlement. Like we're just kind of ramping up and we're going to offer something safer, fairer and just better than what the market has right now.
- [15:33]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Yeah. So, so let's walk through some of the stablecoin stuff, you know.
- [15:37]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Right.
- [15:37]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
You know, with the genius act. And you're the expert on stablecoins, not me. But the genius act, I know it only allows for certain kinds of stable coins to like be legally permissible in certain environments. Like what kind of stable coins would your platform accept and what kinds would you not accept?
- [15:54]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah, I think like let's stay focused on our U.S. business. You know, right now we accept USDC and PYUSD. So that gives you an idea of kind of like fully backed, fully regulated PayPal and Circle. Yeah, circle. So we, we and we actually handle stablecoins a little bit differently than most platforms where like FTX would just kind of bucket them and call them USD. Platforms like Coinbase only really speak USDC and they can't like if you tried to like use PayPal for PyUSD for collateral, it's really, it's not possible. The way we do it is we have a default stablecoin where we kind of take, let's say if you come in with USDC, we, we, our default stablecoin is PayPal's PyUSD. So we have a deal with PayPal, PayPal's an investor and through the platform we denote all the order books and pyusd. If a CL comes in with usdc we handle it through multi leg orders and a bunch of other things. So like we just do it the cleaner way. The risk is on the market makers, not the market. You know, it's, it's the right way to do it. We've been thinking about stablecoins and markets for a long time. I've been in markets since 02. There's a little bit of gray in my, in my stubborn area. I promise I'm older than I look. So we've been thinking about these things a long time and stablecoins are a key unlock, right? So what's happening right now with the genius act and all the other things that are happening is that USDC is essentially 99% of the US domiciled US denominated. Right. And again that's the X tether world. And you expect to see with clarity of regulation you're going to expect to see a lot more competitors, you know the stripes like from the big banks and everything, big banks and Web2 giants and exchanges themselves. So they're going to be creating their own stable coins and we want to be a stablecoin agnostic platform and that's our goal, smart and so we can like kind of, we can pivot to any stablecoin you want to bring in. And we behind the scenes like the kind of like the trojan horse here is obviously the trading business that we're building but behind the scenes we're building core stablecoin infrastructure to go from one to the other and kind of just handle these trades effectively multi chain. So I mean we're like hard tech, core infrastructure guys and we have like an app, right? Like in many ways we look like, you know, it's like it's OpenAI and ChatGPT. We're hard tech. We have a matching engine, we have CFI DeFi settlement, we have routing, we have a bunch of cool stuff that we've been building and then we built an app really kind of like last minute to get it out to retail. And it's been, it's been taking off. So people really like what we built. Built.
- [18:12]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
So far, what's been kind of the biggest selling point to your customers to really incentivize folks to say, hey, leave your current trading setup, which you've got a lot of comfort and security with and all that, and come on over and test it out. Is there any. I know a lot of crypto companies do airdrops or some kind of subsidies or incentives. Do you have any of that or is it just, hey, we just got a better experience.
- [18:35]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
It's a really good question. So I don't think we're like really targeting someone like that is an existing, let's call them like an exchange player. They've been in crypto for a long time. I'm not like trying to necessarily pull them. I'm trying to. You know, there's so many people that have never touched crypto. There's so many people that are afraid of trading in general. So like, the reason why I call it True Markets is like, obviously we're focused on crypto, but there's so many other things to trade. There's prediction markets or securities, there's derivatives. There's all these things that we want to enable. So I think that if there's a key competitor, it's Robinhood, right? And you know, we, we want to en. Enable these like retail plus customers that say, hey, I'm smart enough to know that I shouldn't be being charged 250 basis points to buy Bitcoin. Like, that's, that's actually insane, to be honest, because on the other side of it, the institutions are definitely not paying that. The market makers are definitely not paying that. And retail pays it because they want access to it in the app. That's beautiful. And so we can do that too. And people always ask me, like, why can you do it? Nobody else can do it. I'm like, well, we're like a handful of very focused. I call us like the Navy SEALs, not the Navy. Like really highly dedicated. 90 of my team used to work for me at one point or another where the Navy seals doing something amazing and we can do it at much better, fairer pricing. So I really. The one thing about crypto that kind of irks me is that if you really look at the fees, they're not that fair.
