Latest / CRYPTO 101 / Ep. 697 Ethereum's Outlook for 2026 with SharpLink's CIO Matt Sheffield

Transcript

Ep. 697 Ethereum's Outlook for 2026 with SharpLink's CIO Matt Sheffield · CRYPTO 101

0:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Welcome to the Crypto101 podcast, presented by Gemini.
0:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Your bridge to the future of money.
0:14
[SPEAKER_03]: all right ladies and gentlemen welcome back to another episode action packed episode of the crypto 101 podcast i'm your co-host Bryce as always joined by my good buddy across the country mr. Brendan a little under the weather today Brendan i uh i'm thankful that you joined us how are you feeling
0:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, a little bit under the weather, but honestly, I blame the bears.
0:36
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the bear that pushing the cold front over here.
0:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's supposed to get a cold.
0:40
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm in Florida.
0:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
0:42
[SPEAKER_02]: So I don't know.
0:43
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to cope.
0:44
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to say it's all due to the bears and no fold in my own.
0:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely.
0:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
0:51
[SPEAKER_03]: We'll just keep getting some rest.
0:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Get some good vitamin C. But in the meantime, hopefully the CIO of Sharpling Gaming Nat Sheffield could make you feel a little warmer, a little more excited about where this market is going.
1:03
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're joined by Matt Sheffield.
1:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Matt, thank you for joining us.
1:07
[SPEAKER_03]: How are you doing?
1:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm doing great, but it is absolutely frigid here in New York City, so I think I'm the one that's supposed to catch the cold.
1:15
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm safe over here in California so far, knock on wood, although I was dealing with a very pesky raccoon last night who kept me up.
1:25
[SPEAKER_03]: in between a one year old who's crying and the raccoon that's that's scratching at the wall.
1:30
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean it's just been crazy, but look we don't want to get too deep into the weeds.
1:33
[SPEAKER_03]: We want to talk about all the amazing stuff that you're doing at sharp link game in your team, Joseph Lubin, Joseph Shalom.
1:40
[SPEAKER_03]: some incredible, you know, leaders and you're the CIO, so you're managing the investments, the strategy, but before we even dive into like stuff you're doing right now, we just want to zoom out a little bit on your background, just to get you acquainted with our audience, understand who they're hearing from, you've got a great, you know, Wall Street background, could you catch us up a little bit on what you've been doing prior to sharp link and maybe color it with how you got into crypto as well?
2:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
2:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I got into crypto by accident around 2011 it overlapped with some of the other internet communities I was a part of and I started mining a little bit of Bitcoin on my gateway laptop.
2:19
[SPEAKER_00]: had the time and I found it, you know, obviously fascinating, got rabbit hold a bit, did not foresee Bitcoin and then eventually if they're in becoming a risk asset nor an asset class at the time, others, maybe my chairman Joe Levin were a little more pressing in that respect and recognize the opportunity sooner on.
2:39
[SPEAKER_00]: what I ended up doing was going to Bridgewater Associates out of undergrad and trading fixing come there for a while.
2:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was actually a decent community of us that traded crypto on the side in our personal accounts.
2:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't something you talked about necessarily during the day.
2:53
[SPEAKER_00]: You still talked about global risk assets and macro as a whole.
2:57
[SPEAKER_00]: But there was always this group of us that knew that the others were trading crypto and could kind of discuss it privately
3:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I think in 2022, it became much more socially acceptable for everyone to talk about it on desk.
3:12
[SPEAKER_00]: This was around the time that Luna Trade was playing out to the upside and people started breaking down the systematic mechanics behind what was going on there.
3:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And that dovetail of systematic macro that we were so interested in Bridgewater and defining the way the world works
3:32
[SPEAKER_00]: wound on and being able to kind of figure out mechanically what was going on there.
3:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the discourse became a little bit more public at least on the trading desk.
3:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And I ended up spinning out in 2022 with four my colleagues to start a crypto hedge fund.
3:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It was designed to be perfect for a first-time allocator who was used to working with these large macro funds to make their first investment into a crypto discretionary fund.
3:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It was very much designed to be a medium volatility fund.
4:00
[SPEAKER_00]: This was not moon shots.
4:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It was supposed to give you upside exposure, but also
4:04
[SPEAKER_00]: ensure that, you know, we were preserving capital through time.
4:07
[SPEAKER_00]: This was supposed to be a first for right for allocators.
4:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And we did that for a while and really tried to educate the institutional allocator space on digital assets for the first time.
4:19
[SPEAKER_00]: That was
4:20
[SPEAKER_00]: really exciting.
4:21
[SPEAKER_00]: We did launch the fun 10 days before FTX and so that was probably subpar timing on that front.
4:27
[SPEAKER_00]: But I connected with a firm called Falcon X. I was trading with them and ended up going over there in 2023 trading on their spot desk, which I ultimately ended up leading in 2024.
4:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And we had a great time learning about institutional allocators from another perspective, which is those who are trying to figure out the liquidity.
4:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And at Falcon X, we started off doing those more riskless principle, and then we moved into a principal model, retreating 500 different tokens, so I moved beyond the liquids that we're considering previously.
4:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's when we actually discovered digital asset treasuries, and do you want to 2025?
5:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was very interesting because we started investing in all these hype transactions that I can talk about.
5:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what gummy hooked.
5:09
[SPEAKER_00]: We did 25, 30 of these investments on balance sheet.
5:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a great time.
5:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Ultimately, it ended up connecting with the folks at Sharkwing, trying to pitch them to trade with us, and they did a better job pitching me to come join them.
5:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's kind of full-circle highly ended up in the
5:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that.
