← The Wolf Of All Streets
The Wolf Of All Streets
Bitcoin SMASHES $72K As Ceasefire Begins & Wall Street Steps In! Real Breakout Or Trap?
00:38:38
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- [00:02]
A
The wrongs we must right, the fights we must win, the future we must secure together for our nation. This is what's in front of us. This determines what's next for all of us. We are Marines. We were made for this.
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B
Bitcoin made a huge move, smashing through $72,000 before retracing a bit on the news that there's a likely two week cease fire in the conflict between the United States, Israel, Iran and seemingly the rest of the Middle East. But in the meantime, we have a lot happening on the Wall street front, including Morgan Stanley launching their bitcoin spot ETF today. And even further down the rabbit hole we go, we can talk about quantum tokenization and everything else happening in the crypto market. And we have one of the best people to do that with today. We have Stacy Warden, the CEO of the Algorand foundation, here to unpack all of it for us right now. Let's go, let's do,
- [01:16]
A
Let's do.
- [01:17]
B
Good morning everybody. Welcome to the show. I hope that you're having a wonderful day. I know that I am happy to not have said, seen a civilization erased from the planet today, which was a threat yesterday. So all credit to anyone involved to orchestrating a hopeful ceasefire here. I'm actually going to see a doctor today. I'm in recovery for tds, so I don't want to dive too deeply into it because I know that the war talk is exhausting to everyone. Before I want, before I go ahead and bring Stacy on, I do want to remind you guys that tomorrow we are doing a webinar. I am doing webinar with my good friend Bill Barheit over at Abra, obviously also alongside Marissa Kim, talking about crypto portfolio strategies and investing for the fourth turning. It is very ominous but we're going to go through, you know, a good hour of questions. I'm going to ask them. Digging into the best way to structure a portfolio, obviously and working with them. We're very close with them and so heavily suggest that you come participate. It should be very, very interesting. I'm doing it because I want to learn as well. Always the reason that we do these things. So check that out tomorrow at 4 o' clock Eastern Standard Time. That's April 9th and you can sign up right down below. I'm going to go ahead and bring on Stacy. Good morning, how are you?
- [02:37]
C
Good morning. I want to do my own plug for your webinar tomorrow because we have recently moved back to the United States, become a for profit entity and reconstituted ourselves with a new board. And Bill Barheit is my board chair.
- [02:51]
B
Bill is amazing. And so I had a podcast with him on Sunday and he was proclaiming your amazingness and excellence. And we talked very deep on the quantum, which I do want to get into because it was interesting that obviously the quantum news seemed to be very bullish for Algorand, while bearish for others. So we will get to that for sure. First, I want to talk about obviously the fact that we had this big move across, I think, the crypto ecosystem. It seemed like this is huge relief to all markets, right? Everybody breathe a sigh of relief because we went from really intense rhetoric to I think a calming of nerves. If you take a look at this, there was a huge short squeeze. We don't need to get deeply into the price, but do you think that that's directionally correct, that we're just kind of seeing a sigh of relief right here while we wait and see what comes next? It was pretty intense there.
- [03:46]
C
Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you when I had my sigh of relief is when that B2 bomber was flying out of, across the ocean and then they showed it taking off and then they showed it making a U turn and going back again. I was like, okay, civilizations are good, good not to destroy them. So I was, I was of course quite pleased about that. But I think it shows that, you know, bitcoin really is. It's a high beta macro asset and it's going to react to this macro news the way other risk on assets react to it. And so it'll do well. We'll all do well when the macro. I mean, it's just very hard to know how to price this stuff, right? Like who, whose model is the, the obliteration of a civilization, you know, and so like nobody knows how to, how to even think about it. I mean, it's bad obviously, but just how bad and where to safety? Where's the flight to safety? It's hard to understand that stuff.
- [04:34]
B
I was going to say, not only do I struggle with how to handicap the news or what's being said, but it seems like even before this happened, and certainly during, no asset has reacted as you would have anticipated. I mean, gold and silver were already trading like extremely high volatility small cap altcoins before we even started. All the crypto traders seem to be on hyper liquid now as oil experts with high leverage. So I just really don't even know that anything's moving how it should, you know, in the context of past events.
