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- [00:00]
Kavita Gupta
The pattern which I'm seeing is a lot of people feel that everything is happening so fast, so much extreme, so quick. Is it going to be sustainable? Is it an idea to actually lock that liquid cash in your pocket into this? And the volatility keeps on coming back.
- [00:26]
Jen Senasi
Hello. It's Tuesday, March 4th, and this is Markets Daily, hosted by me, Jen Senasi. On this show, we take a look at the crypto markets, providing insights against the broader financial landscape. Joining me today is Delta Blockchain Fund founder Kavita Gupta. Hello.
- [00:40]
Kavita Gupta
Hi. Thank you, Jen, for having me.
- [00:42]
Jen Senasi
Of course. Nice to see you again. We got to talk about the markets. I feel like every time you're on this show, the markets are doing something kind of wild. If we, if we take a look at what's going on this morning, a lot of the gains we saw yesterday have reversed. There are a few different reasons that analysts are putting out there. But what are you watching? What do you think's going on?
- [01:04]
Kavita Gupta
I mean, it's super fascinating, right? You have one of the biggest stories of the crypto decade, right. And expecting even more better and better this week with the crypto summit. And what you actually end up having is the market completely reverse. You have over $1 billion liquidated from different arbitrages. And you're just wondering, like what's happening? Is it the overall market's idea that the markets are not going to go that well? Like it's the overall sentiment or is it just the crypto industry? Well, I do not have the exact answer, but the trend which I'm seeing, the pattern which I'm seeing is lot of people feel that everything is happening so fast, so, so much extreme so quick. Is it going to be sustainable? Is it an idea to actually lock that liquid cash in your pocket into this and the volatility keeps on coming back. And I think that's what I'm hearing from a lot of liquidity providers, a lot of whales, a lot of institutional platforms, that even though President Trump is doing everything the crypto industry can dream of to be very honest and fair. Right. And the so called no capital gain taxes expected to come out of it. But I don't think people feel that it is here to stay for a very long time to put in their liquidity, I think that that confidence is still not there, which is very surprising. But that's what I'm hearing now, of.
- [02:38]
Jen Senasi
Course, lots of people weighing in on the markets this morning, many of them pointing to Trump's remarks last night saying that tariffs on Canada and Mexico will go into effect today. That of course, sent the equity markets spiraling. Last night, crypto markets followed. Just talk to me about what you're watching because there's a lot going on from a macroeconomic level. What are you watching and what should people who are trying to make sense of the crypto markets be watching?
- [03:03]
Kavita Gupta
I mean, coin disc for sure, but apart from that.
- [03:07]
Jen Senasi
Thanks for the shout out, Kavita, always.
- [03:11]
Kavita Gupta
But I think apart from that, what I would say is look at it that how every time there is a new government which comes in and which try to do a lot like it's very also similar to President Obama when he just came in. And yes, he did inherit a failing economy with mbs, abs, banks dying and cars dying and everything. But then first year, even though he was bailing out, the money did not pump into the system. You know, every day White House was releasing a good news, a good news. And I feel like that's very clear because America and overall world, we have not forgotten really bearish depressions, right? And so when you have cash in hand, I would start seeing first thing is the real estate market moving a lot or not. If you start seeing luxury goods, real estate, more spending on restaurants, more spending on anything, which is basically your liquidity going more than what your savings are, you start seeing people have confidence and people are going out. And I have always seen that that moves the ticker. I don't see that. If you talk to average American, that average American who has actually voted for President Trump, if you talk to them, you start seeing that they are like, let's see for first one year how things settles in. You know, everybody wants nationalism, but people are now realizing the cost of that nationalism in the world of globalization, you know, So I would also just watch equity markets, I would watch fxs and I would watch the spending. Every credit card and FICO's course releases the spending capacity on an average income. Those would be mine to basically get out of the market or get into the market. Even though, Jen, one thing I have to say as an investor, like running a fund and you go to institutions or investor to raise money, I do find pieces of it counterintuitive because when the markets are down, that's the best time to go to the market, right? Like the math works like that. If I want to give you a return as a market investor, my LP should give me money in the beer market to go in and make a return and give it to them. But somehow the money doesn't move in its bill.
- [05:32]
Jen Senasi
I want to Talk about three assets that were named by President Trump for this American first strategic reserve or stockpile. We're not quite sure what it is yet. Ada. So Cardano, Solana, xrp, Ripple were all named as assets that might be in this US Strategic relationship reserve. Talk to me about how you're watching these projects. What would this mean for these projects if this strategic reserve came to fruition?
