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- [00:01]
A
What if you could use your home to build more home? It's possible with a Sofi home Equity loan. A home equity loan allows you to leverage your home's equity at a typically lower rate than a personal loan with low fixed monthly payments and all without increasing your mortgage rate. Whether it's a new bathroom, updated kitchen deck or more, your home could help grow itself. View your rate@sofi.com homeupgrade today, mortgages originated by SoFi bank and a member FDIC, NMLS 696891. Terms and conditions apply. Equal housing lender
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B
bitcoin ripped towards $75,000 in the most confusing market in history. But maybe the bigger story right now isn't Bitcoin's performance. It's the fact that in an event like as common as seeing unicorns mating in the Metaverse, we have Ethereum outperforming Bitcoin by a pretty significant margin. Ethereum up almost 13% in a 24 hour period. We're going to unpack that and and everything else in the markets with Andrew Tillman and of course Josh Frank from the tie. Let's go, let's go,
- [01:18]
C
Let's do.
- [01:19]
B
Good morning everybody and welcome to said Metaverse where unicorns have been mating. I didn't know that that's what my background would look like today. I was surprised by my producers, but I'm going to be hon. I like it. I feel like I'm in either Narnia or the Lord of the Rings and both are equally more pleasant than actual planet Earth right now with this new cycle, I've got Tillman, Andrew and Josh. Good morning gentlemen. How are you?
- [01:42]
C
Good morning.
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B
None of you appear to be in the Metaverse.
- [01:47]
D
I'm not sure I know how to do that on the software, but if I can figure it out, I'll join you.
- [01:51]
B
Yeah, I mean, honestly, like the metaverse we were promised was Zuck with no legs having a board meeting. So whatever I'm doing is much better. I'm not surprised that the metaverse died. But let's talk about bitcoin. Bitcoin at $74,573 right now we've got an article here that says it's because of Trump's bluff on Iran. Whatever. We can get a narrative for literally anything. But like I said, Ethereum actually outperforming up pretty big. That's not something we often see where there's enough confidence in the market or I guess enough risk on that. You see, even Ethereum, the largest altcoin outperforming Bitcoin. I mean, Josh, what do you make of the price action right now? Or is it all of us getting extremely bullish Right. At resistance again?
- [02:37]
D
I mean, I'm not a technical trader, so, you know, I can't talk about, you know, resistance or not resistance. It's not really my expertise. I think it's all lines matter. All lines matter, for sure.
- [02:51]
E
Yeah.
- [02:52]
D
I mean, I think it's a combination of things. I mean, I think it's. It's bullishness and hope that Trump wants to end the Iran war solely or primarily because he only likes when markets go up. And he created something where markets go down even if he thinks the war should continue. I think he cares about markets more than anything else. And so I think there's certainly some optimism there. I think also there's some optimism about the fact that Saudi and other countries have created ways to move oil that don't revolve around the Strait of Hormuz. Also the fact that Iran is demanding Bitcoin for payment for people to cross the Strait of Hormuz. So I think it's a confluence of things. There's also a little bit of increased chatter about potentially the Fed still cutting rates this year. Obviously, the market isn't really pricing it, but there's still a chance. Yeah. So I think it's a combination of things. And the way that crypto moves is everyone trades with so much leverage that you get a little bit of a move, you get some liquidations, and you get a much bigger move. And. And so I imagine that that's probably part of the equation as well.
- [03:58]
E
Or we had almost a billion dollars in inflows in the ETFs last week, and we had Morgan Stanley's ETF come to market. And Michael Saylor. And Michael Saylor bought a billion dollars in bitcoin.
- [04:17]
B
Yeah.
- [04:19]
D
My point is, I don't think these things are. I don't think these things are ors. I think these things are ends. Right. It's always a combination of things that's going to move the market.
- [04:30]
B
I mean, he did have 1.1 billion in volume yesterday on STRC. Now we're getting back to calling it the infinite money glitch in the press, which I don't love.
- [04:39]
E
That's not great.
- [04:40]
B
But that, you know, I think people say he could have bought 600, 600 or 700 million just yesterday on these flows, right after the announcement of whatever he did last week. Crazy.
- [04:51]
C
I think we're seeing the. The biggest shift in holders and Types of holders that bitcoin's ever seen, the gates, the on ramps for paper Bitcoin, for ETFs, for all sorts of derivative products, options. All of that is driving more capital into our market. And there is a very different narrative on both sides of the fence. If you're late to Bitcoin or some would say from an institutional perspective, very early to Bitcoin, you know, you're, you're not at your allocation percentage that you want to be. You're still acquiring Bitcoin. And so you're looking for, okay, how much further you're doing analysis. You know, every, every all lines matter type of analysis as to where you think you should be putting all of your purchase orders in. And, and I think that there's more people coming into that than there could ever be sellers in Bitcoin. And so it's just a matter of, of major whales, you know, kind of getting their bag finally. You know, we've always joked about kind of the guys in the van down by the river with, you know, a thousand bitcoin. Well, you know, I know, I've heard personally, you know, through multiple friends, a lot of those are, those guys are selling and, and they're kind of cashing out. That's a good sign. Why? Because there's buyers available and the price isn't plummeting to nothing. It's literally getting soaked up as fast as it can get soaked up by Wall Street. And, you know, those folks have a lot more liquidity and a lot lower allocation percentage. And the next wave, they're not going to be forced sellers and, or enticed sellers like the folks that have, you know, that started, started the industry. There's too much money for them to go get right now and change their entire, you know, their entire lives. And I, I will say this. There's a lot of companies that are built on blockchain, and those people also become forced sellers if they're not profitable. You know, I don't want to name names, but there's lots of exchanges that are not profitable, and there's lots of people having to sell Bitcoin in order to support those efforts and, you know, more power to them. That, that is innovation at its finest. You know, there's a lot of market share to be made, and people are going after it full tilt. Because the integration and the things that I really look at to see whether the, you know, price matters, if it's falling, you know, the price can be an indicator. It can be one data point along with Many others to tell you that something's wrong. But if it's just price, you know, and everything else is going the opposite direction, you know, you have more financial institutions adding ETFs that are Bitcoin related. You've got a ton of products being created and integration being created across. You know, I saw a headline this last weekend that now on Kraken, it's basically all equities. Tokenized equities are, are now available. So 247 markets, 365 markets are being announced on every front. Well, there's only one type of asset that can be traded. 3, 65, 24. 7. And it's tokenized assets. So to think that we're like shrinking as an industry just because the price is doing what it's done. It is very unpredictable and markets and people don't like unpredictability. But the amount of dry powder out there and the amount of allocation that we could pick up during these uncertainties I think is, you know, it bodes well to me that Bitcoin's doing as well as it's doing.