5:30
[SPEAKER_03]: That's an incredible story.
5:31
[SPEAKER_03]: And yeah, I remember those FTX days, not so fondly, but quite vividly, and that was a crazy time.
5:39
[SPEAKER_03]: And I mean, just maybe we could just start with some of the trading stuff.
5:43
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you're obviously super experienced trading at Bridgewater, which is I think maybe V-largest hedge fund in the world by AUM.
5:52
[SPEAKER_03]: And then over at Falcon X, which is one of the largest trading desks in crypto.
5:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Man, I mean, we've got a lot of folks that are on our that are listening to our show that are trying to trade.
6:05
[SPEAKER_03]: And what are some of your words of wisdom for folks that are that want to be traders that want to try to trade?
6:11
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, how do you how do you do it?
6:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I really resonated with the systematic approach.
6:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't mean that everything you do has to be fully automated, but I do like to have an if-then statement of why I think something is happening, and then what should happen, and it tests that understanding through time, because if everything I do has to be
6:33
[SPEAKER_00]: maintained in my head, I always go off a gut instinct which I do believe there is something behind gut instinct like you're you're capable of processing a lot more information than you realize but if you can codify it and put it down then you can continuously improve that so that if every day you just come up with a slight tweak and then go into determine that that was better.
6:52
[SPEAKER_00]: through time you end up with these repeatable set of rules that makes it a lot easier to trade.
6:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you say every time I see a setup like this, I think it's going to perform like that, which is an extreme in the trading world, but maybe a better one is usually when I see a setup like this, it plays out like that.
7:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can go and say great, let me go back to us that over a hundred instances.
7:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And it works 55% in time.
7:14
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got yourself a decent signal.
7:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you can do that a lot of times and figure out why I think something happens instead of just every time I see this, this does happen.
7:22
[SPEAKER_00]: You start to understand what we would call like the economic machine.
7:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the Ray Dalio economic machine, very, very familiar.
7:33
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that like, he might posit that we're at that fourth turning stage where we very well may be at the end of an empire, the American Empire.
7:45
[SPEAKER_03]: And with that, you've got a glut of debt or indebtedness from the
7:51
[SPEAKER_03]: issuer of the reserve currency you've got all sorts of crazy dynamics and if you kind of zoom out where are we today in just the macro markets coming from you know a fixed income background and then maybe you can color it a little bit with you know where does crypto kind of fit into today's market dynamics
8:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say that we're definitely an interesting turning point.
8:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I would probably leave the empire, rise and fall conversation to Ray, who has spent so much more time looking into that.
8:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think he went all the way back to Dynasties thousands of years ago to understand how money work.
8:29
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we take a look at the last few years, right?
8:31
[SPEAKER_00]: We are finally starting to see a path to look, quidity picture.
8:34
[SPEAKER_00]: that we all know and love to be more likely than not.
8:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Pretty constructive for a risk asset.
8:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I still think that crypto fits into that longer-tail risk asset bucket for most people.
8:46
[SPEAKER_00]: If you don't have the table stakes of your portfolio because time to tough, you may not have as much discretionary income to go and put into that higher risk higher reward bucket.
8:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Through time as there's more utility and more institutional adoption, I think this concept of crypto as an investment class probably fades away into it's just another asset class, some things being commodities, some things being securities, some things having utility and some things being stores of value, but for now it still is a fairly early adopter asset class, fitting it's out long till bucket, and at the end of the day that means it's going to be highly correlated to liquidity, which is a pretty good forward looking picture from here.
9:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you know, there's been a couple of big scares in the crypto market over the past couple of months and it's got a lot of the listeners thinking like, you know, what do we do here because there's a lot of really positive data and positive fundamental developments and good regulation practices and I feels like people are a little bit torn and confused because they're seeing the fundamental developments.
9:47
[SPEAKER_02]: They're seeing that, like yourself, continue to accumulate.
9:50
[SPEAKER_02]: They're seeing institutions become more open to crypto and launch more products and talk about how it's going to be an integrated part of the future.
9:58
[SPEAKER_02]: And then they even see the Federal Reserve cutting rates, which should be a good thing for the crypto market.
10:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And then they look at the price action.
10:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And they see us for the past several months kind of coming down to the downside.
10:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I think beyond just price action, there's been a few of these big events as well.
10:14
[SPEAKER_02]: You've had that large liquidation event that happened back in October.
10:19
[SPEAKER_02]: You've had some other things that have kind of scared people off.
10:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's a bit of just mixed feelings and mixed emotions.
10:25
[SPEAKER_02]: There's choppyness going on.
10:27
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, what do you make about all of this?
10:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that really can't underplay how significant 10, 10 was in terms of the the ripple effects thereafter and I think we're still noticing what are probably the tail of those events playing out, you know, this was the largest single day to leveraging slash loss of wealth cryptos ever seen it and the number was something like.
10:49
[SPEAKER_00]: 19 billion of publicly recorded liquidations and that doesn't even include all the OTC positions by lateral that were on.
10:56
[SPEAKER_00]: When we saw something similar in scale, obviously for a different reason with FTX, it took two to three months before the market was really able to reposition itself deliver and then start to heal and 2023 went on to be a fantastic year.
11:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It just didn't feel like in hindsight because morale was pretty low and that is often when you get the scary reps and
11:18
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't have it be a consensus trade, you know, when we were talking over the summer when treasuries were launching probably three a day for like everyone was saying, you think you're for going to be a blowoff top so much so that it became a true consensus trade.
11:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I think options queues were priced extremely strong to the top side.
11:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone can't win at the same time in crypto trading like that's just not how
11:42
[SPEAKER_00]: It works.
11:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It has to be a bit of a non-consensus view.
11:45
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're going to see a playout, and the best time is after people have taken a bit of a hit, and they're starting to say, it's over, the top is in.
11:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's what you see on the fall of 1010.
11:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it took, some de-leeverjing.
11:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It took some people saying, Crypto's over for this cycle.
12:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And now I think you can start to heal once we've seen all those kind of ripple effects playout on the follow.
12:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean, I've seen fear and greed index is no matter how you parse it on like bottomed out.
12:13
[SPEAKER_03]: I've seen just, you know, relative strength index and momentum.
12:17
[SPEAKER_03]: It just feels like it continues to get, you know, more and more oversold.
12:20
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think, like you said, from these areas of just.
12:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, capitulation and depression and anger, you know, that's when you could really start to see the the large price movements and like you said it's it's an interest in spot because it's kind of colored by a backdrop of, you know, forward looking at increase in liquidity and lowering of, you know, capital costs and so I think it's, you know, a really, really good set up.
12:46
[SPEAKER_03]: but it feels so hard to be bullish right here, just because, you know, you look at price action.
12:50
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, you know, if we kind of turn over to the things you're working on at sharp link, I mean, you guys have a huge balance sheet of crypto.
13:00
[SPEAKER_03]: You've got no interest bearing debt.
13:03
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a really interesting looking vehicle and you're the chief investment officer.
13:07
[SPEAKER_03]: And we wanna know, how do you think about investments today in sharp link?
13:13
[SPEAKER_03]: And what's your goal?
13:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Our goal at Sharkling is to build in the most productive earth treasury in the market.
13:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the productivity element is the most important to us.
13:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, you know, sailor pioneered the concept of putting crypto onto a corporate balance sheet in a public company five years ago.
13:32
[SPEAKER_00]: But Bitcoin is a store of value.
13:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a productive asset, at least natively.
13:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And being able to put a productive asset on a corporate balance sheet and make it both an access schema, but also an actively managed productive treasury is a very different strategy.
13:48
[SPEAKER_00]: I think everyone views the concept of a treasury is this homogeneous notion.
13:53
[SPEAKER_00]: But in reality, with a productive asset like Ethereum, we can go out there and first generate yield by simply helping secure the network was taken.
14:01
[SPEAKER_00]: But then also build this efficient frontier
14:06
[SPEAKER_00]: maintain your original ethelt, ultimately if you're holding sharply, you should probably be bullish on etheth if you're not, then reconsider that thesis.
14:14
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you want to be bullish on etheth, what's the best way to express it?
14:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And the way I think of it is when you have dollars in your safe, they're doing nothing or if they're in a checking account, they're doing nothing.
14:23
[SPEAKER_00]: If there's a company that you think can do productive things with your dollars and you want to generate more dollars, then you go and invest in that company's knowledge and nominated stock if the same thing existed for gold and you could instead of holding it in your safe, instead sell that gold and go and buy a company that's nominated its treasury operations and gold, if you think that the company is going to do things that are creative in gold terms, then you would go and make that investment that's how we think.
14:48
[SPEAKER_00]: about Ethereum, like let's make this a productive asset.
14:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It is natively productive, but it requires a team to go and do so in a safe institutional grade way.
14:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's what we're starting to build out.
14:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm happy to talk about some of the specific things we're doing a bit further.
15:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, so does that entail like options and sort of deals like that?
15:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Or is it mainly DeFi?
15:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it a combination there of?
15:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So today, it's been DeFi.
15:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So we are 98% stake to start.
15:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was really important to us.
15:20
[SPEAKER_00]: You're running roughly the 2.85% stake rate.
15:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The next thing we did was we did a custom composition of an LRT and liquidry state and token.
15:29
[SPEAKER_00]: We said, OK, great.
15:33
[SPEAKER_00]: that doesn't really exist anywhere else in crypto.
15:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Berkshire Hathaway is a great example of existing in dollars.
15:38
[SPEAKER_00]: You can do incredibly potent things when your capital doesn't have a duration cap because you can go and commit it to longer-term projects.
15:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we've got this goal of being kind of a benevolent capitalist within the Ethereum ecosystem.
15:52
[SPEAKER_00]: We went and said, OK, great.
15:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Linia, eat the fight, eigenlayer.
15:56
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to go and compose a custom LR team, which if anyone else in the retail community wanted to go and compose, they would earn roughly 40 steps above the at their estate and right, but we said, OK, great, we can commit 200 million for two years and we can go and put this all by working with our path like a studio in Anchorage.
16:14
[SPEAKER_00]: into a QC, derisking the trade further, and each of them can give us OTC incentives for doing so.
16:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we're offering something that doesn't really exist in crypto, which is hell in TVL, like we can actually, instead of being like the mercenary capital that rotates every three months, the newest VC back incentives, we can say, okay, great, we can leave this money parked.
16:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can actually start to use as a foundation for real growth of your TVL and protocol that you know is sticking, but we'd like to be compensated for defining a new term premium.
16:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And that to us is both a creative to the ecosystem, but also a creative to our shareholders because they're able to potentially earn outsize returns relative to if they were to do it themselves or if they were just dig easy.
16:57
[SPEAKER_00]: but also make Ethereum more productive for everyone else, which is a really good thing to do if you own a large portion of the Ethereum out there.
17:05
[SPEAKER_00]: You want to show people what it is like to finish it up.
17:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I kind of like to use this analogy of maybe Ethereum's digital oil, it's hard to say, like if in people are still determining we want to be our analogy.
17:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But I certainly can say if you do think it's digital oil, you should teach people about the combustion engine if you own a lot of that digital oil.