- [19:53]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Yeah, and bitcoin is so damn liquid. I mean, if you go into the open market and you execute orders. You could fire off a clip of a million dollars and have no slippage. And so it's really wrong for these exchanges. Not wrong. I mean, they're a business, it's capitalism, that kind of thing. But I guess their margin is your opportunity.
- [20:12]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Exactly that. It's the Jeff Bezos quote all over again. You know, I'm. Again, if they're in the Navy SEALs and, you know, we're the Navy, like, Or if they're. If we're the Navy seals and they're the Navy, like, we're just like, I. I'm. This is what I was born for. I am definitely a missionary, not a mercenary here. I've been in the market for a long time, and I just see it as like, as a trader, I'm like, I buy bitcoin when I can. And honestly, like, I hate that I have to pay retail fees, you know, and that drives me nuts because I know how liquid it is, how able we are to get that liquidity and people being pushed to the ETFs and things like that, because spot is too hard.
- [20:48]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Yeah. So when you launched this, what was kind of like the biggest surprise upon launching it, or even that surprise could be a pro surprise, a con surprise. Was there anything that kind of just like, caught you off guard during the development or the launch?
- [21:04]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
You know, the team has really come together as, like, they've gelled so quickly. And again, half these people have worked together before and like, the reality is, like, there's a Brian Armstrong quote somewhere where, like, action breeds information. And like, our ability to, like, just. We have these two week sprints where we're just going very quickly. We went from. We went from 6 assets to 12 assets to 99 assets in two weeks. And like, to do something like that at a big company, we just couldn't do that. Right. So the speed of innovation at a smaller team where you have like one guy building the app instead of a whole team, people kind of overthinking it is amazing. So we're highly, highly efficient. Like, we live in a world where, you know, we can raise a good amount of capital. We can park it in like, you know, a stable coin or like, or somewhere that pays us 400 or 500 basis points. I can hire, you know, a quarter of as many engineers as I needed before in the past, and they can be twice as efficient.
- [21:55]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
And honestly, coding with AI.
- [21:57]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's funny. It's.
- [21:58]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
It's.
- [21:59]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
You allow people to kind of like, Breathe in their own like space. Like, like, you know, if an app developer has four other people he has to work with, you know, he's spending a lot more time like coaching and kind of like commenting and make sure that everybody like works together. And the reality is if you're just like, you know, you know, 20x engineer, you can just like make it happen very quickly.
- [22:19]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
It's good because it enables that, you know, engineers, you know, not to like discriminate or whatever, but it's like, you know, they're generally like, you want to keep them engineering, not like managing people and facing off with people. It's like engineer and like this allows you.
- [22:32]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
My CTO is coding all day. Like he is. I meet a lot of cto. Sometimes I'm like, so do code. And they're like, no, I'm like, my CTO is coding all day. Now our team is also highly skilled and doesn't need a lot of management, but that, that happens.
- [22:47]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
So, so let's take a quick zoom out. Just high level, like crypto right now, anywhere on any given day, between three and a half trillion and you know, four trillion doll. And that's virtually, you know, we've got there. With no government support, with really no institutional support, how big could this pie get?
- [23:06]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah, I think that there's gonna be a blend here, right? Like we still think about crypto versus like TradFi. We think about there's a, there's a barrier there somewhere. I think we still think about technology and then AI as there's some sort of barrier there. And I think all these things start to blend over time. And like fintech is crypto and crypto is fintech. At some point, dollars into the system that turn into stablecoins are all like, are technically, you know, that's technically crypto. But like, hopefully it just blends into all the applications at the application layer. And you don't really think about it. It's just, it's funny like think people always ask me about like what's happening in the stablecoin market. And the reality is like the dollars themselves are commoditized. They're all sitting in a bank account somewhere. It's the wrapper that's not commoditized, right? It's like on USDC or on PyUSD, but on the application level, in my case like an exchange level, we just want to speak dollars anyway. So we're always like kind of wrapping and unwrapping something that's commoditized anyways. And over time I think all these things blur. We don't care about what the stable coin looks like. We don't care about what chain the client. Like even like think about it like how many L ones are out there. Like the end client doesn't really care. The end client doesn't care if you're on AWS or another cloud services. Right.