- [08:45]
E
Yeah, Legacy finance keeps, keeps buying crypto adjacent crypto direct type of tech. Right. So Deutsche Bors, you know, why are they putting a bunch of money into Kraken? Well, they want to share notes, right? Having to do with 247 trading. Nasdaq did the same, NYSE did the same. Everybody is getting their hands into. Okay, we, we know where this is headed. We're probably not all that ready. So let's go find some partners who've been doing it for a long time and figure this out because there's money to be made here. So it is, you know, traditional commentators, traditional financial journalism, all those things, they've, they've laughed at crypto for such a long time. They still do, by the way. But then there's also the reality of what's happening in the traditional financial space. Wanting access to crypto, opening up access to crypto because there's tons of money to be made. Whether it's the tokenized world that is directly attached to 247 trading, BlackRock won't shut up about it. And that means that once BlackRock won't shut up about tokenization, which they've been talking about for six to nine months. Well, now you see all these legacy organizations that frankly, you know, are almost beholden to BlackRock products in terms of volumes, they now are doing things and taking positions in organizations that will help them move to the tokenized space as quickly as possible.
- [10:27]
B
I find this Kraken deal, really, really interesting actually, because as you said, they took 200 million from effectively the. It's like the ice of Germany, right, where the operator of the exchange. It's actually a down round, right, because Kraken raised, I think at a 20 billion valuation from Citadel and others, another $200 million at the late 2025. And this is 200 million at a 13.3 billion. So like, I think uneducated people are looking at it and saying Kraken just became worth less right ahead of ipo. But I think if you actually look at it, it's more of a strategic investment from an operator.
- [11:05]
D
I don't know about that. Kraken. Kraken has. Kraken has been on a buying spree and has spent a tremendous amount of money trying to get ready for IPO. They were planning on IPOing in Q1. They weren't ready. I think the CFO might have gotten ousted. There was some turmoil going on there. I wouldn't necessarily look at this as purely. I'm sure maybe there's a strategic aspect, but this might also been an aspect of. They thought there was going to be a capital raise that came alongside an ipo that that didn't happen. They needed more money. They went out and raised. And I want to comment on all this tokenization stuff. I think this, this concept that tokenization means crypto prices go up is a misconception because I have a lot of these conversations with institutions and you know, ultimately a lot of these institutions are basically going to go the route of like, think like, you know, if you're building a business, right, and you're figuring out where to store your data, you're going to get a quote from aws, Google Cloud, you know, you know, databricks, whatever, all these different data companies and data storage companies and you're going to figure out where you want to store your data based off what's cheapest. And there are a lot of conversations that are happening around tokenization and moving money around and transactions where, you know, you look at, you look at places like the DTCC that are plugging into like 20 different chains and ultimately they're going to choose to go where wherever is the cheapest and the most and the most efficient and also where more institutions are. So I think you got to take with a grain of salt whether or not, I think we're yet to see whether tokenization is going to do anything. I mean, tokenization, nothing to do with Bitcoin. I mean, yes, bitcoin is crypto and tokenization happens on crypto Rails, but tokenization is not happening on Bitcoin. Right. So I think we need to be pragmatic and practical about what the actual impact of this stuff is going to be.
- [12:53]
B
Yeah, I think they do just raise the point that we discuss here all the time, which is that it's definitely being adopted. But will we be able to participate in any of it as retail? What can we buy that will actually go up? Or what do we hold is a better question that will actually go up
- [13:09]
D
to the FAT protocol thesis. Right. Which I think is worth revisiting. And if anybody doesn't know, the fat protocol thesis was introduced by Union Square Ventures in 2017 or 2018. Basically the idea that in the Internet all of the value went to the apps. Right. The value go to HTTPs, the value went to Yahoo and aol. And obviously over time it's changed from Yahoo and AOL and pets dot com. But the idea, the thesis originally was that all the value was going to accrue to the protocol. You know, the protocol, the L1 layer. There we go. 2016, even longer than 2018. But I think we're starting to see a shift and a change. Where you've seen what's selling off in crypto, the hardest is a lot of these layer ones and layer two,
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B
the
- [13:53]
D
L2s are getting smoked for the most part. And a lot of the applications that are actually generating revenue are starting to be the projects that are thriving and growing. And so I think if tokenization continues to take shape and by the way, leaves pilot phases and enters production phases, because a lot of these tokenization initiatives are pilots and they're testing grounds and value does not accrue to L1s and L2s. And I think it also has to do with how the L1s and L2s are designed. I think Canton, for example, has done a very good design with their Berman Equilibrium. So I think a lot of these layer ones, I mean, you saw, for example, starkware yesterday, firing a huge percentage of their staff and deciding, hey, we need to focus on profitability, we need to revisit what we're doing here. Right. I think you're going to need to see a bit of a. Yeah, well, yeah, I agree with you, but. But yeah, like, I think you're going to need to, you know, I think there needs to be more dynamics than, you know, I think just we are a chain that an institution is building on that has a token doesn't mean token price is going to go up because it doesn't necessarily mean value is accruing to token holders. And I think that that like conversation is starting to happen. It needs to happen a lot more because certain chains, when institution choose to build, chooses to build on it, is going to have a much bigger impact on the token than other chains.