- [05:08]
C
Right. And the bedrock of diversification is that you need to understand how things, what, what covariances, which two assets are related to each other, covariate with each other and in what way. And if that all breaks down, then your whole diversification, your whole portfolio strategy also breaks down.
- [05:24]
B
Yeah, I find it just interesting as we just kind of wrap up the market talk, that we are behind the surface seeing some bullish things right here. Bitcoin long term holders have expanded their holdings to 4.37 million bitcoin as of April 7, signaling sustained supply absorption per crypto quant. So it does seem like the heaviest selling is probably over. And that's quietly. Once again, when you see prices depressed on any asset, you're probably seeing a whole lot of weak retail hands selling into much stronger hands. I showed a graphic two days ago, but institutions had bought 69,000 bitcoin in the first quarter while retail had sold 61,000 bitcoin in the first quarter. I don't know how that plays for Algorand or other assets. I'm just kind of looking at Bitcoin, but I would imagine that that's reflective across the entire space.
- [06:11]
C
Yeah, I mean Algorand, I mean altcoins like Algorand, we have very little alpha.
- [06:15]
B
Right.
- [06:15]
C
We're not going to do well if bitcoin's not doing well. And you, I mean, I view it as a peloton game, like a biking. You just got to make sure you stick with your peloton. You don't want to be falling behind your peloton. And if you can get into the next peloton, that's always good as well. But you're just trying to, you're very, you know, you're very exposed to the overall market, of course, and in particular bitcoin. Yeah.
- [06:36]
B
And I mean it's definitely worth mentioning today that we have Morgan Stanley debuting their bitcoin ETF as price lump rattles holders. It's interesting, we get the narrative here on Bloomberg, price slump rattles holders. But two days ago we had the largest inflows like of the year into these Bitcoin Spot ETFs, like over $4 or something, which I discussed with Matt Hogan yesterday. But I think it's hard to understate how important it is having Morgan Stanley, which doesn't generally do ETFs. Right. Saying that this is the space we need to get into. And I think they undercut BlackRock by like 10 bips on fees or something.
- [07:09]
C
Yeah, that's.
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B
We need to win this thing, it's big enough that we care. And we all know that takes a long time to turn an aircraft carrier. And Morgan Stanley is about as much an aircraft carrier and institutions as you can get. So. So I think this is a monster signal.
- [07:22]
C
Yeah. And I mean, what do they have, 16,000 salesmen? A good salesman. You don't, you know, you don't. You know, if you're a sloucher, you're not a salesman at Morgan Stanley. So they are going to do and same thing with J.P. morgan. Like, ultimately, they're going to do what their customers are demanding from them. It's not that, you know, Morgan Stanley woke up one day and said, oh, you know, we should do this. They started getting phone calls from their customers saying, like, you know, I don't want to open an account at Coinbase. Like, where is my bitcoin? Bitcoin etf. And so I think that's actually beneath the surface. The much more bullish signal people, registered investment advisors and pension funds and retirees and dentists or whatever are saying, like, I want some exposure to this. Why can't I have it?
- [08:01]
B
Yeah. And it feels like that's been the story with all of the larger institutions, even the most reluctant. I mean, you know, Jamie Dimon's even out here now saying, like, tokenization and blockchain are the future. Of course, he'll still hate bitcoin and all the assets underlying. But JP Morgan, if you look beneath the surface, just like Morgan Stanley, they're servicing all the clients, they're fulfilling the client needs, they're building in the space. They're just like, kind of. It almost feels like they just want to slow things down so they can catch up and make sure they're the ones who win at this point.
- [08:30]
C
Right.
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B
I mean, that's kind of how it feels to me. It's wild. And so there's also a couple stories here from Charles Schwab. I'm not going to show the video. Actually, we have it. But Charles Schwab says a plan to launch spot bitcoin trading within the next 12 months. Which 12 months, you and I kind of quipped before the show that I said, I think, see, in 2037, like, this is so a year from now, I have no idea what the world, the map will even look like, much less what the crypto industry will look like.
- [08:57]
C
But also, I mean, Scott, not for nothing, I guess we know who Satoshi Nakamoto is now.
