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A
Bitcoin just quietly cleared one of its biggest hurdles, leading many to believe that
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a rally may be coming. We'll unpack that and all the news
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here live from the out East Summit
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presented by the tie. And of course I have the founder of the TIE with me today, Josh Frank. Let's go, let's go. Good morning everybody and welcome to the scenic North Fork in Long Island. Today we are not having gale force winds like we did yesterday. We have the sun actually out yesterday everyone's hair was blowing around.
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C
This is what happens when I'm not invited on day one. I just, I send wins.
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B
Yeah, you brought.
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C
As a Jew, people think that I can control the weather. So, you know, I,
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B
I've heard that rumor too, but obviously not the case. So. So listen, first of all, it' an absolutely incredible conference. It's, it's beautiful out here. We have bottomless cups of coffee.
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C
Bottomless,
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B
bottomless cups of coffee. Mine's empty. That's. That, that was kind of the joke. Okay, so let's, let's start from the beginning and then we'll dig into kind of what's happening with the conference. A few pieces of news that hit today which sort of led to that, that title. So Jack Mer stepped down at, not surprisingly as the CEO of 21 and it blew up entirely, I guess the merger between Electronics 21 and Tether. And I mean, you know, and we have another story that Setsuma, which is a UK based treasury company, completely unwinding 90% vote on shareholders to sell off their treasury, which is only 600 and something, Bitcoin, which is actually a lot of money, but after raising 180 million to do it, I think it's worth about 40 and they're going to delist entirely. So, you know, I think a slightly different environment here with the digital asset treasury companies than maybe last year.
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C
Yeah, I mean last year, 12 months ago we were out here and as I mentioned you were earlier in passing, I mean there was like a billion dollars plus worth of DAT deals that happened at the event last year. I mean, people running around foundations launching DATs. I mean it was crazy. Multiple funds announced DAT funds. One fund in particular raised $100 million to invest in DATS. And I have to imagine not doing particularly well. And definitely no conversations about DATs these days. I think DATS is obviously an interesting phenomenon. I mean, they're all trying to figure out what do we do? I mean, it's worse than holding the underlying token because when you hold the underlying token, you own the token. When you hold the debt, yes, there are tokens in the debt, but also in addition to executive compensation and fees and legal fees and everything else, one thing that's not really talked about publicly, and I speak to a lot of the founders of dats, is these insane asinine asset management agreements that they signed. So some of the DATs signed with different asset managers that they pay 2% a year for 20 years in asset management fees with like a 90% buyout. So effectively you got 100 Bitcoin, 40 something of it is going to the asset manager over the course of the 20 years. So some of these debts are not even salvageable because you can't buy them because they have these agreements and these agreements require that the DATs pay out to these asset managers. So the big winner here is all of the law firms that set up these, these entities, all the asset managers that are managing the assets of these entities, as well as the bankers that set up a tremendous number of these.
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B
I was entirely unaware of that. So even if they're trading at a discount, if they have a commitment to the asset manager that amounts to 30, 40% of their assets, I mean, over the company. Yeah, 20. But still, like if you said we're going to sell our hundred bitcoin, they literally can't or there would have to be some.
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C
It's not all of them.
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B
Right.
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C
It's some of them that rush to raise capital that basically thought of it as I'm just going to print $20 million for myself really easily. Everything's going to go up, it doesn't matter. And so there are some of these. So I talked to some of the larger DATs. There are a few big ETH DATs and big Bitcoin DATs and the founders and I've asked them like, okay, well you guys are trading at, you know, 90% of M NAV. Everyone else is trading at 30%. Why not buy them and roll them up? And the reality is they can't because of these horrendous agreements that have incredible outcome.
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B
Yeah, I was wondering why we haven't seen like a dad of dats. You know, someone just raised a bunch of money, consolidate them or buy the bitcoin and you know.
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C
Yeah, or buy it Activists invest and get them to return the underlying assets. For some it's doable. It's not all of them, it's definitely not all of them, but the ones that really rush to structure and get things out. And basically we're just tasting an easy dollar which is, you know, the case in crypto, a lot of the time as we know, they're screwed.
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A
Yeah.
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B
I mean I take the silver lining approach, which why the title says Bitcoin clears biggest hurdle. Right. To me the biggest hurdle was getting Sailor out of the conversation as the main character, which I think has happened. But now actually seeing these unwind and it not really affect bitcoin. Like there's a time when the kind of news that we have seen yesterday and today maybe would have been devastating for price. But if treasury companies, even if they're unwinding, are kind of priced out as not as a non issue, I think that's really actually a quietly bullish narrative.