- [15:09]
C
Yeah, I would agree and I would say it a little differently. I think we're finally at the age of utility. I think we've looked for altcoins and the true utility behind them and the use cases to come to life in the real world and create the deltas that we know it can create but also improve customer experience at the same time. Like the user experience is what drives all of this. If people find value in the interface and in the tools that you provide, look at Pump Fun. Pump Fund may be totally dead. I have no idea what it's going to look like in the future but boy, the volume was insane when it was at its peak. And what does that show? It shows you that if you, if you build something that is a market and you allow the gates to be open for people to participate, then people will come. So if you then take that narrative and you apply it.
- [16:07]
D
By the way, Pump Fund is still doing, it's done 500 million in revenue over the last year. It's still doing, you know, on, on a good day, on an average day, 1 to 2 million in revenue. So it's still massive.
- [16:20]
C
Yeah, that's still. Exactly. And so you just, and you say okay, well they're Napster. I'm not saying they are. And that, no, no implications beyond just the, the, the point I'm trying to make, you know, they, they came out of nowhere. They provided something that millions and millions of people found value in, that they built a market. And then, you know, bigger boys came around and said well we're going to create Apple Music and try to compete with the fact that we can do exactly what you can do, but we can run, you know, we can sue you into oblivion. And so you, you're going to see this war for I think supremacy on the altcoin list. And, and the altcoins are not going to survive unless they partner with the legacy providers that have users that are built into the equation that they can literally just plug and play. And I think that's what I think.
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D
Jeff and Hyper Liquid beg to differ.
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C
Well, Jeff and Hyper Liquid again though, they built something that is, it's one of its kind and it's very unique and I think that they're on the bleeding edge. And as long as they can stay on that bleeding edge, then more power to them.
- [17:37]
B
Something like. They've made almost a billion. I don't want to misquote. The number was 900 million or a billion in total revenue so far. Hyper liquid with 11 employees.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Oh, I think something million.
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D
No, I think that was.
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B
That might have been very dated last year. Yeah.
- [17:53]
D
Yeah, I think it's way higher than that.
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C
What would you say that they would disagree with what I said? I. I'm not picking up on.
- [18:00]
D
I thought your point was that you said you have to partner with traditional institutions. They are not really doing that. They're building everything themselves and they are growing massively with a team of 10.
- [18:14]
C
Well, I agree, but I'm saying that they've run like one mile in the marathon. They will partner with somebody eventually or they will run the risk of someone going after their market share. And it. That's just the nature of business. Like, look at every single business that's ever existed. And when you're successful, you create competition.
- [18:36]
D
And that competition, I'm not disagreeing with you create competition. But my point being is they're. They're doing 800 million in annualized. Annualized fees, 700 million in revenue going back to token holders, and they're eating into not just crypto revenue streams there. Yeah, it's. It's. It's a fraction of what the CME is doing and what. What other traditional exchanges are doing, but they're actually winning volume.
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C
But what's your point? Are you saying they're never going to partner with anyone in the traditional.
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D
My point is that. My point is that you can still disrupt things that happen in traditional capital markets.
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E
That.
- [19:09]
C
That's not. That's as far from. My point is. I, that was not the point I'm trying to make. The, the point I'm trying to make is that the markets need each other in order to put the best product on the street. You know, there's a lot of users out there that aren't going to use hyper liquid. They're. They're never going to even understand what hyper Liquid is. Can we agree that the vast majority of people want on ramps that have a grade that looks like this, not that looks like this, and hyperliquids looks like this? And so the ease of use and the user interface itself and the amount of people that you can serve matter as it pertains to market share. And there are two worlds that have very distinct customer bases that are served by different products, different User interfaces, different worlds apart. And all I'm saying is those worlds are being merged and in most cases it's a lot more carnivorous than it is now. It's a lot of partnerships. You see American Express standing side by side with Coinbase. You see JP Morgan Chase, you see ice. You see all of these massive, massive traditional finance companies, traditional customer acquisition companies on, on the finance side partnering with, you know, people I've never even heard of before. There's acquisitions that we've talked about on this show that are to the tune of like $1.7 billion, you know, for, for a company I've never even heard of. And so that's my, my whole point is, is that I think that we're on the verge of something that's going to give, you know, the old adage of build it and they will come. The 24, 7, 365 markets are going to happen. They're going to happen quicker than we think they're going to happen. They're going to integrate faster across all nodes of the markets that, than we can possibly imagine. And what's going to be a byproduct of that? Well, there's some intended consequences, which is more customers doing more activity online as it pertains to trading. I think that's the goal of every market maker and every exchange is to acquire more traders. Right. But I think that there will be a lot of unintended consequences to, to that endeavor as well. And I think that most of those unintended consequences are going to result in large M and A deals. There's going to be pieces of the puzzle that are going to be needed to be filled and by God, it's going to drive the need and the price of that need way up. And there's going to be these niche little crypto companies out there to your point, like Hyper Liquid, that have built something incredibly disruptive. And I would give you a hundred percent like as disruptive as any technology I've seen in the space. But you know, not more disruptive than Coinbase, not more disruptive than Bitcoin. And, and all, you know, there's just bigger, there's bigger liquidity pools than what we're, you know, talking about that are going to want to pour liquidity into these markets. And what better way to do it than to partner with the company right before you turn on the spigot and douse them with liquidity. It's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. It's out how the big multipliers are made Especially when you're having to do the big multipliers at $100 million plus placements. I think we agree on is what I was trying to echo your sentiment.
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B
I wonder. Obviously I think the most important thing I got out of that conversation is that hyper liquid actually accrues value to the token, which is really important.
- [22:47]
D
And pump does as well.
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B
Yeah. And mechanically, I'm curious if institutions or what kind of institutions actually from a fiduciary or risk managed perspective can actually utilize these platforms right now or if you know, for any of them to actually use partner with somebody.
