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- [00:01]
Unchained Host
Hey all, before we begin, I've got some exciting news to share. We've been working on something a little wild behind the scenes. It's called Unchained on Air, a revamped live stream series and podcast feed that takes you way beyond the headlines. It features sharp, maybe even controversial takes on major events and the kind of on chain intel that never makes it to your feed. It premieres this week and and it's packed way more shows way more often, each one laser focused on a different slice of crypto and finance. First up is Dex in the city where the wallets are cold and the takes are hot with Jesse Brooks, Katherine Kirkpatrick boss and V. Lee, three powerhouse lawyers gathering to dish about the latest. From defi enforcement to token regulation and everything in between, it livestreams every Tuesday at 12pm ET. Second is uneasy money because what happens on Chain never stays on Chain with Luca Netz, Kane Warwick and Taylor Monahan, three OG DeFi builders unpacking everything happening on Chain from tokenomics to daos, from hacks to yields. It airs Wednesdays at 3pm ET and finally, bits and the Interview in addition to our group chat show in which our Executive editor Stephen Ehrlich takes you deeper with one on one conversations, this streams on Thursdays at 12pm ET. To catch the live streams, follow Unchained on x, subscribe on YouTube or find us on your favorite streaming platform now. And don't forget to hit the bell icon so you never miss a show. And if you can't make the livestream, these episodes will show up in your podcast feed the very next day. Thanks as always for your support.
- [01:49]
Matt Haugen
I think in 10 years I go on to say every single Fortune 500 company is a dad somehow.
- [01:55]
Austin Campbell
I will remind everybody in the crypto world if you think crypto people find a way to do this. There's literally a dude who stole a military vote from Argentina over like debts and hedge fund world. So people are definitely going to be barging in here and looking to do some wild stuff.
- [02:09]
Matt Haugen
I think there's a lot of short term good news about potential reopening of the government, but I think we just need to try to making sure we don't keep getting ourselves back to the same problem.
- [02:19]
Chris Perkins
Stablecoins may have to follow very quickly because that's what you're going to need to exchange those assets. So 3 trillion may be materially low as I'm starting to think through it. I don't know the timeline, when it shifts, but I think we're going to be Much bigger.
- [02:35]
Austin Campbell
All right. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Bits and Bips, except exploring how crypto and macro collide one basis point at a time. I'm super excited about our guests for our discussion today, but we're supposed to pretend to do things in order rather than live in total chaos. So we're going to do some intros. I'm Austin Campbell, high scholar of Zero Knowledge Group and one of the three members today of the City Triumvirate. Joining me are Chris Perkins, as always, the golden hand of Coin Fund, the second member of the city, Triumph for it. And Chris has assured us all he's got some real hot takes today on some of these topics. And then our guests, we have Matt, the high chancellor of Hive Mind Capital, the third member of the City Triumvirate. And finally, obviously the smartest member of the group because he did not work for a bag, is Felix Galvan Quill, master of forward guidance. And I'm going to tell you right now, also, 100% worth the follow for his thoughts thoughts on global macro. So we're going to continue to have some excellent guests going forward. Also me, but I am super excited for today, yet I have to tell you, just remember, nothing we say here is investment advice. That is general advice. Don't take investment advice solely from podcasts. Check unchained crypto.com bits and dips for more disclosures.
- [03:54]
Unchained Host
Built by the team behind Sui Walrus is the global data layer for Web3. And with the launch of Seal, developers now get permission to access controls built right into that data layer. Together, Walrus and Seal make Web3 data private, programmable and verifiable by default. Learn more at Walrus xyz.
- [04:13]
Austin Campbell
All right, guys, let's get into it. Let's start with the big news from today. Allegedly our long national nightmare may finally be over. Is the government shutdown going to end?
- [04:25]
Matt Haugen
So.
- [04:26]
Austin Campbell
So the Senate has advanced 60 to 40. A bipartisan deal to end the government shutdown. It does appear that the word is there are votes in the House. This will fund key agencies like the USDA, the VA, et cetera, for full year 2025. Others through January 30, 2026. The Democrats have secured rehiring of furloughed workers and a December vote on extending the ACA tax credits. Progressives are pushing back, saying the deal concedes too much without the guaranteed ACA extension. Some Republicans are saying perhaps they have given too much. But markets are rallying. Bitcoin is back above 106k to price levels. Not seen for several weeks. I'm going to start with Felix. What do you think is going to happen with the government reopening from an economic perspective? And where does this leave us?
- [05:20]
Felix Galvan Quill
Yeah, totally. Also, I just want to say it's, it's fun to reverse the roles here because I've had you on my show a couple times and now you get to host and ask me questions. So this is just. I love, I love it, love to see it. Love to see in the host seat. Yeah, a couple cross currents for me that I've been looking at. One is, it's really interesting comparing back in 2018, what was the, the breaking point of that previously was the longest shutdown and once again there it was really just the, the FTC or, sorry, not the, the FAA and just the flight holds and everything. That was really the crux that got people to come back to the table. And it looks like that's what's happening again here. And in terms of, like, the economic impacts, there's a couple ones. The first one for me is just around the dynamic that happens when you continue to have the treasury go to the market every week and issue bonds and bills, but they're not spending it as opposed to during normal operations. You know, you have the bill auctions that happen every single week. But on the same vein, on the other side of the equation, they are still spending things. And that's really grinded to a halt over the last month. And that's been happening at a time where there's been a few hiccups in funding markets recently. You know, we're getting to a point now where we've seen the announcement of quantitative tightening coming to an end and just getting closer and closer to ample slash, scarce reserves. So, so that happened at the same time that you had this dynamic of week in, week out, a lot of bills being issued but nothing being spent. We've seen this huge draw in terms of liquidity from the markets. And you see, typically speaking, the tga, the Treasury General Account, they aim to have a target of about a week's worth of spending sitting in there. So typically that sits at about $850 billion. And we've gone above a trillion over the past month just because they're not spending anything. So that's been pretty detrimental in terms of just this consistent drain out of liquidity, out of spending. So, you know, when you have the biggest player out of the market, it makes sense that we've seen such a choppy dynamic of the past month. So really excited to See this hopefully resolve itself because it's, it's been a bit hairy on that, on that regard for sure.
- [07:25]
Austin Campbell
Chris, I saw you making faces at the treasury part.
- [07:29]
Chris Perkins
No, I mean looking forward to seeing some of that money come back in. But I was going to ask Matt, it looks like SOFR's come down quite a bit which looks like liquidity is coming back into the space as well. But before we get to that, I mean I've been looking at Poly Market this week. Next week we'll look at Kalshi. But it looks like prediction markets are saying 89 chance that government shutdown is going to end between the 12th and the 15th. But it also says that the Democrats are going to take the House in the next election, which I think is really interesting coming out of all this. So. But look, I think this is going to be a very nice tailwind. We know that it's coming, it's been coming and when those big checks come into folks pocket right before the holiday season, it should bode well the crypto market.