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B
Okay, we're going to get into that in one second, right after I tell you that Charles schwab has his 1.3% allocation to Bitcoin or ethereum can reshape your portfolio risk. But now we got to talk about. You got it. My quest to solve bitcoin's greatest mystery. So I saw this come up this morning. I didn't read it. You have.
- [09:19]
C
I read it.
- [09:19]
B
According to this writer, Adam Back is Satoshi. I happen to have some inside baseball on some other potential satoshis that are about to drop. But let's talk about Adam back here, because this is not the first time we've heard his name mentioned when trying to identify who Satoshi is.
- [09:37]
C
Yeah, it's. It's interesting. And you know, Adam, I'm just talking about a New York Times article I read. Like, don't. Don't come getting mad at Scott or me about this, but yeah, he. She marshals. It's a very long article, and it's full of, like, kind of circumstantial evidence, but she just like, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick for, you know, 3,000 words or something. And, you know, she makes the best case possible. I think it's a. I don't know if it's she or here. Actually, it makes the best case possible. And. And anyway, this. This journalist is convinced that Satoshi is Adam Back.
- [10:11]
B
So I'm. I think I generally. I think we all have satoshi fatigue as well. Right. Because we've seen this movie so many times. Peter Todd, the last one I mentioned, I don't remember the name. I think it was on hbo. And the big reveal was Peter Todd, who stood there like.
- [10:26]
C
Right.
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B
He's never called me that, but, like, no way. And Adam Back standing next to him, like his McLaren hat or whatever, like, kind of, you know. You know. But there's another movie coming out. I happen to have gotten a sneak preview of it. Oh.
- [10:42]
C
Who they say it is? Who do they say it is?
- [10:45]
B
Under embargo. But I will say that Adam Back is close to it, but they believe it's more than one person. Okay. And it's a very convincing.
- [10:55]
C
Really. It's a woman.
- [10:58]
B
Seven women. A lot of the evidence comes from women. And so. But. And really, really compelling. So I don't know that we're ever going to get consensus on this, but I guess the bigger question is, does it matter? And if so, how much does it matter? To me, it's less who did it. I think it's important to note whether they're alive or dead.
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C
Right. For sure.
- [11:28]
B
And what the likelihood is that those coins could move. Because I think, if we're being honest, is like we've come to this almost religious fervor about satoshi's nakamoto and the anonymity and decentralization has become so key. And this will be a nice segue into quantum as well, because there's concern about those very tokens. But I don't think anything would shake the faith of ardent bitcoin believers than satoshi coins voluntarily moving.
- [11:55]
C
Yeah, right. I think it's the two things that you mentioned. It's the fact that so many bitcoin can drop. Obviously, that's not going to be very good for the price of bitcoin. But also there is this mythical idea around bitcoin, and it's headless, and it really is permissionless and decentralized and all of those things. And to have a leader, you know, we have the core devs and various and people like you that we consider part of the kind of the bitcoin leadership. But it's nice not having not knowing who satoshi is. I think just for the romantic element of it as well.
- [12:29]
B
I mean, Adam participates in the economy, and this is not an insult at all. But, I mean, he is a businessman. He has built insane things. He participated in bitcoin treasury market. It would take the restraint of like, herculean effort for him to never have moved one of those tokens. I mean, we're talking about a top 10 wealthiest person on the planet. If satoshi Nakamoto was a single individual with access to all of it.
- [12:58]
C
Right. By hitting return on your keyboard, oh, my God.
- [13:01]
B
I'd have to cut all of my fingers and arm head. It would be the most impressive feat in the history of humanity. I'm not saying he couldn't pull it off, but, man, you know, like, you looked at Adam, he's just been such a participant, you know, the entire time. He's not the disappearing and not having a say type. So I would be very surprised, but I can't wait to actually dig more deeply into this, because the approach that
- [13:30]
C
she take, it's kind of interesting what you learn about, like, how you try to unearth somebody's identity. So that's also. It's kind of like I learned a few things about how you do that. So. So that's kind of also what's interesting about the article.