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D
The general rule of thumb with a lot of this stuff is if you're a prop trading firm, you can do it. I mean they're always the first adopters on a lot of this stuff. Right. I mean the, a lot of people don't know this, but the founders of Hudson River Trading have been funding bitcoin developers for the last 10 years or something out of their own pocket. Right. HRT, super early to crypto. But so are all the market makers. I mean the proprietary trading firms, your Tower researches, your jumps, your Susquehanna's, your Jane street. The more it's your own capital, the more flexibility you have around what you can do and what you can touch. So they're always going to be the earliest adopters to stuff. But there are a lot of traditional hedge funds or there are a few traditional hedge funds that are touching some of this stuff. But it's very different when it's your own money versus its external LP money.
- [24:02]
C
Amen. Yeah. I think based upon what I hear and my conversations, I'm in it's a lot of foreign entities. It's, it's, it's any, basically anybody that's connected to Binance in any way from a markets perspective. Those, those would be the people. I mean look at Binance and OkX and the markets they serve. It's not surprising that there's a lot of liquidity in a lot of these products that aren't accessible and really aren't, you know, prevalent in, in the US
- [24:33]
D
but the one thing to note on Binance, a bunch of exchanges, I mean a huge percentage of their top 10 market makers are US firms. They're just using offshore entities to trade, but they're, they're U.S. proprietary trading firms.
- [24:46]
B
Can I ask you guys the most important question since I haven't been able to ask any of the three of you? What do you think of World Liberty Financial?
- [24:55]
E
Who cares?
- [24:57]
D
Who cares? In the line of. I think it fits Trump's Portfolio of products very well from, you know, Trump Vodka to Trump Water to, you know, Trump Steaks to World Liberty Financial. Just another, another one.
- [25:14]
B
It, it blows my mind. Andrew, say, who cares? I know that it's easy to be kind of dismissive of it, but Justin
- [25:20]
D
sun seems to care.
- [25:22]
E
Who cares? Who cares? Again, who cares about Justin's son? Who cares?
- [25:26]
B
But I wonder. Well, the, I mean, I mean, it's interesting timing with the Clarity act trying to be pushed. We're definitely giving more clarity.
- [25:33]
E
Clarity act was dead six months ago, guys. I mean, that's so obvious. That was so obvious then. It's so obvious now. What do we got, like about 11 days. It needs to be passed in the next 11 days or else it's basically over because we go into the summer and the, you know, Congress goes away. Yeah, I mean it's political theater. You know, it's a talking point. It's interesting. Everybody gets to yell and scream at each other from one side or the other. Again, what matters right now in the crypto space are basically three things. Innovation, traditional finance, not only putting toes in the water, but jumping in, you know, head first and then flows. Where are flows going? You know, to the, the commentary about L1s and L2s and who wins and utility and all that stuff. You know, I take a look at where are we going to be in two to three years when it, when it comes to where money is actually going and where money will continue to go is Bitcoin and ethereum via the ETFs in those flows. And then at some point there's going to be an aggregate ETF that becomes the third largest ETF in the space. That is going to say 90% of the money that matters in this space is going to come from the blackrock's, the Morgan Stanley's and the JP Morgans of the the world. That's just the reality. That's how it ends up working out again and again and again. In the same way that there were winners and losers in 1999-2004. That's kind of the space that we're in with crypto. There will be winners or losers, some of them we don't even know about yet. And they'll grow up in the next two years. But there's going to be an aggregate that wins and four to five years from now the space will look very, very different, but there will be winners. How do we make money? You know, I think 90% of people that are going to put meaningful capital into this space are the kind of folks that invest in ETFs and the way that they're going to win is they're going to put a meaningful amount of allocation into a bitwise fund that has the top 10 of blah, blah, blah into that ETF and that's how they'll participate. It's very, very, if not impossible to be able to find winners in crypto. Even if you're us on this show, it's nearly impossible given the schizophrenic version of, of this industry. So the way that people that have lots and lots of money have figured out how to do that, okay, give me the ETF that's got everything in it. I'll put 1% of my portfolio in there and let's talk about it in three years.
- [28:20]
D
Two things to comment on that. The first thing is that in agreeing with you is that cryptocurrency are generally pre seed and seed startups that are trading as public equities, right? And if you think about the amount of pre seed and seed startups that are going to succeed, right, It's a fraction of a fraction, right. When you're, when you're, when you're an investor that invests in seed companies, right, you basically have to only invest in things that are, you know, you think have the chance of being 100x is because you have the expectation that 90 plus percent of them are going to go to zero. And the only way that you can return money to your investors is if some of these things become big successes. And I think you have to view tokens in that way once you start going down the risk curve. And it also depends on what your investment time horizon is. But I do think the fact that the market is starting to price in value, revenue and real financial metrics is also going to make picking winners and losers easier in crypto. The one thing to note though is obviously, you know, it was brought up earlier, which is disruption, right? In crypto it's very easy to copy and paste what somebody else has built. And so the ability for some of these protocols to be disrupted is higher and their ability to build moats is lower. So that is something to keep in mind. But I do think that as the market matures, understanding who's going to win or lose is going to be easier. On the point of passive products, I will caveat one thing. I agree with you broadly that I think people will come into crypto via passive products. But I think the reason why passive products have to exist and have to be limited is Purely a matter of liquidity. If you're BlackRock, you just can't launch a product for anything outside of the top five by market cap because any amount of buying activity from your customers is going to just quadruple the price of the thing and you're never immediately and you're never gonna be able to get out of it. I mean it's just, it's purely just a liquidity issue.
- [30:14]
C
I agree. Depth of liquidity is, is what they manage more than anything price.
- [30:20]
B
But what if they're indexed? Sorry, right. I mean I, I agree it depends
- [30:24]
D
on, on how the index works. So if it's a market cap weighted index. Yes, for sure. Because then it's like, okay, then it's a 1% position.