- [24:14]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
It's like, I mean, I always think it's, you know, you said it perfectly. And so I just wanted to build on that of like this whole idea of Internet streaming. You don't call it like, oh, I'm going to go Internet stream on this new application. You're just going to watch a movie, right? And so you don't have to know all the underpinnings of what's going on in the back end and servers and websockets, you just experience it. And so crypto is actually just going to consume finance. And even that word, like this podcast called Crypto, One on One, it's been around since 2017. Crypto was a really, really key term, but that actually might phase out and just going to be called finance because it's just going to subsume all of, all of finance is going to be on crypto.
- [24:55]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Rails software eats the world. Crypto eats finance. Rails. You know, the blend will happen like these, these things blend together. And like I've been in Trad 5 for many years. I've been in like the traditional world. I've been in fintech, I've been in crypto and kind of like had my fingerprint on all those things. And I'd say they all look and feel the same. You know, we talk about markets and securities or options or derivatives. It's the same way I think about, you know, spot or derivatives in crypto and then I think about like collateral. I'd say, okay, dollar collateral or stablecoin collateral. Like at some point we're all talking the same thing anyways.
- [25:26]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Yeah, yeah, no, I love it. And then if we kind of zoom into the platform a little bit, what could people expect to experience that could kind of give them the edge in trading? Are there any tools, visualizations on chain off chain data?
- [25:40]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
It's a really good question. So our first like innovation is we use these amazing sparklines and I would ask your clients here, your audience here to download the app. And we use these 24 hour sparklines. You can see breakouts. So if something's like kind of like charging ahead, you'll see, you see the market in a different way. It's not just a simple 24 hour chart which we'll have as well. But like the Sparkline itself kind of shows you that hey, it's green, green, green, green. It's like it's launching, it's going, it's launching off. You know, if you look at like the Apple stock app or even look at like Robinhood or even Coinbase, you just have these little like green or red charts and it's like it doesn't tell you anything. You need a visualization that's condensed and it's like, but you can see it and you can put it into your like, you know, your widgets and you just want to see is Bitcoin ripping or not and should I be taking action? So that's like step one and then step two. We live in this like amazing world where we have all this data, we have this AI and a bunch of other things that like our tool sets that we can now use. So instead of just having price alerts and things like that that have never been really traditionally that good, we use AI driven notifications. So we can say, hey, there's something breaking out or something trading 10 times what we expect, there's something happening and we're going to tell you that before any other app. You don't have to use a desk screen or anything else. We're just going to force to you within the app. So and you know, we, this right now. Yeah, it's your market. Yeah, the black icon. So you know, and I think that another question I get a lot are like, oh, are you going to have this available on desktop? You're going to have it available everywhere? And I'm like, you know, Instagram is, is available on desktop eventually. But like the reality is like 24 hours, 247 trading should happen on your mobile device where we have biometrics and a bunch of other things that like, are just beautiful. And like the reality is like when I look at like the Robinhoods of the world, it looks like they're taking their like desktop view and kind of just trying to cram it into like a simple version of their mobile view. And it doesn't feel like the premier way to trade on their platform. And so our goal is to make our, our app should be the premier way to trade. And honestly I'm a trader, like I make it a point to try to trade only on mobile. I have my biometrics there, it's right in my pocket. I know that no one's like, you know, I know exactly where everything is and I Like, sometimes I'm in the gym and I said the market's moving and I want to do something about it. I don't want to have to wait until I get to a desktop. So if we can't provide, like the best service on mobile app, we just got to try harder. So download the app, try it out. It's going to move fast. Every two weeks you'll see a new little update.
- [28:04]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
I'm excited. No, literally, while you were just talking, I scanned your QR code, downloaded it. So I'll provide my candid feedback and.
- [28:12]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
I would love that.
- [28:13]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Super excited. But look, I mean, there's a lot of different directions we can go. I know you guys kind of are on Solana primarily. I want to know a little bit about that design decision and just the ethos behind Solana. And if I have stable coins on Ethereum, is there some conversions?