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C
Yeah, I mean I think this has been the problem for bitcoin for the last really six months, but maybe more is basically this obviously the Michael Saylor overhang and what does this mean? And I think it also has pulled away from what is the bulk case for bitcoin. What's the narrative? Why, why should you hold bitcoin as well as some of these other underlying digital assets. So I think this, this definitely changes that and I think we can go back to the conversation of why bitcoin and you know, as a store of value and a hedge and you know, as we see more and more froth in traditional equity markets, maybe that narrative becomes more interesting.
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B
Yeah, I mean it's still trading at today 65, 66. I would imagine some somewhere in the. Not bottom six.
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C
Very exciting, not even high 50s.
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B
Right. But there's been ETF inflows. Again like one of the stories, big stories today was at 9,000 bitcoin had left finance like the largest in many, many months. Yesterday.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Right. So you get these kind of like low end signals that maybe sentiment or the market is kind of turning or that you know, smart money is doing something different.
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C
Yeah, no 100%. And I mean, and you've seen it here. I mean you've had guests here. You have all the large traditional asset managers that are here at Audi's.
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B
Crazy.
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C
And they're all buying bitcoin. I mean they're buying bitcoin, they're making bitcoin accessible to their. I mean they're not. Sometimes they're buying bitcoin with their own capital, but they're focused on increasing accessibility of bitcoin. And a big conversation that I had with one of the top three largest asset managers in the world yesterday was they're really thinking about how do we build a portfolio that we allow our clients to get which has the S and P, which has bonds, which has bitcoins already in it. Like, how do we build these structured products that are more than just bitcoin? And that's ultimately what's going to push this narrative forward is. Is making bitcoin part of the portfolio that you build as an investor and that you have exposure to.
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B
I wish I had the story in front of me, but yesterday there was a story that S and P released its first crypto index fund. Did you see this? And bitcoin wasn't in it because I think they were like. Because it doesn't have a yield or no earnings or platform fees and stuff, which is fine, but we're clearly moving into a world where there's diversified products and a lot of assets for these things and, like that diversified product. Exactly. I can't believe who you have here. Like, yesterday I had a conversation with Morgan Stanley, Franklin Temple. It's like every single institution on the planet is here, and they're.
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C
And they're significantly more bullish than any of the crypto fund managers that are here. You talk to any crypto fund manager here, the world is ending. The sky is falling. You know, kind of yesterday was the sky was literally falling, and today, you know, it's more the. You know, you talk to these large guys, you know, talk to another asset manager that's raising. Trying to raise billions of dollars to buy liquid tokens. I mean, we were talking about this crazy.
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B
Okay, so let's talk about that. Not specifically about raising billions of dollars to buy liquid tokens, but I think one conversation that you and I had last time you were on was the re. Raging debate about tokens versus equity. I think it was actually because of the Venice story. Right. Venice raised a bunch. They did it in equity, not tokens. It left people wondering, why do I own the token? It was defended by Eric Voorhees. You've been doing. I know a lot of thinking about this, but maybe there's a more interesting conversation is if you're one of those, how can you convert the tokens into equity? Or should you?