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E
Yeah.
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D
But it's. If you're trying to like equal weight an index or sing or do a single asset product, there's just no way.
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B
So Matt Hogan was on last week and he said the buck basically stops at Hyper Liquid. Right? Isn't that what he said? This will be the last single or feasible, I guess single asset ETF will issue in crypto. Everything else is going to start to have to look differently. He basically agreed with you, Josh. We've run out of liquidity for these single things. I know there's like.
- [30:58]
D
But also it's like, is it going to be worth your time to launch your product that's going to get $5 million in buying activity? Like the great thing is once you have an ETF approved, you can pretty much just copy paste the template and refile with the SEC with the new asset. But at some point it's just not worth the juices and worth the squeeze, you know, to be listing, you know, insert random token, that's 37 by market cap, ETI or apologies to whoever's 37 at this current second? I have no idea. I'm not looking at it. But you know, by the way, is
- [31:27]
E
it, is it lost on anybody that maybe we should look up Pump fun volumes and, and hundreds of millions from 2020 and then potentially correlate that to what Hyper Liquid is doing now?
- [31:40]
C
I don't know the hyper Liquid numbers. I know that when I was paying attention to Pump Fund that the biggest number I ever heard was that did 17 billion in 24 hours in volume.
- [31:50]
B
What always struck me was the one month last April when it was like 8 million total.
- [31:55]
D
Well, I think the great thing is that you don't need to look at volumes and you can look at revenue and revenue going to buybacks and I Mean that's the most important metric here and how sustainable that revenue is.
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C
Revenue is, is. I don't, I would, I would, I would say 90, 90. Equally important, if you have a high revenue company with a low customer count, you need customer count. And if you have a low revenue company with high customer count, you need revenue.
- [32:24]
D
Yeah but, but the same thing goes on volume. You could have one customer being all your volume.
- [32:29]
C
So that would be not a good market. That would be.
- [32:32]
D
But they have a lot of, I mean they don't have a single customer. I mean we can Google it, I'm sure.
- [32:36]
E
My point is, is that it, it's one folks have made the case and it's worth at least exploring that you know, the quote unquote crypto pie from a retail standpoint has not grown in any meaningful way over the past three or so years other than the ETFs. So you know, active daily trading associated with whoever has just moved from spot washing machine.
- [33:04]
B
I agree like hyper liquid traders that when you see that like a few weeks ago it was silver and gold were the most traded assets on hyper liquid and then the last week it was oil or whatever, you know, last weekend and usually it's the weekend numbers when they pump, you know, that's just a bunch of old meme coin and altcoin traders that now found something with more volatility to trade. It's not like oil traders have come to hyper liquid to trade.
- [33:28]
D
So it's, it's, it's hyper liquid over the last 24 hours. And obviously you could take some of this with a grain of salt because you don't know if an active user is actually a person. Right. Somebody can have multiple wallets but there's 66,000 active users. That's, that's, that's a lot.
- [33:43]
E
Yeah.
- [33:43]
C
Again to my point, you hold the bigger players. If they're trading against supply, those tokenized efforts are going to be used is my point. Especially as a hedging mechanism against the commodities. Harder to move in and out of the tokenized commodities, easier to move in and out of. Where do you think the hedging is going to take place when volatility hits the market on the tokenized side of things and it's just by nature. That's law of nature. People will go there because it will save them a lot of money and it will give them better, better hedging tools. So and, and guess what? Those are the biggest players in that market. Oil market. Big. The biggest players are the biggest producers. I can Promise you.
- [34:31]
B
Yeah, they're, it's people hedging and taking positions against their own stock and such.
- [34:36]
C
Yeah, they'll trade a tanker 15 times before it gets across the ocean, you know.
- [34:41]
B
Yeah, I mean, I never really looked at the Hyper Liquid chart.
- [34:43]
D
It's pretty impressive.
- [34:44]
C
It's unbelievable. They've crushed it. And, but again, it's just like the Connecticut connectivity of markets, real world markets. They're just proving what we already know and what everyone's really moving into, which is, you know, just these new products that allow people.
- [35:01]
E
But, but from 50, 000ft, guys, you know, hyper Liquid is still an exchange business. And if you step back 40 years, exchange businesses have not grown to be wildly successful and profitable just as an exchange. This is why coinbase is doing 17 other things that have nothing to do with, I mean, Josh, I'm in the middle of my sentence. Can I finish, please? Thank you. So it, they're doing a bunch of other things that have nothing to do with the dollars and cents associated with, with the movement capital. It's, it's a bunch of other things that they're doing that accrues value to what it is. That is Coinbase. Same thing with, you know, any other financial services company. Morgan Stanley is not just making a buck on the, the, the movement of commission dollars from, from one piece of equity to another. They're doing a bunch of different things to make that particular entity valuable.
- [36:06]
C
Yeah, go ahead. I have a comment. After you.
- [36:09]
D
Yeah, and look, and I, I, I don't disagree with you. I know Coinbase now has nine different revenue lines to do 100 million in revenue, which was something that they highlighted in their last quarterly, you know, financial or their quarterly call. But Hyper liquid is doing 700 million in annualized profit. Like, just take a step back to appreciate how fucking ridiculous that is with 11 people.
- [36:30]
C
Oh, it is. It's unreal. But I would say that everything that an exchange does to make money pales in comparison to when they take positions in IPOs and in ICOs. Like, if you look at every major exchange that's made a tremendous amount of money, it's because they've held the liquidity that they needed through parabolic rises in price. Uphold would be an example of that. Like, every one of them is an example of that. And if you go to the traditional side of things, they made their money the same way. They promoted IPOs, they held large positions in the IPOs, they lent lots of money on, you know, with collateral being shares that they can repossess. And they made their bet on companies and then they made their companies very successful. That's exactly how the crypto market has been operating. And it'll never change. And so, but guess what? You can live, you can, you can die on that sword, right? Pretty easily. If, if you look at also exchanges that go out of business in catastrophic balls of fire, it's typically because they were over leveraged in those holdings and they couldn't manage as they grew. So, you know, access to item investment tools, access to early, you know, new innovation is where the real money is made. If you talk to anyone that's made any money in Silicon Valley. Why do they live in Silicon Valley? Because they, they literally are like vultures. They fly around all the innovation and they just wait until they smell money and they go, hey, here's some money. Can we have some equity?