17:23
[SPEAKER_00]: because that's how you make a productive and how you make a scarce asset even scarcity for time.
17:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and what it sounds like, for all the listeners out there, what it sounds like is you all are not only, you know, the second largest Ethereum treasury out there, the second largest eat that.
17:39
[SPEAKER_02]: You guys are also trying to support the Ethereum ecosystem.
17:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Because when a lot of people think of sharp link, they think, okay, well, the primary goal is they go out there and they buy a bunch of eat and then they hold it forever.
17:50
[SPEAKER_02]: But there's a lot more going on behind the scenes.
17:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's what I want to paint for the listeners is that it's more than just as simple as buy and hold.
17:57
[SPEAKER_02]: You guys are a lot more active and there's a lot more going on behind the curtain.
18:01
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's one of the things that I want the listeners to see and understand.
18:05
[UNKNOWN]: Yeah, absolutely.
18:05
[SPEAKER_03]: No, that's a really good point, and like kind of, you know, piggybacking off that, you know, if you think about, you know, what you guys are doing, it's both to add value to Ethereum, but also, you know, most importantly, add value to your shareholders.
18:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And how do you kind of delineate between that and is there like a metric, I think, like maybe eth per share or like, how do you kind of show to your investors like, hey, we're doing a good job.
18:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, what are the KPIs,
18:34
[SPEAKER_00]: absolutely its eth per share.
18:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Ultimately, that is what our investors are entrusting us to do, which is take their eth or effectively be a replacement for the eth felt that they could have purchased by buying spot and generate additional eth on eth returns in a safe way through time.
18:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there might be other
18:52
[SPEAKER_00]: strategies that you could do yourself for the public investment that has a very high risk-reward volatility was that might be able to generate e-multi.
19:03
[SPEAKER_00]: But we're trying to do it as a steward of your Ethereum, not trying to take outside's risk, and smoothly through time generated consistent above market return in e-phoreum.
19:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Super smart.
19:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you guys view maybe other
19:17
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, maybe like, there's a lot of dots out there.
19:19
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like you said at one point in time, there was multiple being created every single day.
19:23
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of them out there.
19:24
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, how do you view all these other ones?
19:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Because one of the things that we've learned is that they're not all created equally.
19:30
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't all do the same thing.
19:31
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't all have the same mission.
19:33
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't all work the same behind the scenes.
19:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So do you view them as competitors?
19:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you view them as, oh, hey, this is all friendly.
19:41
[SPEAKER_02]: We're all trying to better the crypto ecosystem.
19:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, what is that like?
19:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Generally speaking, I think it's all fairly positive.
19:49
[SPEAKER_00]: We like to say co-optition.
19:50
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, ultimately, the end of the day, we are all here to explain to people how Ethereum can be more productive.
19:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're all going to show it in different ways and potentially offer a menu of options for people who are considering investing.
20:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So there are some trajectories that have explicitly made it their strategy to effectively run like a hedge fund strategy with the Ethereum.
20:12
[SPEAKER_00]: and there's nothing good or bad about that inherently.
20:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just different like that's not what we're looking to do.
20:17
[SPEAKER_00]: There's some that have decided to take more of a pure operating business approach.
20:21
[SPEAKER_00]: They've spent considerable portions of their value and said we're going to go and buy companies and we're going to try to generate outsides value by running these companies.
20:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are just two completely different ways of approaching it.
20:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The end of the day, if you're investing in a treasury, hopefully you believe that they're going to generate you more of the
20:41
[SPEAKER_00]: But we're going about in a very different leg and I am generally glad that we have more people out there because historically Ethereum hasn't had as many folks who have dedicated to explaining the protocol explaining the mission and getting out there.
20:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you can see the Treasury is potentially supplementing from a brand perspective and being able to explain to different audiences the benefits of what we see with Ethereum and its roadmap.
21:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we're getting a lot more Ethereum evangelists and I think you're seeing this start to make serious freaking inroads because even just this week already we saw JP Morgan say that they're going to be issuing some instruments on the Ethereum block chain and we've already got folks like fidelity and black rock who've issued different instruments and vehicles on
21:29
[SPEAKER_03]: the Ethereum blockchain, you've seen gosh.
21:33
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, Bank of America's Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, they're now giving their advisors the ability and the encouraging folks who want to take those growth, those opportunistic growth portfolios, you know, as high as 4% crypto ETFs.
21:46
[SPEAKER_03]: And so it's like it feels like it's been a long judge, but
21:50
[SPEAKER_03]: We're kind of like now in the promised land in a sense, like we've arrived and like we're looking around, we're like, oh wow, the institutions are officially here.
22:00
[SPEAKER_03]: And so how does that kind of affect your business?
22:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Are you dealing with large index investors?
22:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Are you dealing with retirements and pension funds that are saying, hey, we want to get allocations to crypto in a smart, efficient way.
22:16
[SPEAKER_03]: And instead of buying the ETF, we're going to look at sharp link.
22:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Are those kind of some of the conversations you might be having or what are those conversations like?
22:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're having conversations with folks across the different allocator types.
22:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, last week I was in Abu Dhabi for finance week having.
22:32
[SPEAKER_00]: incredible conversations with people over there about what the future of blockchain, what tokenization is going to look like and what different access vehicles might look like broadly.
22:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Treasuries were something very of interest because people didn't fully understand them in some cases or others had heard of them but had not yet actually shaken hands and had a conversation about the nuances between them.