- [13:41]
B
I mean, the more I read and hear, I just think it's a group of people and that. So if anyone says to anyone, are you Satoshi Nakamoto? They have plausible deniability Right. Nobody's gonna be like, I'm his, like, left kidney. Right. Or like, I'm the right ear. So I think that it gives everybody plausible deniability, but they can kind of smile and know that they were a part of it and, and maybe the keys are gone. I mean, I can't even like find my actual keys a daily basis. So compelling. I love that. It just keeps coming around no matter what.
- [14:16]
C
You know, we're not going to get any resolution to this. This article is not going to do it.
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B
But isn't that good? Yeah, I don't want the resolution. So I want to now talk about Quantum. This has obviously been the biggest topic, I would say, over the past few weeks I find surprising. I've even had guests on who I've had regularly who now believe that price has largely been suppressed because of quantum fears. I can say anecdotally, I have normie Wall street friends who will say, yeah, but bitcoin's dead. Quantum is going to crack it. Right. So they're seeing the headlines. They're not digging too much deeper. We don't even need to talk about the bitcoin side. But Algorand obviously, effectively quantum prepared. Yeah, I mean you can break down exactly what it means. But there was a big bump in price when we saw the Google paper on Quantum.
- [15:05]
C
Yeah, right, right. I mean, I don't want you to think I'm counting carefully, but we were cited or mentioned 32 times in that paper, including three of the. Our engineers. So we, we did get about a 40% price bump. And so that we did an event. Our chief economist, Matt Brigitte, did an event analysis and you know, where he extracts all the other macro things out of it. And yeah, we got about a 40, 40 bump. So it was good for us for sure. And we have a very robust post Quantum roadmap. We just keep chipping away at this. So we've always cared very much about this. Our, our founder, of course, is one of the world's leading cryptographers. So it's been, it's a genuine narrative for us. And so I think the market has recognized that. And we of course, are quite pleased about it.
- [15:49]
B
I mean, from a still understandable by all of us perspective, what are you doing to prevent, you know, quantum issues moving forward? I mean, what does that actually look like from a, you know, layer one perspective?
- [16:06]
C
Yeah, so I'm going to steal this from one of the engineers in the paper that, that Google references named Giulio Pizzini. And he. But he put it in a very nice way, with a very nice metaphor, which is that you have to think about when you're thinking about quantum security. You have to think about the history, the present and the future. And so for the. To make sure that the history of your chain can't be tampered with. This is something that we have in fact found a solution for back a number of years actually. And so what you need to. What quantum computers can do is they can start with a genesis block and they can create a whole other history history of the chain. And so what we have done is put in your using quantum resistance signatures called falcon keys, every certain period of time, every certain number of blocks, a check using the consensus mechanism of the Algorand protocol itself, with a quantum signature, a falcon signature, so that when computers post quantum computer comes and tries to rewrite the history of the chain, we can say no, that is not the history of the chain, this is the chain. And we can. And if we have to roll it back, we'll have to roll it back like 15 minutes to the last quantum signature. Now these signatures are very large, so you don't, you can't use them for every single transaction. And then when you. But it does protect kind of what, what has happened on chain, that's the most important element of it. And for the, the current history of the chain, you want to make sure that your transactions are quantum secure. Now we can do that, but again it takes a lot of block space. It takes a lot of space. But. And then for the future of the chain, you have to make sure that your consensus mechanism itself is quantum secure. And we're not there yet. So we don't want to overstate this at all. But another point that we'd like to mention is that there are two elements to this. One is can post quantum. Can quantum computers, quantum computers, can they change your chain or take money out of your wallet without you knowing about it or being able to prove that they did it versus can they still do it? But you can flag it and prove that it was done so that you can be recompensated in some way or the chain can be rolled back. And so the first is much scarier that they that a quantum computer can do this and you can't show that it was done. You can't show that something had happened. And right now we, we also can, we can't prevent it, but we can show that it happened. And so then you're in a whole nother world of like what do you do about it? You can try to understand what you need to do about it.
- [18:46]
B
It's interesting because when we're talking about bitcoin, people don't seem really concerned about the mining or the consensus mechanism or the chain itself. They seem very worried about the wallets that are not quantum proofed yet. So it seems like it's almost a different conversation when talking about bitcoin and Algorand.