- [38:14]
B
And they wait because they bought rave dial from 25 cents to 14 this week and nobody knows what it is or why. Okay?
- [38:29]
C
There's either manipulation involved or a lot of VC money involved. One of those two things is probably driving it.
- [38:38]
B
They're the reason for all this. Well, Josh, I appreciate your time and we're going to let you run. Always great to have you. And guys, give Josh. Oh, see, look, I didn't have the little namey things on today. Look, because.
- [38:51]
E
There you go. Okay, thanks.
- [38:52]
B
Apparently I can show headlines. I don't know what that means. What did that do? I don't know what that did.
- [38:57]
D
Oh, only two of us had headlines.
- [38:59]
B
It gave us little namey things.
- [39:01]
D
You should be able to rotate people's names. You should just go around in a circle.
- [39:05]
B
It says headline optional. Founder of Creativity Inc. That's what it suggested for me.
- [39:10]
D
All right, Scott, thanks for having me on, Tillman.
- [39:15]
B
All right. Oh, our heads got big. Do you want to, what do you want your headline to be? I'm going to be Founder of Creativity.
- [39:22]
E
So a little, a little more commentary about Hyper Liquid. We, We've seen this story before. It's, you know, it's neat and it's great. A lot of money being, being made by them. But you know, we, it's almost as if there's a rotation in both liquidity and volumes about every two and a half to three years in this space. That's not Coinbase and finance. Right. Those two have meaningfully separated. Okay, but then everybody is just kind of moving around. Like, seriously, somebody go do a little study. I'm sure there's somebody in the comments somewhere. What was Pump Fun doing two and a half Years ago. And what is Hyper Liquid doing now? My guess is probably pretty close, Right? Probably pretty close. And there's pro. You know, of those 11 people working at Hyperliquid, I'm going to assume 11 of them are pretty sharp, smart people. They have to be talking about, what do we do next? Like, how do we move on from being well
- [40:28]
D
to.
- [40:28]
E
To. To. To trade on what. What can we do beyond this? Because we can't do this for the next 10 years.
- [40:35]
C
You're just speaking to the fact that there's a demographic of people that are risky that latch on to that. That liquidity that you see. Yeah. One thing before you do that perspective. Hyper Liquid made 844 million bucks last year. Tether made 10 billion in profits.
- [40:56]
E
Yeah, right.
- [40:58]
C
You know, there's just this. That is the. The technology is. It's disruptive. It has high potential for customer acquisition. And if you're on the bleeding edge, you almost by definition, to Andrew's point, catch the bleeding edge people. The bleeding edge people just go to the bleeding edge. Whether it's tokenized oil or tokenized, Whether it's meme coins, whether it's. Whatever it is. There's a percentage of people that are willing to gamble.
- [41:23]
E
And by the way, what was OpenEES volume in 2021?
- [41:30]
C
Off the charts.
- [41:32]
B
They're doing great.
- [41:33]
E
Pumped out fun in 2023 and now hyper liquid in 2025 26. So again. And what was coinbases from 2014 to 2017? Right. But they figured it out. Right? And now they figured it out so much that Jamie Dimon. Jamie Dimon is screaming expletives at Brian Armstrong at a gathering in Davos. Right. So. So you know that. That's the standard, right?
- [42:04]
C
Well, just to be fair, Jamie probably screams expletives at everybody.
- [42:08]
E
But I found. I found that some of the best CEOs are really good at screaming expletives.
- [42:14]
C
That's what I.
- [42:14]
E
That's what I found. That's been my personal experience.
- [42:19]
D
Personal experience.
- [42:23]
C
When you're being assessed for a CEO position, that's one of the questions.
- [42:27]
E
One of the things you got to
- [42:29]
C
go through a round of screen.
- [42:32]
B
My first job interview out of college was to be the assistant to, like, a huge music agent because I went to school with his daughter. His name was Johnny Podell. He had been the agent for, like, the Allman Brothers and, like, Tina Turner. And then he did crack or heroin for, like, 20 years and disappeared. Then he came back after heroin and did, like, the Backstreet Boys and stuff. Or in sync, either way. I went in for my first interview and the person who had my job was in my interview, the job I was interviewing for. So he just sat, sat the dude there. And you remember those brick phones from like the 90s with like all. He took one of those and threw it across the room at the person that. Whose job I was. Hit him with it like it was nothing. And then I showed up and I lost his job and I got his job. I moved to New York City from Philadelphia and I showed up to work the first day. Or they're like, who are you? Yeah, I'm here to assist Johnny Podell. They were like, we gave that job to his apartment. You were like, yes, people to be
- [43:31]
C
very pleasant when they do the SWOT analysis. You know, as a CEO, you lead with. My strength is. I can scream expletives very well. Weaknesses you lead with. I scream exclamative. So it's strength analysis. It's like a, you know, sword. It can cut both ways. You got to be careful with it.
- [43:50]
B
Yeah, but this is. I said this before as a, as a, as a mild joke, but isn't this what hyper liquid should do? Just, you know, incorporate arch public?