22:55
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a massive amount of interest from institutional allocators, but treasuries are a fairly new concept outside of micro strategy, and because a lot of us look different than micro strategy, they're not fully up to speed necessarily on how to make sense of it, how to consider it versus just buying a spot ETF, or maybe investing in a VC, which is what a lot of people did, is their first access team.
23:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we kind of treated as part of our mission to go out and have these conversations and to translate between the crypto native side and the institutional investors.
23:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a lot of the folks that we brought on to our team, the reason we did so is that we both come from institutional world and the crypto world.
23:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So our CEO built a lot of the treasure, a lot of the crypto products at BlackRock.
23:37
[SPEAKER_00]: He helped build Ibit and Itha, their Ethereum ETF,
23:44
[SPEAKER_00]: he we are CMO just joined from being crypto like being that link between traditional finance and crypto is really important because a lot of it's still education I think we see it as an industry we're very good actually as a community about taking the time to educate people who are interested in keen to hear we all just got back and thanksgiving i'm sure you explained to some family member how grip the works when we go into holidays and should explain it a few more i think we're all pretty good at doing that and we do spend a decent amount of our time doing the same
24:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I agree, man.
24:14
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't want to shift gears too hard, but there's been a lot of discussion and talk about MSI recently because they brought forth this idea.
24:23
[SPEAKER_02]: They're proposing that they want to exclude companies with more than 50% of their balance sheet that holds crypto from major indexes.
24:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And I've seen people online talking about this, and ironically enough, on Friday afternoon, one of our team members reached out, and they're like, hey, the community is wondering, like, what are these treasury companies think about this whole MSCI proposed?
24:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And I said, hold your thought.
24:48
[SPEAKER_02]: We're having the CIO sharp link on on Monday, and I'll get a direct answer for you.
24:53
[SPEAKER_02]: We can talk a little bit more about this.
24:55
[SPEAKER_02]: But it just goes to show a lot of people are
24:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it infused in a little bit frustrated, like, yeah, why where did this come from and why is this being proposed and I guess generally speaking, like, how do you view that proposal and what would it mean for companies like Charlotte playing?
25:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I was a bit taken aback.
25:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought we were passed this honestly as an industry.
25:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
25:18
[SPEAKER_00]: We, if you exclude companies that have over 50%
25:25
[SPEAKER_00]: One, it's going to create some very weird corner cases.
25:28
[SPEAKER_00]: There's going to be very large companies that happen to not be sitting on very much cash during the snapshots and all of a sudden you're excluding $50 billion firms from the index where you're going to have to start creating carve out.
25:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think implementation is going to be tough, but going to the broader point,
25:43
[SPEAKER_00]: people want to get exposure to the technologies of the future.
25:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And you do so in a market cap growth way like that's the little point of index.
25:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you wanted to pick a specific sector or excluded particular sector, there's an ETF for almost every permutation or mutual one of investment that you could possibly think of that you can go and compose.
26:05
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you're following a broad base
26:07
[SPEAKER_00]: you want it to actually comprise everything that it describes the big without making whether it's politicized or just discretionary decisions of what to include and not because it ends up creating a world of haves and have not which entire goal of crypto is to democratize and in this world you're going to end up with people who don't realize it's excluded who are now going to miss out on what I believe to be a considerable amount of upside and those who do proactively know about this which is probably a
26:34
[SPEAKER_00]: subset of the world that goes and understands that MSCI is about to exclude an industry and then goes and proactively adds something to their bucket into how to get that exposure back.
26:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're effectively just excluding a large portion of the investment world without their knowledge.
26:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't, I don't love that.
26:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, I'm confused about how they justify it, right?
26:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Because for diversity's sake, like,
26:57
[SPEAKER_02]: It just makes sense, right?
26:59
[SPEAKER_02]: Why would you say, oh, you know, well, there's this one new group, we're gonna exclude it.
27:04
[SPEAKER_02]: That kind of defeats the whole purpose of diversity and indexes in the first place.
27:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, if people want direct exposure, they can go get it, but it feels like it should be included.
27:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the other part of it is, is like, where do they draw the line, right?
27:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Because then you can start looking at like, Fortune 500 companies, S&P 500 companies,
27:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Like Coinbase, for example, and you can say, okay, well, you know, if you look, they have a ton of crypto in terms of assets under management, because they act as the custodian, and then are they going to look at them at some point down the road and say, well, actually, you know, they have the bulk of their assets under management all in crypto.
27:39
[SPEAKER_02]: They have a ton in crypto.
27:40
[SPEAKER_02]: So maybe we're going to exclude them next, and then it's like, okay, well, they're also a custodian for the government.
27:46
[SPEAKER_02]: and for BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager and all these other things.
27:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it kind of creates this question of, where do they draw the line?
27:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And I understand this isn't all finalized.
27:57
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not all completely firm quite yet.
28:00
[SPEAKER_02]: But that was the other question that I've seen from our community of like, could this have ripple effects in the things that are not only that, but crypto-related companies as well?
28:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, you're also starting to see a big push from other publicly traded companies,
28:15
[SPEAKER_02]: bunch of these other, you know, I guess asset managers and banks who are going to start bringing more crypto into their balance sheet, are they going to potentially be affected by this?
28:24
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I'll also like, you know, think about tokenized assets.
28:27
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, all these asset managers are tokenizing different shares.
28:30
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's like, okay, imagine if you have like, you know, a bunch of tokenized stocks and bonds, those are blockchain-based digital assets, crypto or whatever.