- [08:15]
Felix Galvan Quill
One of a few things.
- [08:16]
Chris Perkins
And I have to talk about some.
- [08:17]
Matt Haugen
Other things the President's talking about here.
- [08:20]
Chris Perkins
Matt, are you tracking the sofa thing?
- [08:22]
Matt Haugen
Yeah, I am. And I guess just come back to Austin's question here. I mean I literally just came back from London last week from the SAW conference. I know, Chris, you were traveling Today, the last 40 days, probably the least amount of time you want to spend at the airport, I would say to start with. But I think we can all talk about the treasury bills and all of that. But there's real consequences to people's convenience every day. The government employees and they're living from paycheck to paycheck and some of them are sort of impacted by this pretty big time. And also think about all of the federal services and payments and loans and into small businesses and farmers. All of this got halted. So I would say that is yes, you keep spending the money without being able to borrow the money on one side. That's big problem number two. Obviously I think at a small medium business level and everyday level, there's a lot of disruptions. But I think the long term is always just I think our government and our society is getting more divided in general. I think the question is once happened to the next shutdown, how far we are from this? Last time was 70 years ago. Are we going to be repeating this every two years, every one year? That's a much bigger social issue I guess than just economic impact we're facing for the last 40 days but yes, BTC is rallying this morning. Sulfur is coming down, liquidity returning a little bit. So I think there's a lot of short term good news about potential reopening of the government, but I think we just need to try to making sure we don't keep getting ourselves back to the same problem.
- [10:01]
Austin Campbell
Yeah, that. I think that echoes some of my takeaway from this, Matt, which is to say, I think short term we've gotten to a solution, but we only really got to a solution by getting up against a pretty extreme pain point, which was holiday travel. And I'm sure both sides were looking across the aisle at each other and being like, we have to solve this right now because.
- [10:22]
Matt Haugen
For the holidays, probably.
- [10:24]
Austin Campbell
Exactly like nobody wants to screw up everybody's Thanksgiving and Christmas. That's a good way to ensure everybody involved with this is incredibly unpopular going forward. And by the way, if you want to think about why the Democrats chose now to deal, the worst narrative you could be facing is things get even worse a week from now and then the Republicans go nuclear to save Christmas. Right. Like that is not a narrative structure that you want to be competing against when you're seeing like 2026 might look okay for us. But Matt, to your point, if we can't find a good way to get out of this paradigm, the thing I've been observing is one, each government shutdown seems to be lasting longer than the previous one. Like every new one is the longest government shutdown ever. And at some point you just end up with the government shutdown forever if you continue down that path indefinitely. Two, none of these shutdowns seem to actually be doing much to change underlying fiscal and monetary policy, if that makes sense. Right. In each case, it's not a question of are we spending less, we're just spending more in different ways. And so I do wonder what gets us off this sort of like terminal path to like infinite money expansion, if you will. Though, I want to come back to something Felix said too. I do think current liquidity conditions are even worse than some of the headline numbers would have you thinking. Because like reserves that some of these banks are currently holding, I think they're holding them because they still have significant embedded held to matur losses and bond portfolios and things like that. This is not money people intend to do anything with. They're just playing defense.
- [12:01]
Felix Galvan Quill
Yeah. And those, the distribution of reserves across banks is super uneven. Like JP Morgan's doing fine. But some of those longer tail banks, they're. Yeah. Even though technically, when you look at the aggregation, we're, we're somewhat, you know, you can still call yourself like not scarce reserves right now, but some of those long tail banks I think are probably a bit hairy right now for sure. Sure.
- [12:22]
Matt Haugen
I think the shows on the regional bank stock price last month or so, I mean margins coming down, liquidity is getting worse, facilities being reduced and all of that. I think the pain has already been felt. But I think, Austin, you're right. Like the question is like are we getting into a rhythm that every time, you know, they couldn't solve an issue, they keeping the public hostage but keeping having shutdowns that become like one of the routine. That's going to be a place we're trying to avoid. Right. For all reason.
- [12:52]
Austin Campbell
All right, so speaking of policy changes that have happened, let's talk about the tariff dividend. So Donald Trump is back in the news as always with his $2,000 tariff dividend. Trump proposed $2,000 per adult payouts for Americans funded by tariff revenue, excluding certain high income or high earners. The market reaction was pretty much investors view it as short term stimulus. Stocks and crypto seem to have gone up or at least if that's interpreting it correctly. A lot of people are saying the longer term impact here is inflation, higher national debt. Trump is saying businesses are pouring into the US Only because of the tariffs. And yet as a backdrop for all of this, the Supreme Court just had hearings on the tariffs. Said Chris, to your point, I think prediction markets are still seeing less than a 25% chance of approval. What do you make of all of this?
- [13:48]
Chris Perkins
Yeah, so there's a long history of tariffs in our country and in the early parts of our country. By the way, it's the Marine Corps 250th birthday today. So I'm feeling a little bit of historical nostalgia. But it was, it was very much an interpreted and enumerated in, in, in, in the Constitution that this was a congressional power. And I think therein lies that some of the challenge. But as you pivot into the 20th century, it became more of a shared power with more, I guess, deference to the executive, the president in this case, particularly if there's national security. So, you know, and the Constitution gives the president a pretty significant amount of flexibility as they need to conduct know, foreign policy or national security. So how does this come out? I don't know. Do I think in the end the president is going to have the ability to find a way to levy tariffs on, on, on foreign countries? I think there's probably a way is this the way or not. But this is also kind of a, I guess a beauty parade to the public saying, hey guys, these tariffs are working. You know, everyone said that the, the sky was going to fall and, and look, economists will probably will say the jury's out, we haven't really seen the long term impacts of the structural change. But hey guys, we've made, I forget what the number is. $200 billion in these tariffs. Sky hasn't fallen. I'm giving them back to the people. We're gonna, we're gonna really grow this economy. But so like, it's kind of a beauty parade. Will it have the effect that he's looking for? I think so. What is this administration trying to do? We've seen it all along. They're trying to stimulate. They want to grow the gdp, they want to grow this ourselves out of this debt, they want to lead through innovation so that we get ourselves out of, you know, this debt problem that we face. I remember Matt, back in the day when we were at Citi, faced the global financial crisis and we were in bad shape and there was only one way that we were able to get out of it and that was to earn our way out. And that's what we all try to put our heads down and do. So I think this government is really trying to focus on stimul stimulus and really, you know, they're looking at real, real nominal gdp.