- [44:00]
C
Let's talk about. I'm fascinated. Pomp said something that I just can't get off of, which is, AI is changing the world at such a quick rate that there's kind of three stages to AI. We started with the Google 2.0 stage where it was like, let me know what I need to know about this. So it was user based queries. The second iteration was let me show you everything that I've got and you come up with the questions that need to be asked because you can see everything. That's the kind of the Sylvia CFO type model. The final is the execution model of that. And it's where you can take instructions whether they're AI generated or whether they're human generated, but they're your instructions. And you programmatically put those instructions to work and you leave those instructions in place so that when the instructions, you know, meet the requirements, the market actually shows the volatility that you've prescribed, for example, or whatever the condition that you're looking for is met. Then those instructions then get deployed and you're in a position to act. And so why is that important? Well, it's important because of what we just spent 35 minutes talking about. 247 markets exist, especially if you're in crypto. They've existed for a long time and we all know the emotional damage that does to you. We all know the time constraints that we all have to live our lives. And we know that being involved in the markets and being plugged in to the degree that you need to, to be available and make decisions quickly is a very taxing endeavor. And so these tools that we've built at Arch Public are specifically geared to alleviate that trouble and to get your will represented in your trading strategies that you can build in your own toolbox and then deploy those into the, the markets. And it's getting exceptionally exciting because the feedback that we've had specifically over the last year has just been overwhelming. And 22, 000 customers I think we're up to and just the, the help that we're able to provide people that have needed these tools is a very satisfying and, and gratifying endeavor. And so it's built a lot of excitement inside of our company. We're growing very quickly. And I think it's because, you know, right place, right time, we just have found ourselves in this execution lane of kind of, of, of markets. And it's only going to get bigger. It's like every single asset that gets added to the tokenized list now is available to, to be managed in and out of your portfolio on a 247 basis. So the days of, you know, where you hired a registered investment advisor and paid them 1%, 2% per year to have a meeting with you once every six months, that is very, very quickly dying. That I think is going to, you're going to see a blockbuster Netflix type of an event there. And the reason why is because the markets move too quick to rebalance every six months. You're, you're losing massive opportunity and you're not managing the volatility that you have. You are now subject to whether you like it or not, every market is volatile and it's becoming more volatile. More trading, more hours of trading always brings that. And so you're just looking at something that's going to, I think, gonna become mainstay and you're gonna hear about it whether from us or from someone else in the future. And so what we've done is we've made our product free. You can literally come and download it and get plugged in with our customer service division and they will literally walk you through how to use it, how you can set it up for yourself, how you can manage it. It's completely inside your control. It's on your brokerage account. You can choose whichever one you, you currently are using or if you Want to start a new relationship to use this, that's, that's completely up to you. So no, no high pressure. There's no sale. You can sit there and use it for free for as long as, you know, we're around and you know, no, no harm, no foul. So we really want you to have the light bulb moment as much as anything that these tools are here and they're very, very powerful if used correctly. And what they're gonna, you know, really do for you is provide you, if you're, for example, wanting to increase your allocation in Bitcoin or Solana or Ethereum or any of the other ones or, you know, you're looking at, when do I buy? How much do I buy all those things? Well, you know, you can set the best dollar cost average schedule up in the world. And if I said to you I want to put a million dollars into this asset and you, any prudent person would say, well, don't buy it all in one chunk. You know, okay, well, do I buy 10 chunks of 100 grand, 20 chunks of 50 grand, you know, so on and so forth, or do I wait for the market to present dips where the price of the asset is on sale and I do it very prudently with very small amounts of capital across that cost curve? Well, if you play that out, that's going to give you an exceptionally healthy cost curve. It's going to expose you to the entire volatility curve, but it's never going to be putting more eggs in more baskets based upon the emotion that arises through that volatility. So you have a management tool that allows you to harvest volatility in a way that if you're a manual trader, you've never, never experienced before. So we'd love for you to experience it with, with us and we would, you know, just reach out to us@archpublic.com
- [50:00]
B
When's the next time we're all getting together.
- [50:02]
C
We're planning it right now. It's I, I, I, I October for sure. And there may be an interim, you know, get together as well.
- [50:12]
B
No Vegas this year for any of us. No, I feel like there's like a just wild hatred of the Bitcoin conference this year or something. I don't know.
- [50:22]
E
Well, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a case study on how to, you know, burn down brand. Frankly.
- [50:29]
B
If only somebody had said something about
- [50:31]
D
that,
- [50:35]
B
if only last year in Vegas somebody had been crazy.
- [50:38]
E
If, if the community could give anybody credit for making A call before anybody else did. Your call about it ending badly and it being a serious bubble last year and Vegas was as. Was as good a call as I've ever seen. So, you know, kudos.
- [50:55]
C
I have a hard time criticizing it because it's near and dear to my heart, you know, the industry, you know, it's. It's. But it has. It's one of the. It can't. It can't last forever. Just like anything. And don't know if it'll come back with, you know, a lot of glory. But I will tell you, it's probably of a hard time to be at the bitcoin conference considering Nakamoto's price, you know.
- [51:23]
B
Yeah. You know what's crazy is I saw that still, like, the main headliner for Consensus, which I am going to, actually, and bitcoin conference is still Eric Trump.
- [51:31]
E
I think.
- [51:32]
B
You got to wonder, like, with all the world Liberty financial stuff, does anyone have this all? Just sit up on stage and be like, hey,
- [51:41]
E
somebody somewhere will. But you can imagine, though, that he's ready for that question. He. He. He's.
- [51:46]
B
Where are you on the website, Eric?
- [51:51]
E
You gotta be ready for it. I mean, he wouldn't put himself out there in public if he's not, you know, or he's just an. A unique fool. We'll find out here in the next couple.
- [52:03]
C
I think they're very passionate about bitcoin. I think that, you know, they. They really have. You know, I will say some of the most passionate people about bitcoin were people that got aggressively debanked. And I don't know how true all that narrative is, but I know it is a narrative out there that, you know, they were debanked. But I, you know, I. I assume the best and, you know, walk forward, move forward. It's. It's one of those things where, if people find enjoyment going to the conference this year, great. Have fun.
- [52:33]
B
I hope they all go. I just find it funny that they aggressively debanked Justin Sutton. It is.