28:38
[SPEAKER_03]: Now is the MSCI going to, you know,
28:41
[SPEAKER_00]: discriminate against them it seems like it's operation choke point 3.0 is it I guess maybe we don't have the answer to this but is it possible for the SEC or CFTC to shoot something like this down saying it is like another operation choke point I'm not sure actually yeah great question I'm not sure I mean the interesting thing is like I think that it fails to understand what holding Krypton your balance should actually means if you're trying to make a
29:09
[SPEAKER_00]: If it's a buy and hold strategy, would we buy a billion dollars a Bitcoin put it there and plan to do nothing like I okay, maybe I understand that point of the once again, I think the line being drawn is a bit arbitrary, but.
29:20
[SPEAKER_00]: In our example, we're staking 98% of our 860,000, so eat, and that is doing a very vital service, which is securing the network, and we're earning revenues via staking from that.
29:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And that goes to our top one because it is revenue.
29:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Like this is a action we are getting compensated for as a firm and generating revenue on.
29:41
[SPEAKER_00]: you need Ethereum to be able to do that.
29:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're effectively saying the thing that you need on your balance sheet to be able to power the business that you're in part running, is no longer allowed to be held on the balance sheet if you want to be included in the index.
29:54
[SPEAKER_00]: It becomes a bit confusing, like why is Fiat any better to hold on your balance sheet in that sense?
30:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I know it's a bit of an abstract argument, but conceptually you should be allowed to hold whatever you need on your balance sheet to do your business properly.
30:08
[SPEAKER_03]: yeah, it's wild.
30:10
[SPEAKER_03]: I think, you know, it's a lot of the education stuff that still needs to happen, you know, that some of these, you know, regulators or index investors that are really from the old guard of finance that they're thinking, well, what is mining, what is staking, you know, why is that important, you know, who cares if we have tokenized stocks and bonds?
30:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, they just, I don't know, maybe they're stuck in their ways and it'll just take a little bit more time, a little bit more persistence.
30:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, I'm curious, yeah, like, you know, we've now got two of the largest, like, super packs that are fair shake and fellowship and they're doing, you know, they're a hundred million dollars each in terms of, uh, you know.
30:46
[SPEAKER_03]: political action funds and they're going to be doing a lot of educating on all this stuff too.
30:51
[SPEAKER_03]: So, I think, you know, time is on our side.
30:53
[SPEAKER_03]: We've got all the time in the world with crypto, and, you know, we're, you know, it's an emerging asset class still.
30:59
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, I'm still super optimistic on on where the the dats as a concept go, where, you know, all of these, you know, defy activities and stuff go.
31:10
[SPEAKER_03]: But I want to shift gears just to touch outside of, you know, what, what you're working
31:16
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, is there anything in the Ethereum ecosystem that kind of is just percolating your interest, whether that's prediction markets or some interesting stuff going on in the stable coin world?
31:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, what kind of gets you excited?
31:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe even, you know, certainly back to like, you know, what might be part of the future of sharp link.
31:34
[SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, what kind of particulates your interest?
31:38
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's definitely, I would say, tokenized RWA is an equity's first.
31:43
[SPEAKER_00]: That is a space that we barely scratch the service on.
31:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, at the end of the day, stablecoins are the first manifestation.
31:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the easiest to make sense of it.
31:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the first thing banks want to adopt because they can keep.
31:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of the interesting come like that has PMF without a doubt.
31:57
[SPEAKER_00]: We've locked that in, but tokenized equities, I think, will be this zero to 60 moment that happens very suddenly.
32:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Right now, we were the first company to tokenize a NASDAQ company on Ethereum, right?
32:10
[SPEAKER_00]: We did that via our partnership with Super State.
32:13
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's no liquidity in the ecosystem for tokenized equity.
32:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's not that much of a marginal benefit to holding it.
32:21
[SPEAKER_00]: When you eventually bootstrap the liquidity to be this robust ecosystem that adds a lot of extra utility to holding tokenized equity versus holding the traditional, then you can do all the things that the crypto natives are already very familiar with.
32:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, hey, I want my staking yield.
32:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's the LST.
32:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to go borrow the LST to go and farm a new protocol.
32:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you can do multi-legged trades that maximize the productivity of your asset.
32:47
[SPEAKER_00]: This happens in traditional finance, but not for retail generally.
32:50
[SPEAKER_00]: In retail case, if you lend your stock out, most of them are taking 15 to 90% of the retail brokerages of that income, you're effectively not able to achieve proper capital efficiency.
33:02
[SPEAKER_00]: on chain you would actually be able to do so, but it's a bit of a bootstrapping problem.
33:06
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to have the liquidity liquidity to get liquidity, such that I think once we go from that zero to 60, it's going to be all bets off.
33:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The best way to hold your equity will be in tokenized form, because you'll be leaving a lot of juice on a table by not having it there.
33:23
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's very exciting to my point.
33:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I saw the DTC, the department or what is the depository trust clearing company, I think.
33:33
[SPEAKER_03]: They just put out some big announcement like on Friday or over the weekend about tokenized assets and how this is something that they want to really shepherd in.
33:41
[SPEAKER_03]: So I thought that was another good key milestone that we hit.
33:46
[SPEAKER_03]: It's gonna be.
33:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And I just saw, uh, I think it was Bank of America talking about at this morning saying that they see banks.
33:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm reading it off to the side.
33:55
[SPEAKER_02]: They see banks will move or they see that banks will be moving on chain over the next several years.
34:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, Bryce, you said the JPMorgan news about their money, uh, market fund on Ethereum.
34:06
[SPEAKER_02]: It does feel like that's the next direction, right?
34:09
[SPEAKER_03]: yet Paul Atkins the chairman of the SEC just the other other week he said you know this is happening faster he said a couple years for for bringing assets on chain i mean the stuff's moving fast and you know prices are down but the the fundamentals keep growing yeah i mean where i think black rock on the street earnings come we're going to tokenize
34:28
[SPEAKER_00]: All of our products.