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C
Yeah, I mean, I think the. I think the question is, why should you convert token to equity? And I think it's not every project, there are reasons to have tokens. And I think a lot of the amazing things about crypto is, you know, there's obviously been an insane amount of vaporware, which we love to chat about and nonsense and garbage. An insane amount is the understatement of the century. I mean, the industry is mostly vapor, but there are some Projects that have real revenue, but that are just trading at ridiculously low multiples. And so to kind of give, you know, kind of a little bit more context, right? When you're a founder of an equity business, right? You know, if you launch new podcast, you launch a new company, whatever, you might own 30%, 20%, 15% of the company. When you launch token, oftentimes you get 2% of the token, 3% of the token. And when your token is trading at 5 billion market cap, you're the happiest person ever. When that token is down to 20 million market cap, you're looking at yourself, you're like, I got $100,000 worth of this token. Like, what's my incentive to continue to build this out? I can go get a signing Bonus, join an AI company, and it's more than the $100,000 that I have in token, right? That's the first problem. Second problem is you, as that founder, can't really give yourself or your employees more tokens because you've basically out of the pie. You know, everyone's seen the token supply schedules out of the pie. The team gets 20 of the token. And so in a traditional, you know, equity business, you'd issue what's called an esop, which is an employee stock option pool. And so you dilute all the shareholders equally. In crypto, if you wanted to do that, you'd have to pass a governance report with governance vote saying, hey, we're
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B
going to get a bunch more tokens,
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C
we're going to mint more tokens, and that's going to go off over horribly, right? But, but like, you know, the incentive structure is not in place. That's the first thing. Second thing is, if they want to raise more capital, they can't do it because it's the same problem, right? If you have an equity business, right? If we wanted to raise more capital, we're not concerned about how many shares we have in our treasury. We issue more shares, right? And you dilute everyone equally. You know, in crypto, people raise one round of capital. They raise, you know, sometimes two rounds of capital, then the token goes live. And it's like, okay, you had Runway, but now your token is not worth anything. So you can't liquidate the token to extend that Runway. And so how do you raise more capital? You can't issue more shares. So if you want to raise $10 million and you only have $5 million in the treasury, what do you do? And then you're out of tokens, you have nothing left. And you're sell, you're putting cell pressure on the token in order to, you know, in order to raise capital. That's the second kind of problem. The third problem is buybacks. Buybacks are a massive problem because hyper liquid should buy back. They're generating a tremendous amount of revenue and a tremendous amount of EBITDA and they're, you know, at this point, even though it's so fast, they're very late stage company, early stage businesses should not be buying back. No seed stage equity business series A stage equity business buys back shareholders. It doesn't make sense. And so you're a token. Let's say you have 5 million in revenue and 1 million in profit on that revenue. You want to go and spend a million in profit or 2 million in profit to buy back tokens, which isn't even working. It's not even pushing price up. And then you're actually losing money. And so your Runway, your Runway is shortening. You can't raise more capital. And so structurally it's a huge, it's a huge problem. And there are a lot of projects out there, I think specifically in the defi space, in the RWA space that you know, that like actually have revenue, but the token just doesn't reflect that. Right. Like we've seen projects that have 5 million in revenue, but the token sits at 15 million market cap. But the token also doesn't give you anything. You have no investor protections, you don't have any rights to anything. Right. Like as a token holder you're also kind of screwed. So I think there's going to be a huge movement towards converting. Not for L1s and L2s. I don't think it makes sense structurally, but I think for a lot of defi projects or revenue generating projects to basically effectively end the token and convert to equity. The way I think that it practically happens is you take over anyone above a certain amount of tokens and you put them directly on the cap table of a new company. So you basically say, okay, send these tokens to a burn address and then basically they get burnt and you get issued common stock in a Delaware C corp. I think for token holder 5 to 25 maybe there's a way to enter an SPB and move over. And then from everybody else, basically the larger investors that are coming over onto the cap table basically have offer to buy back everyone else's token at a slight premium to spot. So even the token holders are getting a little bit more out of it. And I think that's the way could These tokens do it and just kill the token and build a, build a C Corp and make money and not care about token holders for sure. I don't think it's the right thing to do. I think the right thing to do is you effectively get, you know, the token holders out at a little bit of a premium so they make money, they have the option. You're not confiscating less money.
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B
But yes, make money, make money versus current price.
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C
Right. And then so basically you convert everyone over as common stock. You can then issue a new employee stock option pool on top of that so all the employees can get more shares. Especially if the founders got 1% or 2% of the tokens. It doesn't make sense. The incentives aren't aligned. You give them a little bit more, but also you create more shares for future employees to be able to come in and then you raise new capital on top of that. I think where this ultimately becomes really interesting is if you can take the SPV and tokenize it and then allow people that were previously token holders to participate in the tokenized equity. I think that's ultimately where I want the market to go, which is investors should have the ability to invest in whatever they want, whether or not they're accredited. And I think, you know, obviously US accredited investor laws prohibit that. But I would like it to be the case that investors can participate in anything. I mean there's been a lot of, you know, pre IPO stock trading, you know, SpaceX and others before they've gone live. But I think crypto has done amazing things as it relates to bringing in investors in order to access early stage opportunities. And people have made a shit ton of money on the retail side. People that got into hyper liquid early Solana early. There have been, you know, avalanche near a lot of these projects very early were extraordinarily successful and you know, there's no reason that they shouldn't have access to the same opportunities. So I think, I think where the market is going in the short term is token to equity and where I hope the market is going to go in the longer term. And I think, you know, obviously we need to see regulation pass to enable this or there's, there's novel ways to think about this is token to equity to tokenize equity and allow those that were token holders to become tokenized equity holders. Because ultimately I just think an equity is a better vehicle than a token is for, for lots of businesses, but
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B
certain projects still would need tokens. Right? So, so I mean, I guess if you're, if it's gas fee, if there's some specific utility to it, you're layer one basically, then maybe you still need one. But this, basically what you've, this is for like 99 of the existence.