- [15:58]
Felix Galvan Quill
Yeah, there's a couple ideas I've been entertaining that I could add to that. And one is, yeah, right now that the liberation and Supreme Court right now is specific to the IEPA pursuit of, of how they've been deploying these tariffs. But there's a lot of other means that they could go about employing these tariffs. So I feel like the market's trying to digest the odds of that is like, okay, well, perhaps these get struck down and yeah, if that's annualized that 340 billion, 400 billion, whatever the number is, there is the implication that that needs to be refunded. So perhaps you see the situation where that gets refunded, but then they go after these, these new executive avenues as opposed to the IEPA approach. So feels like the market's trying to decide how much to weigh one of those two outcomes. And then I just want to, you know, Trump's a big fan of, of optics of these sort of things. So it's like, all right, well, if he's going to be forced to have to refund $340 billion, you know, if, if most of the Tariffs, it's going to be a total nightmare to figure out who that gets refunded to. You know, does it get refunded to the corporations? Does it get refunded to the individuals that are that the tariffs have been passed on to? But you know, I've seen some reports where you know, 70% or so of the tariffs have been passed on the consumer. So okay, if, if the Supreme Court is telling you you need to refund that amount, it's a nice way to to wrap that in a little bow and say here's a little dividend for you. I don't know how much that's believable, but it's an entertaining theory to at least play around with.
- [17:28]
Matt Haugen
I agree with Chris earlier. I think politically this must be extremely popular if you can get it through. But I would say in foreign policies you don't just getting more popular without the other side looks pretty bad. I mean it's typically a zero sum game. Very rarely it's a positive sum game. So I'm saying is that you're trying to increase the tariff and then trying to give the free money to your voters is a great political move. But if to make whoever you raise the tariff from looks pretty bad, the question is in the long run is this going to increase in more tariffs and retaliation stuff. But that's one side. But I think the question to talk about here is more about what this type of measurement is going to do to inflation. Because inflation come from two different places. It's like where the money came from and where the money goes. The problem you have a double whammy here. The money come from by increase the price in general because there's a tariff in the first place. And then you also put the stimulus back to people's hand so they actually can spend more money. Always the backdrop that we're trying to fight a big inflation that is coming from a four five year cycle and just trying to start into easing the policy. So again maybe the dividend itself is not huge enough to really put a dent about the inflation trajectory. But I think one thing hanging on everybody's has every single conversations with any hedge fund managers executives in large financial firm is just figure out where this over debt burden of us is going to and how we can actually soft land really like you know the country's at the verge of bankrupt on paper. So I think trying to do something which is politically look good in the short term. I mean I don't know that sort of like is it piling onto the inflation Pressure which already have no problems.
- [19:27]
Austin Campbell
I mean, if you look at sort of historical precedents here, most of the time when governments are faced with a choice of embrace fiscal discipline or keep spending and cause inflation, they go with keep spending and cause inflation. Right. By the way, that is not a statement specific to the United States of America. You can look at that globally. Usually the only times you're going with austerity is when there's like external constraints that have been imposed on you either due to like losing a war, being part of like the European Union and unable to issue more debt in the case of Greece, or literally the bond market just pukes all over you and stops taking on your debt. So to some extent, I think the US is just doing what we would expect them to do. Matt, to double down on your point, there wasn't at the case that these tariffs were the revenue basis for the offsets and the big beautiful bill also. So now if we're just going to take that money and spend it, we kind of have to concede that thing was just massively expansionary for the deficit.
- [20:28]
Felix Galvan Quill
Yeah, I think if you look at the analysis of the cbo, their initial analysis didn't actually have tariffs in there and then I think they petroleum added it. But it's like if you don't have the tariffs and you have the big beautiful bill kicking off in earnest in 2026, we're going to go from like a 6% of GDP deficit to like almost 8%, I think, which is nuts.
- [20:49]
Chris Perkins
But this feels like a constructive setup for crypto prices. You guys agree?
- [20:53]
Felix Galvan Quill
Like super constructive. Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. Like that. That's the hard part, right. Is like you're dealing with the short term idiosyncratic market structure stuff like October 10th. But you see where we're going. I was just trying to get there in one piece.
- [21:06]
Matt Haugen
I was going to say go ahead.
- [21:09]
Austin Campbell
All of this is playing into the hands of spot bitcoin holders, as I will jokingly say. Right. Like the whole thesis of in fact many of these types of assets is exactly that the world was going to look the way it's looking right now. I mean, Matt, you've been investing on this basis. What are you, you think?
- [21:24]
Matt Haugen
Yeah, I mean, I think this year and maybe starting from last year, there was a pivotal question with people answering is like when you say flight of safety, like what do you even mean?
- [21:34]
Austin Campbell
Right?
- [21:34]
Matt Haugen
Because like historically, maybe since Bren Wood, like people view dollar as the risk free asset, all your term structures and spread was built on the US Treasury I think we've seen the, the significant rally of gold and bitcoins and Chris mentioned about set up for a good rally for crypto, at least for bitcoin. I agree with the else, maybe there's a different reason for that. But the question is when people talk about flight to safeties, I think people are really talking about is US treasury actually have a credit spread on its own, what are actually flying to safety? And I think we all hinged on the inflation, US monetary policies, their fiscal spendings, which actually make entire term structure pretty confusing at the moment. Chris, you've been that for long. We keep talking about risk free rate software. Caesar, and what's your take? How do you think the risk free curve should be built from here?
- [22:42]
Chris Perkins
Like we've talked about this in the past, it's really interesting that this is a completely underdeveloped part of market structure and rates drive the global economy. You turn on Bloomberg, they don't talk about companies, they talk about what's the rate. The rate. There's nothing more centralized in the world and maybe it's even getting more centralized as we put stable coins in place. It's a different form of centralization where we'll try to control the front end. But you have these guys sitting in a room controlling rates. You know, as we see it, there are rates everywhere in crypto. Now that we have staking rates, those curves are starting to form. Futures are going to start coming online here in a bit and I do think that this is an underdeveloped part of crypto that will start getting developed as we look at what is the true risk free rate. And like the other thing is people ignore real versus nominal rates all the time. It's very frustrating. You start looking in crypto, you can start finding some very, very interesting, interesting real rates. Those curves will start forming and then we're going to start looking at trading basis swaps versus dollar versus east dollar versus Solana. This is going to be the future, guys. And, and we're going to start looking at the decentralized version of decentralized rates. But thanks for the plug, Matt. Something that we focus on and I think it's going to be an important part of market structure going forward.
- [23:59]
Austin Campbell
All right, I'm going to take us to one of our ads because we have to and then we're going to be back for the more of this discussion.