34:29
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
34:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, there's six trillion dollars of ice shares right there.
34:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that's not insignificant.
34:34
[SPEAKER_00]: That would just 12x what is currently tokenized.
34:38
[SPEAKER_00]: That's pretty incredible.
34:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It's going to happen.
34:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's going to happen in a stepwise way because the people that have the majority of the assets are several or multiple large institutions.
34:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you're just going to see these massive stepwise moves higher every time one of them comes on board.
34:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And it'll be the first one.
34:54
[SPEAKER_00]: It really opens the dam and then after that, everyone's just going to be racing to catch up.
34:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Man, I actually got a question on that.
35:01
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a great point.
35:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Having this, again, imagine just 12x in the amount of TVL, if you will, that's on a theory or whatever, how does that translate back to the price of a theory?
35:14
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't want to get into price targets or anything like that.
35:16
[SPEAKER_03]: But if we think from a value standpoint, if you think about a company, hey, there's EBDA.
35:21
[SPEAKER_03]: There's cash flows.
35:22
[SPEAKER_03]: You got multiple so-on and so forth.
35:24
[SPEAKER_03]: But people look at a theory and they're like, how the heck do we even value this?
35:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it the right way to value it based on, you know, how many assets come on chain?
35:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Or is it the right way to value it based on something else?
35:36
[SPEAKER_00]: For where we are right now, I do think that the high quality asset secured model is very affected, because ultimately the value of a network.
35:45
[SPEAKER_00]: is only as strong as how much it's securing.
35:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And they can only move, they have to move in a bit of a correlated fashion through time.
35:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Otherwise, you can get into some weird dynamics around the network not being secure relative to the underlying.
35:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And we have historic, we've seen that relationship.
36:01
[SPEAKER_00]: We prefer to look at it as high quality asset secured so we've seen that two-to-one relationship but for every two dollars of high quality defy.
36:09
[SPEAKER_00]: There's roughly one dollar of it there in market cap.
36:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think that's going to maintain in a linear sense, like I'm not saying that the day that they tokenize the eye shares complex.
36:18
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to see a theorems market cap go up by six X, but I do think it'll be Jay shaped and it will be pretty significant because the amount of utility is ultimately a function of how many.
36:31
[SPEAKER_00]: market participants are there and how much you can do without having to leave it.
36:34
[SPEAKER_00]: We like to say that Ethereum has the license to win.
36:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not that it is 100% fully entrenched will win, but it is pretty close to reaching a point of no return where it would be very difficult for any other person to take it out of its incumbency for the tokenized assets base.
36:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And I do think that once we get to that next step,
36:54
[SPEAKER_00]: then there's no return.
36:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I do think Ethereum will be firmly cemented as the security layer for all on-chain going forward, at least for high-quality, deep-fined institutions that need to rely on that security element.
37:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, leaning into that, I mean, why do you think that your kind of answer is, but why do you think that people should tokenize on Ethereum as opposed to private blockchains?
37:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it's about the composability and the marginal utility.
37:21
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you have a large network that you can basically make your assets available on, there's going to be more people who can do things with your asset that are high utility than you yourself.
37:32
[SPEAKER_00]: As a result, they're going to be want to compensate you more for it.
37:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So the rate that you could get for lending someone your tokenized equity, for example.
37:39
[SPEAKER_00]: will effectively go to whoever has the next marginal highest use case for it, the larger the network, the more that value is, and people are generally going to move to where the value is being created.
37:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a perfect model, I think it takes time.
37:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It's on its antenias, but if someone's willing to borrow your stock at 5% and someone else is willing to do it at 3%.
37:56
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to find a way to do it at the 5% as long as risk adjusted that 5% is still superior, and I think through time that has to go to the largest network.
38:05
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that makes sense, and that was one of the things that I was fearful of a couple of years ago is like, hey, when all these institutions come in, are they just going to go and build everything on their own chains?
38:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Are they even going to want to use Ethereum or something?
38:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And it looks like the resounding answer is yes.
38:24
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, Ethereum is being looked at by all these institutions.
38:28
[SPEAKER_02]: But along those same lines, I mean, maybe this is a fiery question for warning,
38:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Our community here likes all crypto, you know, they like Bitcoin.
38:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously we're huge fans of youth, but there's a lot of salana fans that listen in here.
38:41
[SPEAKER_02]: So why tokenize and why just do all this with Ethereum and maybe not something like salana?
38:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I think that Ethereum did the hardest part first, which is focus on cryptography and security and now they're working on
38:58
[SPEAKER_00]: transaction throughput, but they have enabled the layer to ecosystem to let others do that portion of it.
39:06
[SPEAKER_00]: In the interim, while explicitly saying that the roadmap is prioritizing throughput through time, but they're going to do it in a cryptographically secure way, as opposed to a centralized way.
39:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't think that that makes Solana that it's simply different.
39:20
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that the use case
39:25
[SPEAKER_00]: very low-cost way.
39:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just that it's not the same as securing a network.
39:31
[SPEAKER_00]: You ultimately want to go to someone with a million validators and the cryptography of 10 years with no downtime for the security layer of things.
39:40
[SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't mean that that's the best application for sending micro payments in the moment.
39:45
[SPEAKER_00]: That might be an L2 or Solana that has superiority there or if you need
39:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Seconds right now.
39:51
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not getting that on the main mat.
39:52
[SPEAKER_00]: You can get that on the layer two though, and so I think that Ethereum was very clever and kind of an uber-esque way where they said, okay, great.