- [28:29]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
That's a good question. So, like, you know, first and foremost, we had a bunch of L1s, like, as investors in our platform and that, that wasn't the. And Solana was one of those L1s. Raj himself is an investor in our, in our platform. But that didn't, that didn't sway us. What swayed us was that the customers wanted to trade assets around Solana and that's where we started. And honestly, like, their foundation was really helpful and kind of like pulling us together and kind of bringing us up. So when we had to make a choice on like, where should we support, first it was Solana. But by the end of summer, we should be Solana Base, EVM and a bunch of other tokens. And we will do. We're a gasless platform. We don't like, we don't tell you, hey, this is a Solana USDC or a Base. We handle it all behind the scenes. So our goal is. Yeah, so right now I would say we're like a Moonshot competitor. By the end of summer, I want to be a Coinbase competitor and Moonshot.
- [29:19]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
For those who don't know, it's like the Hottest Apple in 2025 allows you to basically buy meme coins straight from your Apple pay.
- [29:27]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
I mean, it was like literally the first platform that could really handle dollar to trump token and that really gave them a benefit there. And the reality is, like, there's so much more to do. Right. Like, it's really hard to trade prediction markets. It's really hard to trade base tokens. It's really hard to trade all of those in one platform and kind of do all the bridging and all the other things you have to figure out. And we use stable coins across like all these different dimensions to kind of work as like the conduit between these dimensions. So the invent of like stablecoins really allowed us to do these things. And again, I don't think the customer himself themselves need to know that this is an SVL token or a base token. They need to know just like what's going up, what's going down, what do I want to get exposure in.
- [30:06]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Yeah, totally. And so one of the things that I always kind of preach here for the past, you know, better part of a decade is just like great security practices. And thank God that since 10 years ago security has gotten so much better and so much more commoditized. And like we've got these trusted execution environments in every phone, we've got really, really, really strong encryption. But I still see people get hacked with soft wallets. I still see people click links, get browser keys drained. So I always recommend using and connecting with a ledger or a hardware wallet. Is that something that you guys enable or tell me how you think about the security stack?
- [30:47]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah, and I think you guys should probably bring like the turnkey guys on. Yeah, I would love to.
- [30:51]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
I'm TiVo if you're, if you're listening.
- [30:54]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah, I think Bryce is amazing and his team's amazing and I'll tell you that like there's always an evolution of thought and security here, especially in crypto. There's ideas around NPC wallets and all the other things that like in, in terms of the non custodial like hosted wallet space that I think is really interesting. I think what Privy's done, what turnkey's done has made it even safer. Right. So I, I, I'm very comfortable with the idea of using turnkey wallets for your defi assets and that's, you know, I think we should dig in deeper with that and kind of pull the, pull the turnkey team on. And then also on the other side of things, you're going to ask, well, should your exchange be holding your bitcoin? That's a really good question. And the reality is I think that the separate, like that the ftx, whatever happened at FTX and all the other hacks that we've seen, number one, the separation of execution and custody is super important. Security there is super important. And also just being held in like a trust or being held in a, at a QC is really important. So if the QC goes down, your bitcoin doesn't go down with it. And I think that.
- [31:56]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Qualified custodian.
- [31:57]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Qualified custodian. And I think that that's going to be kind of going into the next year of regulation and innovation. You're going to see an ask of like, well, are my assets that's being held at a qc. So like if you're an, if you're an ria, like it has to be a qc, but if you're just retail, it doesn't. And the reality is like, we want to offer that to retail at and not at a premium. We're going to do it at less fees than what's out there in the market. So, you know, I would beg people to download the app, try it and give us feedback. We're going to, we'll have like a live texting support within the app. That will literally hit me and the other co founders, Patrick, that's going to be epic.
- [32:32]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
And I'm just selfishly, I have a question. You know, so longtime listeners know I run a hedge fund called Tower 18 and we've got different counterparties, different, you know, wallets and all that kind of stuff is true. Markets facing off with institutions. Can, can I sign up for, you know, an institutional account?
- [32:50]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah, you can. So right now, highly focused around market makers and, and, and systematic traders on the other side of the, of our retail trades at this point. But we will be essentially building what we build for retail for institutions, but doing it the right way. And I think that there's a, you know, there's always like this like drumbeat of like the institutions are coming, the institutions are coming. And the reality is like a crypto institution looks very different than Tradfi institution and we have to build for that. And so we're like I said, we have like this hard tech of like matching engine settlement and engine both C5 DeFi. We've got all this beautiful stuff and we just have like a retail app on top. The reality is like we have all this really cool tech that we'd love to. We're considering white labeling to other platforms. So there's many ways you may be able to touch us over time. And I think institutions are going to be a big part of the next year or two.