- [24:05]
Unchained Host
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- [24:48]
Austin Campbell
All right, Matt, you had just brought up Alts, so we're going to dive right into our next topic on the back of that. That is at least somewhat related to what is going on with DATs. Are they dying? So MNAV premiums across the space have evaporated in many cases. A lot of DATs now trade nearly one to one with their crypto holdings or below, signaling somewhere between zero and negative market confidence and business value. Now, the total crypto held by DATS has fallen with the market. But as we were discussing before the show, the majority of that is just crypto prices moving around and back to the tightening liquidity environment. That's not totally surprising. It seems only that Ethzilla has been actually selling tokens to buy back shares though. Happy to hear if you guys know about any others. A lot of analysts are now calling DAPPS an exit event, driving prices down for some of these tokens. And the business model is under fire for high setup costs, essentially paying more than the underlying assets are worth. For the end investors, bitwise, CIO Matt Haugen said if all a debt does is hold coins, you're better off with an etf. So, Matt, I know you've been thinking a lot about this. I'll start with you. What do you make of what's going on with the market here?
- [26:05]
Matt Haugen
First of all, I'm gonna just admit to say a lot of the people on the show probably are hoping I'm gonna say something about our own Avex that offer. We're not gonna say those. This is not financial advice. But you know, I think as you know, you know, we're deeply involved in the space in many ways also in our previous life, right. This is the year we truly see crypto and try to fight converges. I think that is just the output of that convergence and the next innovation may not be that, maybe something different. But I'm saying that from a structural standpoint, I feel extremely optimistic about the space because finally, after four or five years since I left Citi, Set up Hivemind. I feel we have a detour and this year was the year zero that we have a somehow fair and supportive legislation. Regulators allow some of this innovative stuff to happen. Can you imagine that that happens anytime between 2022 to 2024. So I'm saying that for the industry as a whole, it's massively positive news because you're attracting more capital, you're attracting more talents, you're attracting more innovative structures and people are figuring out ways to make it work. Now, micro level, when you're having 150 companies all raising a die, somehow there will be problems. I think the backdrop is the crypto market in the last three, four months. Probably also have a lot of volatilities now. It's hard to see and hard to say is the dad triggered the crypto market or the other way around. I think there's definitely some kind of intertwined activities there given how big the entire debt market has become. As you said, between BTC and ETH, that's 100 billion on its own. And then you have the long tails everything else. I agree with Matt from Bitwise. I think that if you just purely holding tokens, you're better off just holding etf. I made an ad the other day on my Axe account and I shared some of this last week in the stock conference too. I sort of like comparing DAS with ETF. Almost like owning Berkshire House with stock versus owning S&P 500 index. If you think about the business model the tool was not, or Dow Jones for that matter. If you think about the tool, they're all historically holding anywhere between 20 to 25 names, but one consistently trades above the book value of the other stock index. And the reason why is because the two investors that run Structure Hathaway has a proven track record to consistent adding alpha, timing the market, actually in certain cases owning the entirety of the stock. So they actually can make a lot of value creations from the stuff they own and not just passively holding it. So the question for DAT 2.0 is the following. When you're having every Single1's top 30 tokens have a dad, at least one out there, how do you differentiate yourself? Number two is if your entire business thesis is based on you're holding your stock in the trade above book value and every single time it does so there's someone else on the sideline going to raise a dad right at one time abnav, it's very hard for you to be able to consistently sustainably trade above app nav premium if you only thing you do is just holding the token itself and then everything else kicks in, right? Because you have a higher cost, you almost have to pay things for the SPAC sponsor if it's a spacing or pay for the legacy business if you're using a reverse takeover. So if you go to this route, you almost have to have a business plan that you're going to do things beyond purely holding the token. Again, not talking about the debt that we sort of the lead investor ourselves. One way to do that is finding what is the operating business you're going to build on top of it that do two things. One, by itself, it actually has a real cash flow, real profit, real business, real users that drive enterprise value beyond just book value. So the combination of the two, make sure your stock trades above the book value. Number two, you have to somehow also making an operating business related with the token you hold. But I think that's where things getting interesting is because we've been talking about migrating business economies, financial ecosystems on chain for so long now. You have opportunities to go to public market raising hundreds of millions of dollars and trying to figure out a ways to build real world application and operating businesses bring them on chain to actually drive the fly view of your token price I think is great. I think in 10 years I go on to say every single Fortune 500 company is a DAG somehow. It's just that their operating business so much bigger, their corporate treasury will hold dollar euro today just like they're going to hold BTC and East in 5 to 10 years time. So I think from that perspective it's the right idea. But I think you need a lot of fine tuning to make this really work.
- [31:32]
Austin Campbell
All right, I'll pile in on top of that one. First, as somebody who has had some critical things to say about DATs to say what Matt said was a very important point there about how to think about these structures from a business perspective. That is to say, if you think about it, you've got a box and you've got a bunch of assets in the box and then you've got expenses on top of that. So if you did nothing else, the average dad should trade at a discount, right? And that's not a commentary on the token, that's a commentary on expenses, right? Which is something people often don't want to think too much about. And if you have a DAP that's going to sustainably trade at a premium to the things in the treasury of the company, it's probably got an operating business where you're thinking about the discounted, like, value of future cash flows and essentially adding that back in. Now, Matt, to your point, this is something I want to pick Chris and Felix's brain on. If we're thinking of something like the Berkshire Hathaway model, part of what's been really effective, if you really, like dig into what Buffett and Munger were doing for a long time, was fighting very cheap sources of funding like reinsurance float and then deploying it as capital allocators across a diversified sector of things. Does that argue for single asset DATs or should we really see like crypto sector DATs then deploying generically into the economy? Like, how do you essentially, where do you find the cheap funding, I guess is my question, to enable that trade?
- [32:59]
Chris Perkins
It's a good question. Look, I'm a big fan of, of dats and I thought Matt really summed up things really beautifully. Not all are going to be successful. As investors, we look for about five things when we evaluate a dat. The first is timing. You got to have the timing. That's right. You want to have a token with good fundamentals. Fundamentals are correlated to the success of the debt. You don't want to buy a crappy token. Whatever. The most important thing. Hear me out. The asset manager, kind of like what Matt said on Berkshire Hathaway, you have these two active managers. You have to have an investment advisor who knows what they're doing when it comes to TRE operations. On chain operations, that manager has to know its stuff. That is the difference. That's the secret sauce that you get with the DAT look. You also want to have the foundation to be alignment, I think I said. And then you want to make sure you got a good kol. Someone has to tell the story, particularly at this time. But my bottom line is that it's still super early. The cement is drying on a lot of these things. These things work in cycles. I put out an article this weekend. We don't even have futures on a lot of the underlying tokens for this because Gensler held them up. How are you supposed to trade basics? Most institutions can't even buy a DAT because it's too volatile.
- [34:09]
Felix Galvan Quill
Right?