39:59
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to just ensure that everyone has this on their phone.
40:02
[SPEAKER_00]: This becomes the standard.
40:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I say Uber when I mean rideshare.
40:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Even if I'm taking a whiff, I say I'm ordering an Uber.
40:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, a number of ubiquitous concepts.
40:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's what they've effectively done.
40:11
[SPEAKER_00]: They're trying to maximize the network effect.
40:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And then eventually, they can work on the economics later.
40:16
[SPEAKER_00]: So listen, I just want to throw out a lot of things, a lot of it being name-coin trading.
40:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, it's definitely a seamless experience in many ways.
40:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I just don't think that that's where people are going to tokenize trillions of dollars of assets because the value prop isn't there for that use case that I view to be the most important.
40:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Very interesting.
40:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Look, I mean, we could go on for a long time and I really hope we do get the pleasure of hosting you back again as your business develops and kind of in in closing.
40:44
[SPEAKER_03]: I've just got a question and it's kind of a two-pronged question, but like.
40:49
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, what excites you about the future of a theorem in terms of like, are there any upgrades or there any adjustments to the economic security model?
40:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Is there anything kind of on the horizon with upgrades that you might be looking forward to?
41:03
[SPEAKER_03]: And then secondary to that would maybe be, you know, what's on the roadmap for sharp link?
41:11
[SPEAKER_03]: And I kind of just was thinking, I was like, you know, it's still called sharp link gaming.
41:15
[SPEAKER_03]: But I'm not sure if there's any gaming aspects.
41:17
[SPEAKER_03]: So is there a name change in the in the works or, you know, what's on the road map?
41:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Definitely think the throughput related upgrades are exciting to me.
41:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So like I'm looking closely at things like we need them just trying to, I think be close to the developers and following the part of the ecosystem that's trying to prioritize the user.
41:35
[SPEAKER_00]: experience for retail side of things.
41:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Nice.
41:39
[SPEAKER_00]: That's exciting stuff.
41:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And there are people who have done great things there.
41:42
[SPEAKER_00]: They're starting to put on the piece out.
41:44
[SPEAKER_00]: You can watch on some websites as some of the ZK Provers are able to generate sub 10 second.
41:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Penality, conceptually speaking, but that's interesting stuff.
41:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I also think that on the other side of things,
41:58
[SPEAKER_00]: People are building interesting layer 2s like I don't think it has to be that if you're in eth maxi, you need everything immediately to be on the net I would rather than continue to build super high quality upgrades do so in a timely way allow people that are able to solve particular use cases to do so on the altos and be supportive of the altos so that the altos ecosystem can thrive.
42:19
[SPEAKER_00]: and kind of co-exist in this great app store app world, where you know that you don't have to be the best at everything, but that things you are gonna be the best at, you can sure you do really well.
42:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I'm a very big supporter of some L2s going out there and doing that thing, which is special purpose and extremely creative to the ecosystem.
42:37
[SPEAKER_00]: On the sharpening side, we, I can't speak to any name in specifically, but what I can say is that, for sharpening, we are, we're looking forward to, I think redefining what people understand a treasure to be.
42:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And part of that is taking our, our stockholders along with us through time.
42:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So when we do some of these deals, we sometimes get accused of at nauseam, describing them on social
43:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And people are like, this is getting redundant.
43:04
[SPEAKER_00]: We've heard you say the same thing five, six, seven times.
43:06
[SPEAKER_00]: But for a lot of people, they may be hearing about the concept of a liquid restaking token for the first time.
43:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And they don't want opacity in their holdings.
43:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what really excites me for us is that education component and bringing the market along with us to teach them more.
43:20
[SPEAKER_00]: They may not put all their investment in heat in sharpening.
43:23
[SPEAKER_00]: They may decide we're going to put some in sharpening or none at all.
43:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're just going to go and do these cool things that you taught us about on the chin.
43:29
[SPEAKER_00]: ourselves.
43:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's also a win.
43:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that's an exciting component for us.
43:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The Sharkwing brand, hopefully through time, is associated with being that link between traditional finance and the on-chain economy and doing so in an intelligent way in an institutional grade way.
43:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So why can't common on specific rebrandings?
43:48
[SPEAKER_00]: I do think that the name already in the sense and bodies what our goal is.
43:53
[SPEAKER_03]: I love it.
43:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Connecting people sharply, no, man, Matt, Mr. Matt Sheffield, CIO of sharp link.
44:02
[SPEAKER_03]: This was really quite an enlightening conversation.
44:05
[SPEAKER_03]: We greatly appreciate it.
44:07
[SPEAKER_03]: For the show notes, where could people follow along with you and some of the stuff that you guys are putting out in terms of just like crypto related content?
44:16
[SPEAKER_00]: So you can follow me at SheffielderFordonX.
44:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Sharkling's account is also just that.
44:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Sharkling.
44:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we also have on our website, sharpling.com, our live East Treasury dashboard.
44:27
[SPEAKER_00]: We can follow along with all the transparency that we provide on a weekly basis of what we're holding, how we're holding it, and how it's performed through time since we think that transparency is key.
44:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I love it.
44:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The Sheffield report.
44:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Give him a follow.
44:41
[SPEAKER_03]: It's incredible to be able to hear directly from you.
44:45
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you for joining everybody listening at home or on your way to work.
44:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Or maybe you're already at work and you're trying to escape the dull drums by investing in crypto and learn more.
44:55
[SPEAKER_03]: We appreciate all you guys joining us today.
44:57
[SPEAKER_03]: And we'll catch you guys back same time, same place next week for some more incredible guests.
45:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks Matt.
45:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Appreciate having me.