- [33:40]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Yeah. Kind of pivoting just a touch. But on stable coins, it just kind of ran through my mind again, the quote from Scott Besson about the stablecoin market currently around 250 billion. He thinks by the end of the decade it could kind of grow to 3.7 trillion. So roughly a 10x in stablecoin market cap, what would that do to, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and just the market at large. Does that kind of lift market values? Like do you think so?
- [34:10]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah, so I think that like with the idea that stablecoin the pie is going to continue to grow and obviously we're going to see fragmentation there and with fragmentation you're going to see a need for, you know, innovation and infrastructure. That's all these things will grow. There'll be these side businesses that are sitting right next to a stablecoin that are offering services that. So the whole like crypto industry will grow for sure. And like, as we again, like, I think things start to go chain agnostic over time. But there's still gas, gas fees being paid and there's still like underlying infrastructure that's super important. And I think that the infrastructure of crypto is one of the most interesting things. And when I look at like trends like AI, you're going to see a world where one AI is paying another AI and they don't really have the ability to do that outside of crypto. They can't own a credit card or a bank account, but they can have a wallet. And that's where I think all those numbers start going up into the right. Because transaction services are going to be huge in using crypto Rails. And again like we, we all say crypto, crypto, crypto and the reality is it's just gonna be, you know, dollar rails, right? These are going to be US dollar rails. And like, you know, as a government, like the US Government should be looking at this as like, hey, this is what's going to backfill any, like any question around whether or not the US dollar is a global currency or not. And the fact that like the entire market, specifically ex U S has said, hey, we need this dollar denominated is a blessing and we should lean into it. And that's what they've done. And that's amazing.
- [35:33]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Yeah, I think, yeah, it really does, you know. Yeah, really, you know, galvanize America's place as, you know, that exorbitant privilege, it extends that exorbitant privilege with the dollar. It just makes everybody all around the world able to use the dollar so much easier. And importantly, if you think of Scott Besant as what he is, which is a bond salesman, he needs more places to stuff these bonds. And so now he has legislation which is going to have a bunch of places to stuff these bonds. And so America's going to be able to continue to finance itself. And stable coins are a huge part of that.
- [36:05]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah, I think there's a superpower with like stable coins that like even the CFOs and non crypto companies are going to start to ask themselves. Well, I have all these pockets of dollars that are sitting everywhere and I need to like deploy them in short duration, long duration bonds and that's like a lot of work. What if I could just use something like a stablecoin where like on the whole, on the universal level someone is like taking care of that for me where I can like very efficiently as well. So they're going to give you a higher yield. So I think one of the like the less talked about superpowers of, of these stable coins is that someone else is like managing the yield and then doing it on like a bigger level and you don't have to worry about the short duration and long duration. Like so I have corporate funds and like I want those all in stablecoins.
- [36:45]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Yeah, no, it's, it's awesome. And you could also earn yield very easily with Defi and that's one of the things that you know, to Robinhood's advantage. They're offering you know, basically any cash money, cash broke brokerage dollars that are in your account, like it's automatically earning yield. And I would imagine that in Defi would also be capable to do that. So if somebody deposits stablecoins onto your platform, are they able to automatically generate yield or is that something totally just different?
- [37:15]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah, we're definitely considering those things. I think what we learned about the last like kind of blow ups was that everybody kind of moved the collateral around, right? Everybody like counted collateral many times. We have to be careful about those things. I think in many ways you build, you build in a traditional way on Defi Rails and you need to know where the collateral is. You need to be able to like pull it out. You need to be able to do all the things you need need to do. But just using Defi Rails and yeah, I think that there's a version of this where we offer like a beautiful solution that behind and I think this is where Coinbase actually does a really good job of kind of creating that defi mullet where it feels very Web two up front and all of a sudden it's very Web three behind the scenes. And I think that those solutions are important. But the key is you don't want just one player that you can lend from. You don't want just one player you can trade from. In Tradfi you have the Goldman Sachs The Morgan Stanley's, the Citigroups, and then in the U.S. currently in crypto, you know, USDC is 99% of us, like us denominated US dollar domiciled, whereas Coinbase is 70 to 75% of US spot. And so you want competition here, you want other players to kind of come in and with clear regulation, you're seeing that regulatory capture kind of lower and allow players like us to jump in.