- [34:10]
Chris Perkins
It's too volatile. And if you're down 15% in a month, your PM, you're out the door. You can't even hedge this stuff yet or thoughtfully hedge it. So it's really early. If you get in early, maybe you benefit, but again, there's a lot of risk out there and, and the cement will continue to dry. I do think you're going to see some, some really amazing companies. Last thing, I love what you said about every company is going to be adept because they are, because they're going to be paying in stable coins. Where's the gas coming from? Right. They're going to tokenize assets, they're going to buy back tokenized shares. Where's the gas coming from? And so we're in this golden age of convergence and it's just getting started.
- [34:48]
Felix Galvan Quill
I'll add a couple points. I think in general dats as a form factor can be very interesting and powerful. But I think a lot of the nuance gets forgotten in the day to day discussions around just how different some of these structures can be. You know, obviously it all started with microstrategy and now we have so many different variations. And yeah, I think in, in my belief, I mean, Chris, you made such a great point that the asset manager is incredibly, incredibly important. Like, I just don't think it's, I don't think there's enough humans out there in the world to just exist for that many, you know, top tier asset managers. So I think it really will follow a, a power law distribution. And in the same vein of that power law distribution, I do think that, you know, there's, there's some very well articulated and structured DATs and some that are less so and some that are, you know, a lot of cash contribution and some that are in kind, some that, you know, it's, it's an opportunity for say, you know, foundations or VCS to be able to contribute lock tokens. There's, there's a wide spectrum and I think some of them are, are great. Some of them I might have criticisms for, but I think in general, you know, we're underway in terms of creative destruction. I know it's the beauty of capitalism and I do think out of it some really interesting innovations will emerge. But again, at the same time that does also attract some ones that I might be a bit more critical of. But in general, I think the direction you write is in a positive way, it's just about how many get to that point.
- [36:12]
Matt Haugen
Austin, you asked a question earlier. You said Berkshire Hathaway has a secret weapon, which is their insurance business. It's not only a cash flowing, positive business, but also extremely cheap funding. And what's the equivalent of that? Well, I think the equivalent of that is the lack of the term structure in crypto derivatives, at least for the time being. If you think about it, you can't even getting a five year Call option on eth. Right. Nobody want to short a gamma. On the other side of the options. The only way for you to even get one is to buy a five year convertible bond for sharply or Bitmine or any of these DAG companies with getting that inheritance warrants that have a five year corruption on it. Now the question is like if you run in black Scholes model now we're going to some of the else, Solana, Avax and others. The vault is crazily high to the degree that you can actually pricing. And we run some of this by the way and the result is like shocking. It's like for you to get the implied volume for those long else in the debt you can actually price the convertible bond current coupon negative. That's how valuable the add of money co option of the converts warrants is. Obviously you're not going to ask investors to pay your interest rate, right? We're not in 2018 anymore. But you could easily structure a very cheap convertible bond with very cheap zero coupon card and pay by offering something very valuable. Because there is no such a structured derivative market term structure with liquidities in cryptos yet. I think in the short term that's a structured death deficiency on the crypto side that empower the arbitrage between the two. The debt started it because you will be able to get a discounted token on a crypto side. But in return you suffer liquidity. You lock your token for a long time now you wrap in a public market ticker. All of a sudden you got a liquidity of that perfect, right? But now we're going back to arbitrage the other way around to say hey, you actually don't have ability to buy long dated call options on crypto market now via that you actually have the ability to get that inherited warrants. I think that's a very cheap way for you to access capital market for a lot of this token that otherwise doesn't exist. So I think in the short term that is something comparable to cheap funding as insurance from Berkshire Hathaway. In the long term your cheap funding and secret weapon comes from that your your abilities for all the company you invest or roll up to empower them on the on chain components. I think if any legacy remittance companies, payment companies, regional banks, you'll be able to invest and roll up right away offer them the on ramp infrastructure. I think that's unlocking the 10, 15% of enterprise value. I think that's something the math you can bring values and that's why One plus one is more than two. But again I think it's all coming up to execution and that's why getting a shareholder vote is very, very important. We did one for our own dad. But you need to really get in the shareholder world to making sure the shareholders behind you to do more than just accumulating tokens. And many dads we saw earlier this year are trying to avoid it because they're faster or they're very for different reasons worry about the shareholder may not approve it. Well, the question you should ask yourself is you worry about shareholder not approving the deal, then should you do the deal in the first place, but actually trying to do a little slower, get a shareholder vote, telling them the plan, making sure the roll up is part of the plan actually set you up to do things that different.
- [39:47]
Austin Campbell
That is almost sort of a classic private equity strategy that you're embedding in there. If we can take these businesses that have broken operational processes and just one by one fix them and we saw.
- [39:57]
Matt Haugen
The Internet people send you offline business, not I'm going to roll you up to make you an online business. But now I'm saying there's a lot of off chain business but actually making them on chain will giving their efficiency 10, 15% better across the board. I think that's where cheap funding is as equivalent to rupture houseware.
- [40:16]
Austin Campbell
All right, and I also have to give a shout out here before we move on from this topic with one last question. Block Works does have an excellent DAT tracker. So if anybody is looking for this entire space like Felix is the guy to look at for that. So Felix, provocative question for you. Do you think the market is valuing these things effectively because you said some are better than others?
- [40:39]
Felix Galvan Quill
Yeah, I think, I think, you know, the long tail of them should probably trade at a discount and I think the ones like BMNR and MicroStrategy that have a proven track record or at least proven operators should trade at a premium. I think like to me the most interesting question is what sort of potential games can be played there in the future? You know, like do event driven funds come in here and start that? You know, if you see these, these companies trading at a discount or I've even heard rumors of the potential for say a, you know, a Solana dot to go and acquired a position in a ETH trading at a discount, buy it up and then unwind the ETH position to buy Solana, like that's accretive to Solana. So I think there's some Very interesting games that'll be played out in the next while. And I think it, it's just about how does, how does that long tail of ones that should probably be trading a discount get cleared out? That's what's the most interesting question to me right now. I don't know if any, if any of you guys have theories on how that plays out.
- [41:32]
Chris Perkins
I think it plays out exactly as you say. I can't. I mean there's going to be M and A. There's going to be consolidation and roll ups and like that's what I was thinking about. I was just talking about this basis trade. You buy the data discount, you sell the future try to generate yields. Two things could happen. The, the MNAV drops further and you lose money or it's get. It gets bought and it comes and it goes, you know, north quickly and you make more money. So I think there's a lot of structuring. You can do that again.
- [41:58]
Matt Haugen
We're super early I think Felix, to your question right. A lot of people talk about this M and A. There's two different type of M. There's the amicable M and A which is the token buying the M and A within themselves.
- [42:12]
Felix Galvan Quill
Right.