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C
I don't know, I don't know if it's, it's not because. Not. There's not that make it.
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B
Yeah, because there's no point.
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C
I think it's, I think it's really relevant for. There's probably a universe of a couple hundred tokens that have a decent amount of revenue. And by the way, these might, they might not raise money at a hundred valuation, it might be at a $15 million valuation. But ultimately it creates the right incentives, it allows you to continue to grow, it allows you to continue to invest in the business and it creates investor protections and investor rights and it lets you think a lot more long term. I mean the problem with being a token and having token holders is that you're constantly, and this is the problem with being a public company broadly, you're constantly trying to appease your shareholders or your token holders. And when you're, when you're a later stage business, that's fine. When you're an early stage business and you just need to invest in growth and you keep fun bundling money in and you know, differentiate and try things and fail, you know, as opposed to just playing for the. I mean, as you know, I mean the crypto game used to be. Let me just announce a partnership like we're using, we partner with Amazon and then token price goes up like, you know, 400%.
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B
The Google partnership.
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C
The Google partnerships. I mean, I mean I remember the chainlink one which you know from. And this one probably 2018, 2019 chainlink just ripped on this, right? And there was a ton of these things, right. That game doesn't work anymore. And so I think it's time for people to start to really rethink and we're happy to have these conversations with folks. How do you actually structure this? How do you do this?
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B
The best example of that that I always kind of point back to is that Poly Market is literally called Polymarket because of Polygon.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Haven't seen much movement there. No, they were the kings of the announcements like Instagram, Facebook, Starbucks.
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C
Starbucks.
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B
They had so many. And I think some of those were actually legitimate. But if a token can't move on names like that at this point, what are we doing here? I guess that begs the next question is if you're a founder and you have an Idea. Do you even launch token at this point or do you just. I mean, I think there are, as
- [16:44]
C
to your point, like gas, gas fees and other things. There are reasons to have tokens. I mean, Hyper Liquid is a token and it's very successful, and I think it's arguably potentially more successful as a token than it would be as an equity allowing retail to participate. And it's grown so much and it's trading at a huge multiple of its revenue. So I think it's a serious conversation to be had. But a year or two ago, you talked to crypto venture funds, and every single venture fund would only invest in things that touch tokens. When we were raising, we've raised one round before, we had a couple of term sheets from investors where they put a token warrant in the term sheet. I'm like, guys, like, we're never launching a token. Like, what do you like? Why is there a token warrant in this, in this term sheet? But it was just that they just wanted to cover their ass because everyone was launching a token. They wanted to make sure they had the right to participate in the upside of the token. Now you go around, you talk to VC funds and it's kind of flipped. I think everyone is willing to do tokens now and to do equity. But I think, you know, whereas before it was 90% tokens, 10% or 80, 20, I would say it's now even more than 50, 50. It's probably leaning more towards dependency on equity. Or there are a lot of project token warrants that are just never going to launch.
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B
Yeah, okay, well, that makes sense. I think that's a healthier market and we just don't need another million tokens. But now you can see why people launch meme coins. You're saying the founders only get 1.21 or 2% of the tokens. When they try to actually do something real meme coin, you can just keep 80, 90%.
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C
Yeah, talk to Donald about that.
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B
Do you think those are coming back? I mean, it seems like we've seen a little meme coin renaissance.
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C
I'm not a, I'm not a, I'm not a fan of meme coins. Only in that it pulls liquidity from the rest of the industry. Yeah, I, I'm, I'm, I have no idealistic view against meme coins whatsoever, but people love gambling and meme coins are way to gamble. It's, it's, it's like a scratch off tick.