- [06:02]
Kavita Gupta
I mean see let's take the one which sort of have started making sense, which is Solana. You have a lot of community in Solana though. I do want to see with a caveat we did see a crazy community in NFT times on Ethereum which seems like have moved on to Meme Coins and Solana. Is it a long term sustainable? I don't think so, but once that goes away I am excited to see what left of a developer community on Solana. But as of today, if even I have to go, you would start looking at Solana. Even though Solana ETFs have not been approved, it is sort of not a institutional currency. Then I come to xrp. XRP has always positioned itself as the institutional payment rails for private access. But then everybody has asked, including myself if it is a private blockchain transactional payment, currency payment, trans payment, Rails. Why do you need a token for retail? What is retail really doing? Who's your customer for retail? Who's your developer economy? So for me XRP token as a retail token has never really made sense, but I think that's a long standing debate. Nothing to have. New ADA is very interesting for me because first of all I have never saw it as a US company because as much as I understand the founder is Canadian, lives in Canada, which you can also may talk about theorem, but there are multiple founders and they have built a lot a huge community in us. I personally am not aware about that about Cardano, but also have not really seen any projects coming out of Cardano a huge community or even at the conferences. So for me Cardano was a very very interesting addition to the whole reserve. But these are very volatile currencies. Like if you look at the prices of Cardano or even xrp before President Trump really started talking about them, they were considered a very dead currency with very low volatility. And this is anybody can pick up a chart and look at that. So for me I feel like I'm still trying to understand the logic here, but overall I'm still excited. At least crypto is getting talked about. National reserves, right?
- [08:19]
Jen Senasi
I spoke to former CFTC chair Tim Massad yesterday and I don't know if you've heard him speak about this. He's very against the crypto strategic reserve. He said that he thinks that this is almost a way of President Trump to pay back crypto people who supported him during his campaign.
- [08:41]
Kavita Gupta
But this is the history of every country. Lobbying is official in this country country. Right. I mean this is similarly said about Rockefellers for oils and trains and then other people in the past all the way today now pharmaceutical industries or other oil industry etc. I feel like there was. It was very obvious that there is the first time the whole crypto industry came together they really lobbied for it and they were ready to lobby on both sides. To be very honest. I have seen a lot of money going into Democratic pockets too. I have talked to a bunch of senators myself have asked me to donate. Right. And so I think it happened on both side. Does the crypto reserve make sense? I think Bitcoin reserves 100% make sense because bitcoin has reached to a point where very equivalent to commodities like gold and silver. It is moving between within the range and over time with more stability like this. It is like that now adding more volatile currencies which we just. You just asked me the three. I'm skeptic but let's see how do they play and maybe we'll do it and we'll change Said that I think to reward the crypto industry just not having a capital gain taxes it's itself great because if you look at it the whole concept of taxes, you don't see anything provided by the government with respect to an infrastructure to really go crazy on it. Especially when they were taking taxes for the longest time. But you're still in the gray area for last four to six years and you still have SEC cases running on you, but you still pay the whole tax. So I feel like that's a big gift in itself. I'm very happy with friends.
- [10:20]
Jen Senasi
Defi is having a moment. Uniswap Lab's web app and wallet connect you to the excitement. Swapping and bridging are simple, low cost and lightning fast across 13 chains including Base, Arbitrum and Unichain, the new layer 2 network designed for Defi. Thanks to deep liquidity on Uniswap protocols, you get minimal price impact on every trade. Now with even greater efficiency through Uniswap V4 swap send on ramp, off ramp and bridge into a bright future. Get started@uniswap.org all right, Kavita, I want to talk about some news that you have you recently launched a new startup Inclusive Layer. This is going to help people build blockchain apps that are interoperable from the get go. Talk to me about why you're bringing this to market now.
- [11:05]
Kavita Gupta
So you know Jen, you and me also talked about this actually last year that there's so many L1s, so many L2s, we are creating so much fragmentation in the space. So for last year and a half I've been like sitting and spending time with people who are so called doing aggregation or abstraction. And I'm like, when we talk about the next 1 million adopter in crypto in blockchain space, you're only talking about trading. How about developers, the next million developers sitting in school and college, how are they going to come into it? They cannot come into it if we going to have so much fragmentation and so difficult to build on blockchain. So what we have done at inclusive layer and we have been working almost for last eight, nine months, completely instill is we abstracted and aggregated anything and everything you need, wallet abstraction, chain abstraction and unified liquidity all vertically integrated in one piece to just give you an SDK. So today if you are sitting in a university and you're like, huh, I should build a sneakerhead platform, but on blockchain so that I can have some good staking returns for my consumer customer. You don't have to do a coding, you don't have to do anything. Build your amazing app on Flutter and react. Take our SDK, build your blockchain, build your blockchain product in less than 24 hours. And that's exactly what we have done.
- [12:24]
Jen Senasi
Okay, so this is for people who want to build an app, they want it to be accessible on different chains and they don't really, I mean that's been one of the big challenges for developers, right? Is like where do I build, how do I build and how do I get access to the knowledge? So it sounds like you're addressing many of the pain points we've seen over the past few years. But what I got to ask you, every time we talk about interoperability, security comes up, right? When, when more chains are accessible, there are more opportunities for missteps when it comes to security. How are you thinking about that?