- [38:35]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Love it. So, you know, before we move on, you know, basically currently, you know, big moonshot competitor, but by the end of the year, early next year, we're going to be taking on Coinbase. Is there anything that we didn't ask that we should have or anything that we didn't really touch on that that is worthy of highlighting?
- [38:50]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah, I think that, you know, there's a lot of talk about, like, tokenized assets, securities, things like that. I. I ran securities at Coinbase and I'd say that, like, there's a lot of, like, missteps here. And I would say we have to be careful. Whenever you tokenize anything, it's always a question of utility versus risk. And the beautiful thing about the dollar was there was very high utility. Like, hey, I can use USDC for collateral, leverage, all the other things I could use. I can airdrop interest, just a bunch of things you could potentially do. And there's like, very little risk as long as I know that the dollars are there, as long as I know I can mint and burn as quickly as possible. Like, that's like a beautiful way of, like, hey, we should definitely, like, I'd rather have USDC than a paper dollar for many reasons. For Reagan securities, there's very low utility right now. Like, I can't really use it for collateral. I can't really use it. There's like, a bunch of reasons why you don't want to do it that way. Yet that doesn't mean you can't do it. It means that regulators need to catch up and we need to kind of like, smooth out a couple bumps there. But I do think that, like, something like the US securities markets needs a rehaul. The fact that we're not 24 7, we're not even close to 24 5, is. Is scary. I've been in, you know, I've been in securities for a long time, and we haven't really done anything. We haven't, like, innovated. That's the one thing I would love Wall street to get from, like, from the west coast is like, move faster. Like, do Bigger things like why are we not like trading Tesla 24 7? Why can't like someone from Singapore touch like a regular mass security the right way? Why can't you trade options really? 24 7, that was my old business and like the fact that we had to shut down the markets at the end of the day feels kind of crazy now. So I'd love to innovate there. And those are the areas that. So, you know, we're called true markets for many reasons and prediction markets are really interesting, I think, like what chain? And the Call she teams are also like polymarker and the call she teams have been doing are amazing. I think just getting people to focus on them is great. Post election. They've done a great job. I think there's a lot of innovation left in markets across the board. But like the idea of using like a prediction market over a poll to find the truth is always kind of like it's part of the reason we call it true Markets. Like there's a novel quote out there somewhere where he says, you know, a group of people that think the same and come to a conclusion is a mob. And a group of people that think differently and come to a conclusion is a market. And so there's something beautiful about finding truth within markets, which is why we called it True Markets.
- [41:07]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
I love that. No, that's super interesting and I'm very excited to see all the different iterations that you guys churn out and see what sticks and see what the people really, really want. And it's going to be awesome. And I love that. Just the, the regulations are just coming down and giving you, you know, business builders so much clarity, which is kind of something I wanted to ask your opinion on is the Clarity act, which I, it's probably an acronym for something, but, but does that come to bear on your business at all and when.
- [41:35]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah, I mean it definitely will. I mean, like, I think we're building towards the future of where regulation will be. Like, you know, we've run regulated like CFTC regulated businesses. We run SEC and finer regulated businesses. Like we've, we've run these businesses before. And everything we're doing at True Market Markets is built with that idea. Like I want to trade securities as quickly as possible. And so we're, we're always been, you know, we're a little bit different than most, like west coast entrepreneurs we come from, you know, we're all engineers. I want to make that clear. Like even I am an engineer. But we spend our time in traditional markets and we aren't, we aren't making the silly, you know, you know, some of the silly decisions you make early on, like, what's a matching engine? Why should it do this or that? Like, we, we've solved those things. Things. So I'm excited to kind of put our, like, show people what we can build.
- [42:25]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
This is your crown jewel. This is your magnum opus.
- [42:27]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
I mean, literally what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life. Yeah, yeah.
- [42:31]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
This is, this is your legacy. And it's, it's awesome and like, it's super impressive and really radical and like, you know, we could probably talk all day on just all the interesting things you're doing, but while I still had your time and you've been very generous with your time, I just kind of want to get some wisdom, just as a guy who's, you know, more. I'm more up and coming and like you said, you got some grays. I'm still looking for a couple grays. But, you know, a lot of, A lot of, you know, folks who are trading and even if folks who are listening, who are older folks, older than both of us, but are just new to crypto and saying, hey, I've heard about crypto, I'm trying to get in what are just some words of wisdom from a crypto veteran, but also a financial wizard veteran.