- [19:05]
C
Yeah, I mean it's, it's for a proof of work versus a proof of stake blockchain. The one thing that the proof of work blockchain has, I think an account based blockchain has a number of good advantages. Of course, that's why, you know, we, we're, we're associated with that. But the proof of blockchain, you know what the genesis block is because you, you always are appending to the block with the most work attached to it. Right. So but in a proof of stake blockchain you have an initial trust assumption about what that genesis block is. And then what post quantum will make you do is you have to then have an assumption about the whole history of the chain and you're not sure if that's correct or not. And what these falcon signatures have done are what we call state proofs have allowed us to say, okay, this is the true history of the chain up to this point. This is f. This is quantum secure. So we've been able to kind of back up. Back. Yeah, back it. Yeah, back that up.
- [20:02]
B
I find it so fascinating if this happens in 2029, which seems early, but that's kind of what Google is positing is possible in their paper. Do you think this will be highly problematic for a number of other blockchains? Yeah, that. Because as an opportunity to attack a diet. And that's not. I just don't want people to take that. I'm really taking this from the perspective of someone who's on top of this and has been looking at it as a serious concern for a long time before this Google paper.
- [20:35]
C
Right. And I also don't throw shade. I love bitcoin. I hold a lot of bitcoin. I don't want anything bad to happen to it. But if you. So one example of this is that we have this state proofs and so we thought, okay, what we could do is we could get into post quantum bridging and what we would have to do, all we have to do is convince other chains to also use state proofs and then they could have a quantum secure. It's all open source. They could have a quantum secure snapshot of their chain. That way we would be. We would offer the technology so that every chain could be. Could have the same thing with the history of the chain, quantum secure. And then we could be in this bridging business. This was like this idea I had and the engineers said to me, it's very hard to do that. We had. It's baked into the beginning. And Algorand, it was very easy for us to do and for us to convince other chains that we might want to do this with. It's just going to be huge amount of work for them to implement this. So that was something I thought was pretty interesting.
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B
Yeah. Do you believe that 2029 is really a possibility now when you look at this and you read that, I mean, to me it seems like better be prepared, even if it's a 1% chance.
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C
Yeah.
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B
I was pretty dismissive of the entire quantum threat, to be clear. Like, I'm a strong opinions loosely held guy. And like, I kind of was like, but the nuclear codes and the financial system and the banks. But even if all that does get hacked and that's always been, you know, it seems like we still don't want Bitcoin to have 6.7 million coins come on the market at once.
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C
Right?
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B
Right.
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C
You know, like I don't have a. I don't have a view on this in the same way that I don't have a view on the right path that Artemis should take around the mo. You know what I mean? Like, I stay in my lane, but it's going to always come down to what is the cost benefit, trade off. Right. What is the risk reward, trade off of the thing. Like if you are scared to get hit by a car, you're going to take precautions, only cross with the crossroad. But it's not like you're never going to leave your house. Right. So for me, we need to do things and we need to continue doing things. Our chief scientific officer is one of the leading post quantum cartographers in the world, Chris Pikehart. And. And we have a roadmap and we just keep chipping away at it. Away at it, away at it. So we're going to roll out this year an enterprise staking program which will allow staking in quantum secure wallets. Now, we can't have those quantum, those, those falcon signature keys in every transaction because we use up too much block space. We don't have a VRF that's quantum secure. We're not claiming that we do, but the people that Tend to stake Algos on Algorand. That's not a, a wallet that's going to trade around a lot. It's not going to congest the network too much. So let's make those quantum secure. And so and we also have a re keying capability which means the transition from non secure to secure is pretty easy to do on Algorand. And so we've been discussing this a lot as you can imagine. And so we're going to next be building a set of tools for people to upgrade to post Quantum and just make it easier for people to just chipping away at it.