- [12:57]
Kavita Gupta
So that's why we abstracted everything. Like when you build on top of us, you don't even need smart contract auditing because you are really not creating new contracts on top of it. We have, we today support Ethereum based Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum and The whole idea is and we're going to add Sonic and hyperliquid which we are very excited about and hopefully dawn soon. But we are using the existing top level infrastructure. Right. So hyperlane as a bridge is one of our biggest partner. Then wormhole and Layer zero. Similarly, when we are looking at liquidity, we are taking all possible on chain liquidity aggregated in one place. So if you are a builder today, the security concern you talked about or the fragmentation concern you are not even thinking, we are literally drop down the menu when you go on the SDK, say, oh, I want to be Solana native. That's it. You are now building everything on Solana. You want to do your token or you want to do your staking, it's native Solana or Ethereum or Base. But if you want to do two natives like hey, I want to do base and Solana Meme Coin and they are both native, you can also do it from the same place in less than 24 hours.
- [14:04]
Jen Senasi
I think this all sounds really awesome for builders, but I want you to dig a little bit deeper for me into the security piece. Right. If I'm a builder who wants to come and who wants to launch a token or build an app and the steps are laid out for me, it sounds very easy. How can I ensure that that security is there if I'm accessing the platform choosing from a dropdown menu? What kind of assurance do builders have?
- [14:29]
Kavita Gupta
Yeah, you are doing everything in a non custodial smart contract. We don't have custody, we don't hold custody. It's everything. Smart contract, non custodial, which is what you are getting. So you do. You should do your web 2 security everything on your web 2 side for phishing and all on the web 3 side. Everything is in your smart contract. If anything happens, it's a non custodial wallet. You get it back over time. I feel like once we have more developers, we'll start giving them even more options on security. But right now it's a complete white vanilla smart contracts, non custodial platform is what you get.
- [15:06]
Jen Senasi
You mentioned a few different chains there. Bas and Solana were two of them. What chains are the most attractive to builders right now? What did you find when you were doing your research to launch this product Base and Solana?
- [15:21]
Kavita Gupta
Everybody just wants Base and Solana working. Like even when we were like there are over eight projects which are testing on top of us right now. All are based in Solana. We are. But then you start when you get start getting most of The Meme coins are based in Solana. But then when you start getting perps, Hyper Liquid is biggest for perps. Right. So then you start seeing really deep degen builders asking for Hyper Liquid and the new chain which is now we are hearing a lot is Andre Granger, Sonic and a lot of activity out there. It's also evm so it's a very easy one to add. But yes, that's what we are getting.
- [15:59]
Jen Senasi
Why do you think Basin Solana are so popular amongst builders who are like if we're talking about Meme Coins, maybe some consumer facing apps, why are base and Slowness so popular? And then the second part of my question is why do you think Hyper liquid has become so popular in such a short amount of time for some of the more complex financial use cases?
- [16:19]
Kavita Gupta
Yeah. So I think Base and Solana are really a big one because that's where you see user activity mostly for consumer apps and Meme coins. Right now if you take away Meme Coins that takes away 70% of people who are doing cross chain between Base and Solana then you talk about really faster processions on your defi apps or staking which is really high on Solana anyways. Like look at Jito how much returns it's giving. Even though the whole concept came out of Eigen layer on Ethereum, I think it's actually really the staking restaking are really spinning on Solana. Hyper Liquid, that's a very fascinating one. Right. I think it's such a huge perp market that there is so much liquidity already. It's all for traders like I don't see mean coin activity, I don't see oh really deep. Let's create stocks, let's create zk, let's create like even though I do have some, I have heard concerns from all the security people we talk to about hyper liquid security but they are here to serve only one purpose. It's like hey we are a simple chain. We're going to be off chain on chain. We are not saying we are completely decentralized. They are not trying to claim all the fancy things which we feel a lot of L1s spends or L2 spends three years trying to master. They're like we going to create it in a trading style centralized order book these on chain settlement. Here it is deep liquidity. Now let's just play and have the best pops out of it. That is what I see. Hyper Liquid and and I feel like yes, there may be some people who want everything decentralized which is actually not even practically possible right now where we are. But if we have very focused chains and they are very honest about what they are ready to offer and what can you get, that is where I think the future is going to win. And that's what hyperliquidate.
- [18:13]
Jen Senasi
All right, Kavita, just before we wrap up, you said there are eight projects or there were eight projects that we're testing on inclusive layer before you officially launched. Can you give us any insight into what kinds of projects we can expect launching on inclusive layer and what kinds of projects are looking at launching tokens across multiple chains right now?
- [18:34]
Kavita Gupta
Yeah, so super fascinating. So we saw a huge demand for cross chain deepening. There is a, there is an app which, there is a product which is getting built on for cross chain deep end. There's a base and Solana cross chain streaming platform. There is one which is a base Solana meme coin. And when I say this, they basically can have all those three native meme coins at one place and have all the aggregated liquidity across those platforms to support you. You know, and I think that's the fascination. The core of all these cross chain the future is going to be the aggregation of that cross chain liquidity so that more liquidity players gets to have money instead of having five places to put in their liquidity. And of course it makes life easier for a developer because now they are sitting on a billion dollar liquidity instead of like a small $10 million liquidity in some pool.
- [19:31]
Jen Senasi
Kavita, thanks so much for joining the show today.
- [19:33]
Kavita Gupta
Thank you.
- [19:34]
Jen Senasi
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