- [43:10]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah, yeah, it's a, it's a good question. Like, you know, I, I definitely come from, like, the old school way of thinking. I'm, you know, I, I, as a exchange operator, very rarely trade crypto. You don't want your exchange operator and active trader at the same time on crypto. But I would say you should trade. You should own what you know and what you love. And like, there's many ways of looking at that. And crypto Rails in general are just like, beautiful, and they're going to, like, open up the pipe to a lot of different investment opportunities. I, like, tend not to, like, own things that I can't draw, like, I can't write an option on. You know, like, the reality is there's a lot of, like, interesting things about time value and like, so I like to think about time value a lot. It's extreme, extremely hard to trade options on crypto still. And that's. Those are some of the things I'd love to build. My old team purchased Arabit, and I think that was a smart move and I think that, you know, we'll continue to see innovation on the option side. So I think that's going to Happen. So, like, no real, like, investment advice besides, like, you know, you should know where your edge is. You should know what. Like, what knowledge do you have that nobody else has? Like, you know, I was in college, we used to spread trade. I think it was Nvidia and ATI Technologies, because we used to build, like. We used to build, like, video game boxes, like, out of, like, our PCs, and we would be playing Quake and Quake 2, and we knew about graphics cards. So we would, like.
- [44:24]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
If only you just bought Nvidia and held it.
- [44:26]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
I know, I know. I held some, but not enough. Yeah, yeah, but no, I mean, I would trade what you know.
- [44:32]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Yeah, trade what you know, throw what you know. I like that one too. And, you know, I love it. And kind of like, you know, as we wrap up, we always kind of like to try and ask people just, you know, outside of anything that you're building on or anything you're directly involved in, like, what else you look around the crypto landscape or even AI and robotics, what else just gets you pumped up about the future.
- [44:53]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Yeah, I mean, like, there's. There's so much out there. I think the. The combo of AI and crypto or crypto Rails or dollar Rails is really interesting. And we're kind of just scratching the surface on that right now. And that. That definitely is interesting to me. You know, there's people I admire a lot. Like, you know, you guys kind of prompted me with that question before, I think, you know, I always look at, you know, Crypto Hayes, man, like, that guy's OG and like, reality. I've met him a couple times and, like, the guy brought perps to the market. You know, Arthur Hayes is just an amazing guy. He brought perps to the market and did it really well. And, like, you know, he's. He's always got something to say. And, you know, you don't have to agree with him, but he's definitely got something to say. And I. I've always kind of. You look at Sam, you look at cz, but there's Arthur Hayes is the OG that's, you know, still around, kind of still like, up. You know, he's prime shape, like, fought.
- [45:45]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Off the CFTC and the doj.
- [45:48]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
That guy is a proper boss. That guy's interesting. And, you know, I'm really interested to see how the traditional businesses, like the Web, I'd say Web2, but I don't know if that. That's the case. But, like, I like what Stripe's doing. I think, like, with their recent purchases of Bridge and privy like it's pretty obvious that they're like doubling down in the space. I think it's going to be interesting to see what like Circle does with their high valuation currently. Like how are they going to you know I'd see like a lot of opportunities in the exchange and lending space if you own the stablecoin and really kind of putting up their dukes in like the space knowing that like we now have regulation clarity. Like I'd love to see what they do and you know Jeremy, Sean and the rest of the team there are pretty sharp and I'd love to see what they can do with it.
- [46:32]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Excited? Excited. Vishal, thank you so much for joining us today on the Crypto 101 podcast podcast. Where can people follow along with your story? Are you big on X? Are you Farcaster?
- [46:43]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
So Vishal K. Gupta on X and you know True Markets Co on on X and also True Markets Co download the app, love to get some feedback. Email me directly vishal@truemarkets.com and send me feedback. I'll take it.
- [46:55]
Bryce (Podcast Host)
Amazing. Thank you so much for Shaw and everybody at home watching. Please go to the Show Notes. We will have links in there so you can follow along with the True Markets story and journey. But until next time we'll see you soon. Keep building and we'll give you some feedback.
- [47:11]
Vishal Gupta (Guest, Co-founder and CEO of True Markets)
Thanks.
- [47:22]
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