- [23:35]
B
You know, I meanwhile back at the ranch, we're obviously staring at Quantum in the future as this massive threat while apparently we're just getting hacked, fished left and right. I don't know if you saw this, but I actually thought this was a massive number. Americans lost a record 11.36 billion to crypto related fraud in 2025, up 20, 20, 22% from the previous year. I mean we've had continued hacks. The Drift protocol hack reads like a Hollywood movie. For anyone who didn't see it, there was no smart contract risk. Literally North Korea just larped their way into to take 200 something million dollars. Now once again, in the same way that I kind of dismissed Quantum as, you know, an everything problem and not a crypto problem, most of this is fraud that would find its way through the system, crypto or otherwise. But I still think it's worth looking at as a serious concern. $11 billion, a lot of money for the citizens of one country to lose and can't be helping our public perception.
- [24:36]
C
Right. And Nick Carter made, made I thought, an interesting observation and the couple of essays that he wrote on this are very good for, you know, if you're not a quote, quantum cartographer to kind of, you know, learn what the state of the argument is. And he, he said, you know, also you don't want to be testing new cryptographic primitives. Like that's inherently risky. So you always trying to balance what you know and what's been battle tested with these new things that come out that might be better, but they're not quite as battle tested. And I thought that made a lot of sense too. So you got to start early, you got to start as early as you can. Getting ready.
- [25:10]
B
Yeah, I want to talk about pivoting from Quantum and the risks. What are you focused on right now? Because obviously we go through these phases in crypto. It's the defi summer and the metaverse fall and the nft. Right now it seems like RWA and tokenization are the narratives. We had a clip here actually where I think Silvia was talking about this in 2020. So there's nothing new here under the sun for Algorand with the focus on tokenization. But we're seeing that hockey stick now, in my opinion. Right. You talk about it forever and the adoption goes absolutely parabolic here. You got the DTCC talking about this, Citadel talking about this, the sec. Everything's going to get tokenized. So is that one of the huge narratives you're now focused on? And what are the others?
- [25:59]
C
You don't have a clip of Sileo talking about meme coins and NFTs. I'm shocked by that.
- [26:04]
B
I think we had the one where he had the bored ape avatar now.
- [26:11]
C
Well, you and I met for the first time four years ago, right? And we did something, we did a podcast live and we were focused on financial empowerment then and we're focused on financial empowerment now. And so we have, you know, to our detriment for many years. We have not jumped on that. A lot of those bandwagons that you just mentioned, we've always been very focused on financial empowerment. And you know what that means really is payments. We've been very focused on payments in high risk countries, payments that are hard to make payments frankly, that by agencies that would rather use USDC than tether, so international aid agencies, that kind of thing. And now we're quite focused on agentic payments and then tokenization. So those really are the two pillars for us of, of what we have been and what we continue to focus our efforts on. Now anybody can build anything they want and Algorand, of course, and there's lots of other things going on on the chain, but the kind of partnerships that the foundation tries to do and the kind of narratives that we try to drive tend to be very focused on financial empowerment.
- [27:18]
B
So one of those things where you just built and built and built and built and now it's all happening around you.
- [27:22]
C
Yeah, it's. We're ahead of our time, Scott.
- [27:27]
B
This is from Ondo Finance, but they're just talking about tokenization generally. Stablecoins up 430. Forget that. That really is tokenization. Tokenized funds up 51,609. Tokenized commodities up 3,287. Tokenized stocks. I was reading that stux up. It's like 6 million. That number's too big. 6 million percent. That's whatever. I mean this is Definitely, really, really, really happening.
- [27:52]
C
And really early innings too. I mean, the kinds of things that you can do with tokenization, we haven't even scratched the surface yet. I mean, very little is happening in tokenization. Defi this idea that you can always, you should always be earning the risk free rate of all of the money that you have. Like we are in soup. And stable coins may even go away because why would you hold a stable coin and fight over whether you can earn any interest on the stablecoin when you can be holding a tiny little sliver of a money market fund and spend that in your Starbucks and always be earning on your money market fund when. So it's to your point that stablecoins are just a one component of tokenization more broadly. Right. And we like, I mean, Scott, I have to tell you this. Despite, despite my sparkly personality and my obviously youthful demeanor, we have never been known as the hippest blockchain. Yeah. So you know when they say we're
- [28:42]
B
the, with the skateboard. Hey, whatever that meme is, that's me trying to hang out with the meme coin guys.