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B
Yeah, I agree. So let's talk more broadly about what you're hearing. Here at the conference. I mean, it seems like there's every panel I listen to, every conversation I have, there's a few like buckets, I guess, of them. So Clarity act, which I guess we could talk about. Like everybody's talking about that because it's a, it's a thing right now update that I saw today, but it's just kind of loosely reported. Obviously the White House had some language around ethics. Democrats are saying they want the state attorneys to prosecute it. Trump said he wants the doj, which is his own personal lawyers, obviously to prosecute it. That's one topic. RWA and tokenization, I would say, is the other biggest one. And AI and agentic trading, maybe. I mean, those are kind of the biggest buckets. There's quite a few others. Yeah, but every single conversation ends up touching all of those.
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C
I think that's, I think that's right. I think it's a lot of, you know, who wins. I think a lot of crypto. You know, I talked to a lot of crypto VC funds as well. And this is, you know, another conversation point is they're no longer just crypto vcs, they're now investing outside of crypto. And I think, yeah.
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B
Was it Pantera that announced the robotics and AI? Was it Pantera?
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C
Well, I mean, there's everyone, everyone is. I don't know if Pantera specifically, but Paradigm is probably suffering too, but lots of others. I mean, there are definitely still funds that have a lot of conviction in the space. I think the most intelligent way to go about this from my opinion, and I'm not a vc, I'm not an expert, but you know, I like the, we invest in fintech that touches crypto. Like every Neobank is going to have some crypto rail. If you're, if you're, you know, a payments platform, you're going to use stablecoins in some way. So that to me makes sense. You know, to me, when you go from crypto to a totally different segment, I understand it's another emerging technology. Not sure what your edge is, but a lot of these firms that we've talked to are hiring people that are experts at that and they're just expanding the firm and expanding their footprint and they're ultimately going to become generalist funds. So I think that's the other theme that we're, we're starting to see, but it's not everyone. There are definitely a lots of others that still do have conviction in the space, continue to invest in the space. I think the question. Another theme is also who's going to win? Is it trad fire? Is it crypto? I think you would have asked this question three or four years ago. I think people would have said, I mean, you know, peak FTX and FTX getting into equities and I mean FTX owning Robinhood and all sorts of.
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B
Remember when he said he was going to buy Goldman Sachs? That might have been a top signal.
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C
Yeah, maybe. You know, we've missed all the top signals between us too. The. So, you know, I think, you know, the conversation a few years ago was crypto will eat equity markets. And I think now it's equity markets or traditional players are going to use crypto rails and crypto infrastructure. Is the value going to accrue to those that invest in crypto rails? Well, I think that's, I think it's a difficult question. I think it depends. I think certain segments like stablecoin rail, stablecoin infrastructure, I mean, you've seen stripes acquisition, mass acquisition of bridge last year. So there are areas in their areas and I think there's also a huge convergence in multiples that crypto businesses are trading at. So I think a lot of guys that are more rails and infra that can be used by traditional institutions are trading at material. You know, instead of trading at four times revenue like other businesses, they might be trading at 20 or 30 times revenue. And so you're seeing this massive convergence in crypto valuations, whereas everything was trading at high multiples. I think now people are having a much more sober take on, you know, basically, you know, everyone was fishing in a pond, right? And now, you know, there are more fishing rods in, the pond is smaller and everyone thought the pond was going to grow. And the question is really, you know, how do you, how do you cash your real. Both in the crypto pond and the tradfi pond. The Trad 5 pond is a lot bigger. And so you're within the crypto native space. You're kind of playing to a smaller market. And I think that's really, you know, I think, I think businesses that are thinking just about crypto natives are in a tougher spot. But I also, you know, we've, I mean, we've gone out, we've made three acquisitions in the crypto space and you know, some that have been very native. And my view is when everyone is scared is when you should be invested.
- [22:21]
B
What are the acquisitions?