- [42:12]
Matt Haugen
Like the number, the largest Solana token like that by the number 15 Solana that at 0.7 MF. That's congratulations among the same ecosystem. I think it's constructive. You're probably seeing less hostile by communities and all of that. I think that can happen and probably will happen. Now it's getting extremely interesting and spicy when you have the second type, what you just said, it's like you have token A go and acquire a token B forcing them to liquidate tokens and buy the other token. I think there's a lot of unintended consequences at all different levels and I don't know how that's going to play out. I think somebody going to try because if there's a way, what we know is crypto people will go there and try it. But people better get ready for all of the backfires they're going to do. Right. Like is your shareholder ask you to basically supporting you to do this and just trying to liquidate another committees. I mean this is going to be a very complicated M and A.
- [43:16]
Austin Campbell
Well I, I would also raise. Do you need to liquidate the other communities or do you end up with the thing of having like mutual alliances? Because like I'm the Solana dad, I'm one of the big ones. I'm trading like close to par. I Take this tiny eth that I put the dad out of its misery. But do you necessarily have to sell the ether? Do you just own it now because it's accretive when it hits your balance sheet, it's worth more, right? There's going to be a lot of that. By the way, I will remind everybody in the crypto world if you think crypto people find a way to do this. There is literally a dude who stole a military boat from Argentina over like debts and hedge fund world. So like people are definitely going to be barging in here and looking to do some wild stuff.
- [43:53]
Felix Galvan Quill
I was going to say I wonder who.
- [43:54]
Matt Haugen
The crypto world is pretty poor today, so probably nobody have money to do that for the time being. But in the six a month's time, who knows?
- [44:02]
Felix Galvan Quill
Sorry, I was gonna say who. I wonder who the car like on of the crypto world is about to be.
- [44:06]
Austin Campbell
I Eric Prince. Somebody is gonna like show up at somebody's office and take all the ledgers hostage that's really trading below and they're a shareholder, dude.
- [44:17]
Chris Perkins
I was at a dinner with the Elliott guys when they did that and there was this firm wide announcement where they weren't allowed to travel to Argentina. It was awesome. Some people won't be allowed to go to Breakpoint I guess.
- [44:30]
Austin Campbell
Well, we're going to talk about the UK next, a country I may no longer be allowed to travel to. The bank of England has done a stablecoin consultation launching basically for public comments the regulatory framework and final rules due second half 2026. Currently there are some technical details. It requires issuers to back 40% of the liabilities with deposits at the Boeing 60% short term UK debt. There are systemic issuers that could hold up to 95% debt as they scale. And most importantly they have proposed holding caps of 20k in stablecoins per person, 10 million per businesses, maybe with a handful of exemptions for those. And this does make the UK's clearest move yet towards formal stablecoin oversight payments. But Chris, I have a question for you. Given your background, are these caps not like a complete unilateral surrender by the UK on the pound being relevant in crypto and maybe in future markets?
- [45:33]
Chris Perkins
Come on man, this is. You look at them and they're trying, like, it seems like they're really trying, but come on, like look at our country. Scott Bessant's there pounding the table saying give me 3 trillion, give me 3 trillion. I'm going to control the front end of the curve. Let's go. I want to, you know, the dollar is going to be the global reserve currency forever, and we're doing it through stablecoins. The one thing that I want to see, I've been dying to see tokenized FX markets, which is trade better. They eliminate her state risk. I'm like, come on, guys, let's get it going. I think the UK is in a real tough spot. Real tough spot. I met with Rachel Reeves. She came over a few months ago and she seemed willing and engaged. She's Chancellor of the Exchequer, for those who don't know. She seemed willing and engaged and she wanted to have constructive conversations with Secretary Bessant. But, gosh, they just can't get over themselves. And I want them to. I mean, Matt, you. We've been, how many times been to Canary Wharf? Like a million times. Global finance, one of the greatest hubs in the world is in the uk.
- [46:31]
Matt Haugen
Such a shame.
- [46:32]
Chris Perkins
It truly is time zone works. FX markets are awesome. Like, it is the place to be. And look the problem. If you're in the uk, how many, how many unicorn tech companies come out of there? Not so many. Right? And when you speak to government officials, they're like, hey, we're okay at startups, but we just haven't been able to have those unicorns developed. So now you have this intersection of finance and technology. They have a lot of risk, and I just wish they would take the training wheels off and get after it because the US isn't slowing down anytime soon. The Japanese are starting to engage, but then, you know, we can talk about the Europeans another time. I don't know, it feels like in those jurisdictions they just have a preference for CBDCs for some reason. And I don't know if the UK is there as well, but these caps gotta stop.
- [47:23]
Matt Haugen
By the way, does anybody know why it's £20,000? Is that the arbitrary number or they just pick a number and just. I'm just curious.
- [47:34]
Chris Perkins
I don't know.
- [47:34]
Matt Haugen
They probably felt it was a very generous cap, by the way. Chris.
- [47:38]
Chris Perkins
I'm sure they did. I'm sure they did. But, you know, this risk aversion is not helping them. And that's really what it comes down to is risk aversion. And like, you know, in our country, we used to be like that last administration. Maybe not as bad, maybe worse in certain cases, but we need to build and break things, and that's our culture. And like it's. We're going to have issues in the States, right? Things are going to blow up, but that's okay. That's what you do when you take risk. It's about the innovation that comes out of it. And so they just don't seem to be part of that.
- [48:07]
Austin Campbell
I don't know.
- [48:08]
Chris Perkins
Felix.
- [48:09]
Felix Galvan Quill
Yeah, I mean, I'm just curious also what you guys think on this, but to me it just feels like this panic or concern in terms of control of monetary policy in each of these countries. Right. And so, you know, my guess is perhaps somebody said, okay, well what's the degree that we can allow our citizens to own US denominated stable coins but still able to have some sort of control on monetary policy? And then maybe somebody came up with some fancy economic economic model that just said, all right, well if Everybody's capped at 20k, we could still have control of our currency and our interest rates. And I don't know, it feels like this, this trend is going to accelerate, especially in, in increasingly inflationary regimes like obviously UK isn't as bad compared to Argentina. But I don't know, I'm curious what these central bankers are thinking about in terms of just control of their monetary policy, by the way.
- [48:55]
Matt Haugen
I mean this tells you how bad the previous US regulations around this was about because we almost under the illusion that UK and the rest of the world are actually moving pretty fast last three years. It's just because we were so bad at home front. Like I'm serious, right? Like when you go into innovative space and the worry you have is not about your company going bankrupt, which is a startup problem, but I can lend limited liabilities for many different reasons. You're not going to be able to attract talents to do that. But I think I talked with Bob diamond last week and thought about the exactly same point. I think these moments made you realizing it's not UK are moving any slower than they always have been. It's the 180 degree in the US have got us back to where it always have been on their policy. Postpone the Internet, the mobile Internet, the AIs. I'm basically back on track. And I think just the rest of the world has always been taking that type of approach and little conservative, little slower. It is US policy has been so bad and made others feel they're very, very pro and constructive. And I think this has always been the case, unfortunately. And I think the other problem in Europe is, as Chris said, the country, the time zone, like all of the global hubs is a perfect center for tokenize the money, almost right payments and all that type of stuff. But I think entire Europe facing A talent crisis too. I'm not talking about they don't producing talents. I'm saying they don't retain the talents. If you go to the best school and after you graduate you want to go to an AI product and crypto project, it's very hard for them to be able to retain the talents too. So I think that's also a problem. You need a policy to be supportive. You also need educational infrastructures and other things to keep up with the pace if the talents keep leaving to other.