- [28:48]
C
I'm like, but you know, where, where, where we're quite good is these things that finance cares about. Instant finality, high throughput, low footprint. And so this is. We're playing to our strengths where technology matters more than vibe matters. Right. And I'll tell you where technology is really going to matter and revive is not going to matter at all is with agents as well. Right. Because agents don't care how big your community is. Agents don't care. No offense, Scott, but agents don't care how many podcasts I go on either. Right. Like they're just going to look for something that's fast, something that's final, something that's free. Right. Very cheap. Right. So, so we think this idea of tokenization of assets and this agentic payments, they come together in a way that is still incipient and, but very interesting to us.
- [29:33]
B
So what does that look like, you know, for the agentic economy? So I think a lot of people have just presupposed that they use stable coins because they're not volatile. It moves. But you made that interesting point about actually spending your money market or a fractional of the money market fund. Do you think the agents get so smart that they're managing a portfolio and that they actually look for yield and asset that they can spend with it rather than just simply transacting in a stable coin? Or are you saying they'll Transact in algo 100%.
- [30:01]
C
I think you can, you know, I think you would. I think it is better to use a native currency, a nate like an Algo or a Sol or a Bitcoin or an ethical to make a stablecoin sandwich. Right now a lot of stablecoin flows are just stablecoin sandwich. That seems to me to have a little bit more FX volatility than you need, but it has a lot of liquidity. But if you used a native token to make these kind of Rails payments, I think we may at least bigger portions of the market may migrate to that kind of a world. But when agents are level three or above agents, meaning they have a, a set of things that they have to accomplish and a set of rules they have to abide by and otherwise are let loose with, with a wallet, they will look to, they will appreciate the idea that of earning money and earning money all the time and getting a good price and you know, optimizing for themselves. They may have to hire other agents to do things for them or you know, rent themselves out to other agents. All of that I think is going to require crypto. I think it will be native crypto Rails probably that make that work. But they will invest in these little micro investments all the time in things like money markets and other assets that have liquidity tokenized.
- [31:16]
B
Though of course with the institutional involvement, obviously we've talked about the biggest names in the space in the world coming into crypto. Do you think that they're going to use our native blockchains like an Algo Eth Solano, or do you think that they're going to create walled gardens and their own blockchains and try to cut us out entirely?
- [31:37]
C
I think it will be, it will disperse and then it will consolidate actually because people are, I mean tether is annoying, right? Like you can't share the economics on Tether. And if you're Amazon and you're like, I have these suppliers all over the world, I'm tired of maintaining correspondent banking relationships with all of these places. I am tired of having to keep liquidity in all of these countries. I would rather keep my money in my JP Morgan account or my Morgan Stanley account and then just issue a Amazon token. But you could use Tether. Well, no, thank you. I think I'll use the Amazon token to do all of that. There'll be some back office supplier driven dynamics there, but it's a terrible user experience for customers. I think there'll be two things that will happen. One is companies like ubix, like Tony McLaughlin's kind of clearing of stablecoins that's going to be very important because all stablecoins will not be created equal in the same way that bank tokenized deposits are not created equal. And so there's going to be need to be some mechanism that allows you to trade back and forth and understand the variance of the risk pricing of them. But it's just going to become a little bit unwieldy and then it's going to be more of a winner take all market. I think we'll just see. It's the same thing that will happen@layer1. Not, not all of these layer ones will survive. Not all stable coins will survive I don't think.
- [33:03]
B
Yeah, it's been rough, rough run for a lot of layer ones, twos, twelves. I don't know what layer we're at now. Yeah, I'm in web 7. I don't know about you guys, I think you're still back in web3 everybody else but you know I remember having actually when I met you I was. Were we at consensus? I think we were Austin. I think maybe and I interviewed Sandeep from Matic at the time, Polygon Matic that same week and he was talking about how layer twos are not going to be sufficient and we're going to layer 5 and 6 and 7 and oh really was just spinning I guess we didn't get there.
- [33:39]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [33:41]
B
I'm not saying, you know, it was interesting I actually agreed with him at the time but I think we kind of stopped at layer two and it seems like we're catalyzing back to layer one.