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C
Yeah, yeah. So we acquired a business at the end of last year called Stake in which is a couple billion assets under delegation staking provider Basically, the thesis there was that staking is broadly undifferentiated. Every staking provider's got the same fees, the same infrastructure, the same cost, you know, the same uptime. It's all the same. It doesn't matter who you stake with. It's all the same. I mean, there are some that are bad, but anyone who's good is all the same. And so basically, you know, we view it as a mechanism for accessing our services. So if you're an institution and you want access to the terminal, like our platform, you know, a lot of crypto funds, so in traditional capital markets and equity fund, you know, wouldn't launch with less than 20 $200 million, right? Because it costs money to launch a fund. You need to pay analysts, you need to pay lawyers, you need to pay back office, you need to pay fund admins, custodians and crypto people launch funds with very small amounts of money, let's say $20 million and on to 20 model 2% management, 20% performance. They, they have $400,000 a year in management fees. They can't afford to go out and spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on software, which, by the way, a lot of these crypto companies that are trying to sell software to funds are realizing, but they do have 20 million in tokens and they can delegate those tokens. And so we allow our clients, instead of paying us cash, to delegate their tokens to us in order to access our services. We also do a tremendous amount of kind of go to market work with protocols. You know, we do it at our events. We have them come and speak and take meetings with institutions. And, and so on the back of that, we acquired a couple of other businesses. We acquired a business called Liquidity Land, which is a platform that helps tokens raise TVL and they've helped tokens historically raise about 100 million in TVL. The idea being is, to our point earlier on, announcements, announcements no longer are everything. They no longer move the needle. Protocols need to grow, they need to prove revenue, they need to gain traction. And so being able to enable the growth of the protocols by bringing them things that are tangible like TVL is very helpful. And for our institutional clients, it's going to enable us to give them higher yields by going and working with these protocols to basically structure deals for institutions as well as for the broader market. Everyone can access a lot of these opportunities to be able to earn higher yields. They would earn otherwise on, you know, the large lending markets in crypto and other platforms. As well as we acquired a business called Staking rewards.com, which is the most trusted and most visited platform for staking data1. It expands the data offerings that we have with the Tide Terminal and other things, but it's also an amazing distribution channel because it's got a million visitors annually that care about yields. So we'll be able to bring a lot of the liquidity land opportunities onto the platform and we'll also be able to work with protocols and help them gain more exposure to a much broader audience. So they all kind of fit in, you know, along these themes of helping institutions get exposure to digital assets and meet digital assets, as well as helping digital assets grow and gain exposure to the institutional audience that we've built and that you see here.
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B
Do you have specific thoughts on odds of the Clarity act passing or Genius act actually getting implemented since they made it past it's hard for me to
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C
give any better thought than any of your other guests because some of your other guests I talked to said I called the White House yesterday. Like I feel like that guest is going to have a much better opinion than me. So I talked to multiple people that called the White House yesterday and they have different opinions.
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B
Right.
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C
So it seems like it's a mixed bag. It's people seem to be more positive than I was expecting from what I've heard, including those that are close to the White House and that are close to Trump and his team. And so I don't know. I mean it's, I don't have an informed opinion other than I've heard both sides of the story from people that
- [25:42]
B
claim that's what I was hoping you would maybe be leaning.
- [25:47]
C
You know, Trump, Trump didn't answer my phone call.
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B
This neither. More importantly, what do you think it means if it does or doesn't pass? Do you think that that will have a meaningful impact on the market?
- [25:57]
C
I think it does have a meaningful impact on the market in terms of folks ability to participate, companies willingness, especially on the traditional institutional side, to really go all in on the space, continue to invest in the space, build out the space. And also I think it's also crypto is desperately in need of something. It's desperately in need of a narrative. And I think this is the narrative that people have latched onto. And I, I the market has not priced in a win at this point. And so I think a win we need a catalyst and I think a win would be a massive catalyst for the market broadly.
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B
I mean, for you at the tie you just talked about three acquisitions that you made that seem like they would at least be touched by the Clarity act passing. So it actually matters to you.
- [26:36]
C
It. Matt. Well, look, we, we, we are all in. You know, people, it was funny. I had, I had a VC come up to me and he's like, you know, you guys are so active, you're buying all these things. Why don't you buy things that are tangential to crypto? I'm like, if the ship goes down, I'm going to be the fucking captain of it. Like, we're all in. We're betting on crypto. We think that there's a future to this industry. Whether or not the future is all tokens or tokens and equities, it doesn't matter. We think there's a future to decentralized finance and we see massive traditional kind of institutional adoption of it. And so for us, we have a massive exposure to tokens. We have just as much token exposure as a lot of your listeners do, if not more probably. And so we believe in the industry and personally, and personally realizing that diversifying is a good thing, but we have personal exposure as well. But we're still excited. I mean, and you can see it here. You can see those that are building are excited and continue to be excited. And I mean, there are firms here on the traditional asset management side. They have a thousand full time employees in crypto. And so while your random altcoin number 700 on coin market cap might not be going up, there's certainly a lot being built. And it's not only tokenization. A lot of it relates to Bitcoin Eth, Solana and Canton and all the different projects.
- [27:55]
B
I mean, how did you get all these people into what I would say one room, but I'll say one winery. Because everybody's represented here. Everybody.