- [50:51]
Felix Galvan Quill
Part of the world.
- [50:51]
Matt Haugen
I mean, that's another problem too.
- [50:54]
Austin Campbell
I will pile on there to say all three of the quants who worked on my products at JP Morgan originally and Citi originally were trained in France. And so that tells you something, right? But like, listen, if anybody from the UK is listening, I want to make a point that you're not going to like, okay, as somebody who's run a stablecoin, people only need two things to buy a US dollar stablecoin, the Internet and something to exchange for it. And I think the position that this puts a lot of people trying to do things like impose caps in is you're going to have all these measures that you think are protective, that you think will do something. And then the reality is if you're not willing to completely take the Internet away like North Korea, it doesn't matter. People are just going to do it anyways. Like we have entered the era of all of these capital controls just being eroded by Internet connectivity, moving to the realm of money. And so you've got two options, which is get with the program or get run over. And I think my disappointment, Chris's disappointment, probably come from the same source, which is the uk Right. Like you said, Chris is a global financial center. Hell, it's an insurance center too. Lloyds of London was literally in the UK and now here they are trying to like plant their flag on. No, we want everything to be done as though we're calling each other on the phone when we're moving money around and just in denial of this new reality. And it's not going to work. The the comment, Chris, you made on risk aversion, I think the biggest risk you can take is not embracing this stuff. That's the strategy that Borders took when Internet commerce showed up and lo and behold, Amazon just absolutely trumped them.
- [52:31]
Chris Perkins
I think this is going to accelerate the dollarization then even of the uk, right?
- [52:36]
Austin Campbell
Well, yeah, okay, let's talk about dollarization because Myron's been out talking about stablecoins and Rates basically saying stablecoin growth will help push down global interest rates. Predicts the stablecoin market could hit 3 trillion in five years. And that rising demand for these might even lower the neutral rate for dollars. And basically calls stablecoins the multi trillion dollar elephant for central bankers. So Chris, I want to start with you on this one. Is that a reasonable projection for stablecoins?
- [53:09]
Chris Perkins
Yeah, you know, three trillion seems right, but I've been thinking about actually a different, a different metric that's tokenization of equities and fixed income. And bear with me for a second. I'm a fiduciary, right? So I have to buy the best product if there's sufficient liquidity in global equity markets, which I think they're like 127 trillion, fixed income market, something around 150 trillion. Right. Let's look at equities. If I'm a fiduciary and I need to buy an equity and assuming the liquidity is equal, I have to buy the token. I have to buy it because if there's a risk event on a weekend or holiday, I need to be able to manage my risk. What am I going to use to pay for that? I'm going to use stable coin. So is 3 trillion enough? And again, I don't think you're going to see this slow, steady conversion to tokens on the real world assets. It'll be slow and steady until there's liquidity, then pop, it'll be exponential. And I think the stable coins may have to follow very quickly because that's what you're going to need to exchange those assets. So 3 trillion may be materially low as I'm starting to think through it. I don't know the timeline, when it shifts, but I think we're going to be much bigger.
- [54:16]
Austin Campbell
Felix, what do you think?
- [54:17]
Felix Galvan Quill
I think dollar dominance is going to continue. But yeah, it was a really interesting speech from Stephen Ran, who, yeah, kind of point of pride is that I was able to interview him for guidance last year before he ascended up there, which is super cool to see where he's ended up. But yeah, it's interesting. I mean what I've been thinking a lot about is just this transition of the US from DM to emification in some ways, like every turn right now is to just lower the amount of duration that the US treasury is trying to issue, whether it's what Besson is doing at the treasury, which is avoiding increasing coupons at all cost. You know, you have the Fed now, that's likely going to Start buying bills in the next six months or so and increasing their reserve. So you have that going on and then you have the stablecoin thing which is collateralized by key bills. Every single corner of the financial system right now feels like it's being leaned towards as low as little amount of duration as possible. And when you look at ems, you know, I, I saw something that at one point in like the 2010s Brazil was over 100 of the daily issuance was like entirely T bills or something. So it just, it just feels like we're heading towards this world where just to avoid any sort of upset on the long end, we're just going to avoid any sort of duration into the the world. You know, we have too much inflation for that and we just get into this world of, you know, you can call it financial repression, but it's just we're going to stuff bills into every corner that we can and it feels like this is one of the key avenues for it. So I, I see that accelerating.
- [55:48]
Matt Haugen
I, I agree with Chris in the sense that I think the stable coin demand in the medium to long run maybe actually is bigger than 3 trillion. I don't know about what Steven said about the rising demand of U.S. treasuries because you put treasury on chain. Is that driving incremental demand for it? I don't know. But I'm saying is, I don't know whether because you're putting Treasuries on chain all of a sudden you're going to lower the neutral rate. But I think one thing for sure is you're going to lower the neutral spread. And here's what I think happens is if you think about tokenizing assets, actually treasury is the starting point because it's the most homogeneous large scalable asset class. You're trying this almost as a testing thing. I think tokenizing assets where you unleash the most liquidity is on homogeneous large illiquid assets. Today private credit real estate mortgages, which are trillions in size but actually was never have the liquidity benefits like U.S. treasury. I think tokenizing U.S. treasury you make Treasury 10% better. I think private credit real estate mortgages on chain you make them ten times better. Now think about when you're putting private lendings on chain that drives the liquidity of that secondary market. What's happening in the primary market. I think mortgage lending, consumer lending, SME lending, credit card, all of the lending risk going to drive down because now I have a better infrastructure in the secondary market to tokenize this and make them more liquid in the secondary market to trade. So despite I'm not so sure about whether you actually having more stable coin to drive the lower of the neutral rate, I think you actually will actually drive the neutral spread. I think the entire credit spread is going to come lower because actually those today illiquid or semi liquid asset class actually going to be the biggest beneficiary for tokenization.