- [33:50]
C
Yeah, yeah, well you know I, we can do it. You can do anything you want on layer one at Algorand. So of course we push the layer one is the best narrative. Of course.
- [33:58]
B
So before I let you go, what else is really exciting to you right now?
- [34:01]
C
Well, I just think on tokenization we just haven't, I mean we haven't even scratched the surface. We haven't looked, we haven't looked at securitization vehicles. All of this stuff, I mean finance is like, it's like crochet, you know, it's beautiful on the outside and then you, you know, you turn it over and it's just this absolute mess. And, and I think where really the juice for crypto rails right now is going to be fixing some of that back office stuff. Having everything on a, on a ledger. You know folks like Franklin Templeton talk about this all the time but they're just Talking about, you know, things that are already liquid. You get into securitization vehicles, mortgage securitization vehicles, all of that stuff that is handled by, you know, no offense to the calculation agents in the world, but, like, nobody needs calculation agents, right? These can all be smart contract dividends devised. It's very easy to kind of figure out who needs to be paid what by, by, by code. Right. And so, so we, we just think there's huge opportunity in both, in both of these areas. And we are doing, you know, a lot in the humanitarian payments as well. We, you know, we do 80% of the electricity bills in Afghanistan are paid on Algorand Rails through a company called Saab Pay. We have the third largest prediction market in the world in Alpha Arcade. Now, you know, it goes Polygon Kalshi. Alpha Arcade is, you know, a distant third. Of course, I don't want to overstate it, but we are the third and you can have a parlay on Alpha Arcade as well. So, you know, it's lots of things bubbling up all over the place.
- [35:29]
B
I mean, it seems like we're really just tip of the iceberg of all the actual utility that we're going to see. Finally, from Blockchain, I think it was always theoretical and this, I don't even want to call it a cycle, but at this point, it feels like there's no putting the cat back in the bag.
- [35:45]
C
Absolutely not. And it's always darkest before the dawn, right?
- [35:49]
B
Well, let's hope that's true for the entire world and not just our industry. Anything else I might have missed before I let you go?
- [35:56]
C
No, no, it's always a pleasure to come on here and I appreciate you very much and what you've done for the industry more broadly.
- [36:03]
B
Well, thank you so much, Stacy. I'm going to let you go, stay on for a couple more seconds, but always a pleasure to talk with you. I hope we can do it in person again very soon.
- [36:11]
C
Okay. All right. Thanks, Scott.
- [36:12]
B
Thanks, Stacy. Awesome. What a great conversation. One of my favorite people, as I said, to have these conversations with. It's always nice to be able to call the people that are actually building things instead of just talking to people like me who are just talking about people who are building things. So amazing to see what's happening there. I just wanted to tell you guys because I had not announced this widely, but I'm actually sitting down with CZ tonight. I'm doing something I never do, which is showing up at work at 8 o' clock at night. But I'm going to be here at 8 o' clock tonight to talk about the book that he wrote in prison. The story is pretty crazy actually. I started reading it at like 4:00 clock this morning. I'm trying to get it done by tonight but not hopeful that I'll be able to do that. I'm going to end up being the guy who puts it in chat GPT and asks for a summary. But I'm trying to get there, but it's pretty wild. He literally wrote this in prison on a broken laptop that he was allowed to use. Fifteen minutes a day is where he started it and then continue editing it. But there's a lot of insights there and he's promised to talk about some things that he hasn't really talked about throughout the entire process. And so this will be exclusive. It will not be on YouTube for now. We're doing this on X so you can look on his X account or my x account at 8:00pm Eastern Standard Time. I'm really excited to have this conversation. I haven't talked to him in a very long time and I think we've got a lot of insight to actually what happened over the past few years and, and what it's been like to be CZ at the head and sort of at the head of Binance for all this time. So please tune into that and otherwise I will be back of course tomorrow I think we have Eric Balchunas From Bloomberg at 9am and otherwise that's it. Going to head over and get ready for a crypto town hall and spaces. Now once again, a huge thank you to Stacey and I'll see you guys tomorrow and hopefully tonight.
- [37:58]
A
Let's do, Let's do.