- [28:03]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think it's. We've built a very low. I mean, I've been doing this for nine years, so it's taken a long time to build a massive network. But I think it's also, you know, with a lot of conferences. So, you know, out east is a conference we're hosting now and we have 300 attendees that are spread across this giant 200 acre vineyard. And the reality is when you go to a conference, you know, less so now, but you know, you probably recognize this in 2017, 18, and there's Lambos parked outside and there's a million, you know, random people there and there's, you know, 400 salespeople from a custodian, you can't get business done. No one wants to be there. And then you go to these major conferences, you know, that are, you know, token 2049 is an amazing event, but no one's at token 2049. Everyone is all over Singapore. People are at this side event and that side event and that side of it. So everyone you want to meet is there. You just can't sit down with them. And the whole idea here was we want to give people a space to actually do business. Right. So we want to, you know, we want to allow people to sit down and spend 15 minutes together. 30. I mean even us, like before this.
- [28:58]
B
Yes.
- [28:59]
C
We're able to sit down and chat. And so it's just about creating an intimate space for deals and business and opportunities to actually get done. And it's amazing to see all the tokenization partnerships that are coming out of this, all the capital raising that's coming out of this. The LP is committing to GPS funds raising capital. And so we actually just announced this morning we're doing another event like this. We rented a five star hotel in the Dominican Republic, did an event called the Enclave. It's very similar, even smaller event, 250 people. But the idea is create very intimate opportunities for leaders in the space to connect. I think people appreciate.
- [29:29]
B
Yeah. And to put the right connectors into the exact people who actually need to connect. Not just kind of a random assemblage.
- [29:37]
C
Yeah. And look, could we make this a 3000 person event and make more money? We could, but no one would come year two. Right. And we're trying to build something long term and sustainable and also, you know, bring the right people into the room and honestly help push the industry forward. Like, I think this does a lot to bring legitimacy and professionalism to the space, which I think is sorely needed. I mean, we have no meme coin projects here or any of that. It's, it's really institutional. But it's not just. We are not. There's a lot of RWA events, there's a lot of tokenization events. This is not about, yes, there's tokenization, but this is about crypto broadly. It's about tokens. We have a lot of the projects here, we have a lot of the founders, we have the founders of Avalanche and Monad and a lot of these big projects that are here in the room having these conversations. And I think it's, you know, push the industry forward. It's also giving a lot of these Trad 5 players the opportunity to meet these different protocols, connect with Them and ultimately, you know, in some cases potentially lost ETFs, ETPs, including their token or multi asset ETFs or tokenize on their network or you know, have some sort of partnership with them, you know, launch a tokenized money market fund on their chain. So I think it's, you know, just about having the right people in the room and also making sure there's not 500 people trying to sell you things at all points.
- [30:44]
B
I was trying to sell my Melania bag out on the street, but yeah, no buyers.
- [30:49]
C
Yeah, maybe one of your listeners though,
- [30:50]
B
Maybe, maybe anybody wants a Melania. I don't have any money tokens. I was highly cool. I mean I think we covered it. Is there anything else that we didn't cover?
- [30:57]
C
I appreciate you having me on.
- [30:58]
B
I appreciate you having me out here.
- [31:00]
C
Yeah, this is amazing. It's, it's awesome to have you here and you know, it's beautiful, beautiful backdrop, nice sunny day and thanks everyone for listening.
- [31:07]
B
Yeah man, thank you guys. And we'll obviously be back again tomorrow. See you then.
- [31:12]
A
Today's video is sponsored by Securitize. And you've heard the word tokenization. Putting assets like funds, bonds, Treasuries and stocks on chain. Securitize is the regulated infrastructure the biggest names in finance build on. They're the tokenization partner for BlackRock's on chain. Treasury Fund bidl working with new York Stock Exchange, Vaneck, Hamilton Lane and Apollo SEC regulated entities nearly nine years running. Most money still moves through slow decking, decades old systems. Securitize puts the real asset on chain itself. Not a synthetic or wrapped token standing in for it. And regulated in the United States. It's the institutional grade bridge between traditional finance and crypto. They didn't just build it, they just proved it. Listing their own stock on the New York Stock Exchange and simultaneously tokenizing it on chain on Solana and Avalanche. The first and only public company built entirely for this. Their mission, tokenize the world. Learn more@securitizeio this is a paid partnership, not investment advice.