- [57:50]
Austin Campbell
I mean even potentially short term credit. Like I think one of the trivia items that people outside of Tradfi probably didn't notice is that okay, so when I was there it was still Libor, but back in the day your 30 year Libor was trading inside of your 30 year Treasuries. Eg, like private credit was somehow cheaper than lending to the Treasury. And by the way, I think the same thing could potentially happen with stablecoin points because they're going to have a preference for overnight reverse repo for liquidity reasons which could actually drive that below bills. Right. Like back to the point of financial repression there that we were making. And so Matt, I agree with you there are some fascinating things going on. But to go to Chris's point and why my estimate is as things start to move, I don't know specifically 5 years on the 3 trillion but I'll definitely take the over is if we think private credit is a good thing to move on chain. The market that I'm keeping my eye on is things like interest rate derivatives. Because moving to 247 unification and clearing and margining of interest rate derivatives one solves all sorts of jurisdictional problems, right? This issue of like I'm long in Europe, I'm short in Japan, I can't net those damn things, but I'm flat, right? Goes away when you can unify your venue. And two, it allows you to have a truly unified like interest rate market. And exactly to Chris's point, all those derivatives need collateral. People are constantly going to be posting stuff underneath them. To trade something, you need money to trade for it, right? Like it's the Simpsons thing of like Homer, money can be exchanged for goods and services. So we need to get all of that on chain. So like I'm incredibly bullish on the eventual market size here. I just have questions on timing. Very good. All right, so one last thing that I think all of us may or may not be bullish on, that we probably promised to include in this episode is that Laura recently became something of a celebrity because of our previous takes on xrp. Chris, you may have started this, so I wanted to pile in here and continue with a little bit of our analysis on XRP and hone in actually on what I think is a very important question that we've seen starting to be asked in the space, which is Ripple has had a token for a long time, but recently they've begun acquiring some very real businesses like Hidden Road. So here's the question for the group that I wanted to throw out there, long term more valuable, the XRP token or equity and Ripple.
- [60:18]
Chris Perkins
That sounds like a question for Matt or Felix.
- [60:21]
Matt Haugen
Chris, you go first.
- [60:22]
Chris Perkins
No, no, no, you're the guest man.
- [60:27]
Felix Galvan Quill
I mean I, I think, yeah, high level. I'd always take the equity over the governance. I mean obviously Ripple is not quite a governance token, but in general you want the claim on cash flows, whatever those lead to. What do you think, Matt?
- [60:43]
Matt Haugen
I kind of agree. I think for Ripple in particular, but for many crypto projects these two are intertwined, right? Like today you can buy Ripple secondary equity, but if you count it, 90% of that is the ripple you hold. I mean obviously they're not diversifying from buying actual real businesses. One thing I think people are underestimating is I think history is past dependent. We have all our favorite tokens and in the last cycle they may not be able to do much because there's a lot of regulatory constraints around what is a utility token and what is a security token and so on and so forth. I'm saying when you're sitting on hundreds, at least tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of Treasuries, you actually will have a lot of purchasing power to buy real business that turns you to something which you aspire to be in the first place. So I'm saying is my view on Ripple has drastically changed not because who is the leader, but also what they are allowed to do in this market. Right? The acquisition of Hidden Road, the launch of their own stablecoin, the launch of their own Prime. I think all of these things are paving the way for them to do something more. So for that reason I think the equity is a good play because they always have the abilities to be able to use that as a very equivalent, like a very powerful tool to actually make acquisition. They can do whole stock deal, for example, Right. But I think that a lot of the value at least in the near term is going to driven from the XRP tokens. So I think these two are intertwined. So if I hold equity, I think my primary goal is making sure what acquisition I do, what space I enter to, is also protecting the Token price too, because that's going to be a large impact about and I won't be surprised, you guys may know some of the details. A lot of this acquisition probably paid in xrp. So you can't be a valuable equity company without having a very valuable token, at least for the time being.
- [62:38]
Chris Perkins
Yeah, I agree. It's intertwined. I think I read today that 75% of on chain revenue is accrued to stablecoin issuers.
- [62:47]
Austin Campbell
Yes.
- [62:49]
Chris Perkins
And RLUSD is a stablecoin and they want to generate revenue from that stable coin. Who's going to buy that stable coin? Well, you got the XRP army, you know, who is very into all things xrp. They seem to me as one of the natural buyers. Of course they're going to want to extend into the institutional side and they've assembled all of the tools to do so.
- [63:09]
Felix Galvan Quill
Right.
- [63:09]
Chris Perkins
We talked about bit, nomial, hidden road, etc and so they've got this nice infrastructure. So I agree with Matt. I think it's intertwined. Gun to my head, I'll. I'll reserve my choice.
- [63:21]
Austin Campbell
All right, so I'll say the way I think about it is if you're trying to ultimately determine whether Ripple is like a villain or a hero in the crypto story will depend on how they see themselves internally. If the token is a way to just acquire money from retail buy businesses and then accrue value to the equity, I think the whole thing ends badly and they look like villains. On the other hand, if they understand they're doing a round trip trade of get cheap funding from the tokens, use the tokens to go acquire a bunch of businesses, build a portfolio of businesses and then start buying back the token to return the value or doing something of that sort. You have a very different construct there. Actually, to go back to a previous comment we raised, they might have like crowdsourced Berkshire Hathaway, which would be a fascinating model. And I think the thing you should be watching for if you're an XRP holder is which of those behaviors emerges over time.
- [64:12]
Matt Haugen
By the way, I know we're up against the time, but I think Austin is a great point. I think in this cycle, in the next 12 to 18 months, if you are a token based project, I think one thing people have really fixed is tokenomics. I think we had a compromise in the last cycle because of regulatory concerns and constraints. You have equity and you have a token. People pretending that both of this model are going to work. The question is like where's the value according to and there's any value leakage. For that reason, the venture space has been a disaster. Right. Because I invest in tokens, but I mean, I invest equities, whereas what a founder doesn't even know and sometimes they don't even think about this. I think people have to figure out a standardized tokenomics to just like making sure people know what they're investing into. Otherwise we're going to keep going to circles.
- [64:53]
Chris Perkins
Yeah, but your hands are also tied behind your back because if you turn the fee switch on, you go to jail. Right. But I think just as we were filming, it looks like Uniswap is now proposing a fee switch. So. You're right, man. It's going to be the cycle to get tokenomics. Right.
- [65:09]
Felix Galvan Quill
Yeah, yeah. I think that's the ultimate question and it's a really good point that, you know, we've been fighting with one arm behind our back for the past four years. Like, that's a lot of the symptoms and issues that we have right now are largely caused by that. And now we can experiment and yeah, it's no coincidence that you have what Uniswap is doing. And you know, I'm a big fan of what Metadao has been exploring with in terms of, you know, token equity rights and that sort of thing. I think the direction is good. It's just we need to get through the. Some of the cleanup in the interim there.
- [65:39]
Austin Campbell
All right, well, on that note, we are over time, but this was a hundred percent worth doing. So first I want to say thank you to Felix and Matt for joining us. This was awesome. And then second of all, thank you to everybody for joining us for this episode of Bits and Biffs. We'll be back in one week to discuss more about how the worlds of crypto and macro are colliding. Until then.