- [52:42]
E
It is something of an interesting narrative that Justin sun is now seen as a paragon of. Of truth here in. In the crypto space. So everything comes full circle, I guess.
- [52:56]
B
You know, simulation is.
- [52:58]
E
Yeah. It's
- [53:01]
C
to show you how, you know, ADD we all are and how much we listen to the news and how, you know, it's just a con. Like, the clips are. Are getting out of control. In fact, I'm going to predict that the nightly news is going to make a comeback, but it's going to be. It's going to look and smell very different than the original nightly news. But you know, I, it's people, people. The clipping of the, the short form content is getting out of control because you don't get any of the story. You just get the little nugget that provides enough controversy to get the spark started and then the flame is lit on both sides and everybody's arguing about a clip that was taken totally out of context. That has no relevance to the actual argument that they're having. It's, it's, it's a mess to clip you.
- [54:02]
B
That certain networks that I might be launching shows on in six days are completely changing direction as to the kind of content and news that they will be presenting.
- [54:13]
C
Well and it wouldn't surprise me. I, I think I know a little bit about what you're referring to. And they were on the bleeding edge of one, you know, technological revolution and they're looking for another and I, I, more power to them. It's a much, it's, boy, it's a needed space to go into.
- [54:31]
B
There's guys in suits on TV is a dying breed, I can tell you that. I thought I was going to get like all dressed up and do the news and stuff and they were like we just wanted to be you. We did all the like lower thirds and stuff. We had it all ready and they're like we want it to look like your show. All our shows are going to look like your show. That's the direction things are going.
- [54:47]
C
You know, I think it's going that direction. And I'll tell you another thing I think it's doing. I think that if you look at Seinfeld as kind of one of the things that people said about it that I did not know was it was the, the most out of studio filmed TV show of any TV show that ever existed.
- [55:06]
B
That makes sense. I never thought about that. But they're in the streets.
- [55:09]
C
They were in the streets, they were in the diner, they were everywhere. Like think about all the out of studio moments and I think that the, the journalism where people are going to be literally going, going out and taking people into a new world. You know, if you look at some of the bigger rises of YouTubers that are doing very, you know, ambush type journalism and these, you know, gang related journalism where they're. Yeah, yeah. I mean they're, they're growing in popularity because people want the truth, they want the candid look, they want to get into the circles and you know it's going to be, it's Going to be awesome. I like that.
- [55:45]
D
That.
- [55:46]
C
Very entertaining.
- [55:48]
B
Yeah.
- [55:49]
C
And informative at the same time.
- [55:51]
B
Or not. Do you think it's possible to not reference Seinfeld?
- [55:54]
D
No.
- [55:55]
C
It has an application to every event in life. I think they did that on purpose.
- [56:00]
E
I mean, listen, I. I was watching Seinfeld last night and it was just. I watched like three episodes and I have no idea what season it was, but it was like three episodes of some of the most active, most epic moments of Seinfeld ever. Right? It was Jiffy Park. It was. I'm not a pimp. It was. You know, George's fiance has a doll that looks like his mom and his dad ripped the head off. I mean, it's just. Just epic. Epic stuff.
- [56:29]
B
Greatest show of all time.
- [56:30]
C
Oh, for sure. Yeah.
- [56:32]
B
All right, guys, I think we did it. Oh, once again. I'm going to show the thing again. Yeah, go sign up. You guys in the comments are talking about how much you like it, how great it is. That's all I've ever heard. And we've been talking about this now for years. I've never had someone be like, you know what? I hated all that bitcoin I bought.
- [56:50]
C
Yeah, well, that kind of is the premise. Nobody really regrets that. They regret, man, I should have. I should have been more prudent about my allocation and really managed it, you know, given the opportunity that's at hand and the asymmetric opportunity. Opportunity at hand. The risk reward ratio that we stand to get. You know, it may only deserve 3 to 5% of your. Your financial allocation, but it deserves, you know, 25% of your educational. Because it'll lead you into kind of the new ways of finance. In my opinion. There's a lot of bitcoin standards.
- [57:23]
B
We're about to start testing some new algos on a new portfolio on OKX as well. So please hold for that.
- [57:29]
C
Yeah, there's some exciting stuff that's happening that we're innovating on. We've got an app that's. We're working on finishing that. We're going to launch all of these markets that are integrating different products. Just. There's just a lot of fun stuff that we've got in front of us. So, yeah, come. Come talk to us. We'd love to get to know you.
- [57:48]
B
Check out the site, archpublic.com you might get to talk to Tillman or Tillman or Andrew. That'll be really exciting. I almost said Tillman or Holloway in the sweater or the one out of the sweater. I don't know which one you're gonna get.
- [58:03]
E
Well, there is a Jekyll. There is a Jekyll and Hyde kind of going on with Tillman. So you know Tillman.
- [58:08]
C
Yeah, we know.
- [58:09]
B
We just talked about that. He yells at you off screen and cusses.
- [58:14]
E
No, that's all myth. That's all just a myth.
- [58:17]
C
Listen, I'm just telling you guys that this is the truth. If you played Division 1 football ball and you were decent at any level, I'm not saying I was good, but just, I, I, I did get voted captain of the team, so I was a leader. You're yelling and cussing at everybody. You know, that's how you get everybody going. Okay? So you know, it's a sign of endearment. In fact, session for me and you right here, buddy.
- [58:48]
E
Not so much here or here.
- [58:50]
B
Right?
- [58:54]
C
That's what's here.
- [58:56]
B
All right, well, we're gonna exit before we do anything stupid. 10:00am we nailed it right to the minute. I gotta get good now at. By the way, like, my timing. It's horrible. Yeah, like stopping things at an exact time.
- [59:07]
C
We didn't want to tell you. Let's say.
- [59:10]
B
All right, guys, that's all we got. It's gonna be 1001. I'm gonna blow it. All right, everybody, check out our. Probably see you guys later.
- [59:17]
D
Let's do.