Latest / CRYPTO 101 / Ep. 673 The Competitive Edge of Crypto Trading with True Markets

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Ep. 673 The Competitive Edge of Crypto Trading with True Markets · CRYPTO 101

0:09
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, everybody.
0:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome back to another episode of the crypto one-on-one podcast.
0:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host, Bryce.
0:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Not joined by my notorious Compod Ray Brendan today.
0:19
[SPEAKER_01]: He's traveling around the world and he's unable to make it.
0:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I am so excited to have the solo pleasure here to discuss all things, defy all things markets with co-founder and CEO of True Markets, Vashal Gupta.
0:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome.
0:35
[SPEAKER_01]: How are you doing today?
0:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Great, man.
0:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
0:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for having me.
0:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, really, really excited.
0:41
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got a great pedigree, former Goldman, former Coinbase and Circle.
0:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And now you're branched off on your own, building your own product.
0:50
[SPEAKER_01]: You've raised a bunch of money.
0:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Walk us through a little bit about your story and just a little bit about who you are so that we could kind of get a sense of why you're building true markets and why you think this is such a honorable endeavor.
1:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so background computer engineer ended up actually my first real job was on the trading floor at Goldman on the electronic trading side.
1:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to.
1:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I was one of those nerds that would try to like spread trade in college and this is, you know, I'm a little bit older and probably most of your on-hand side.
1:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I graduated in no two.
1:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is before the markets had really gotten fully electronic and
1:31
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I joined the then, you know, was then like the Goldman Sachs watch trying to train desk.
1:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, I learned a lot.
1:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I was there for almost ten years.
1:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I ended up working on equity's futures, FX, and then running their options business.
1:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I met my co-founder their seventeen years ago, and this is our fifth business together.
1:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So he's ex Goldman, ex Coinbase himself.
1:53
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we ended up taking the options business from essentially just a very small, like zero business to almost ten percent in the market.
2:02
[SPEAKER_00]: We were doing everything from institutional to retail, selling and including in paymeholder flow businesses.
2:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So some of our biggest clients are like fidelity and some of the other big brokers out there.
2:11
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I left sure to self finance knowing that I, you know,
2:18
[SPEAKER_00]: We had lost the kind of the plug on like what innovation was, right?
2:22
[SPEAKER_00]: We just kept going faster and faster and at some point I'm like, that's not really innovation, right?
2:25
[SPEAKER_00]: That's just leaning against Moore's law and saying, hey, let's just trade faster.
2:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, I kind of pivoted towards FinTech and crypto.
2:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I was an early guy at a place called Moneyline, which was a online lender that was run by a bunch of ex-Goldman and said it all guys, retail focused, app focused.
2:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to dig deeper into crypto.
2:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I was trying to
2:47
[SPEAKER_00]: actually build like a prime broker in the space when that wasn't like, I think Bitcoin is stolen to a thousand bucks at that point.
2:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It couldn't raise the capital I wanted.
2:54
[SPEAKER_00]: People would just weren't interested in crypto at that point.
2:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I ended up, there was really kind of just a handful of companies that you could work for that were worthwhile.
3:02
[SPEAKER_00]: I talked to Coinbase initially, but I ended up taking a job at Circle as head of business development, but more importantly, they had handed me the white paper and they said, well, how do we launch this thing?
3:13
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was in charge of launch and growth, we used to see from zero to half a billion of market cap.
3:17
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, at the time there was really kind of a battle, right?
3:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, Tether was out there already.
3:22
[SPEAKER_00]: There was kind of a cluster of initial stable coins like to use the, uh, true is the, uh, taxes is dollar.
3:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And USDC came out last.
3:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So we really had to lean into our messaging, which was like, we're feed free from mint and burn.
3:41
[SPEAKER_00]: We're multi-ish, which is really important for people that were worried about the risk of burn.
3:45
[SPEAKER_00]: If I give you ten million dollars of USDC, I want to make sure I can burn it and get it back to dollars as quickly as possible.
3:55
[SPEAKER_00]: and multi-assure.
3:58
[SPEAKER_00]: We had a couple of cabbages that really let us lean the market and people saw that as the benefits of USDC.
4:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember trading between USDT and USDC.
4:11
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, USDT was really the primary choice originally because it was a trading pair, right?
4:16
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just first and so like all these different, yeah, by an ant's poloniacs like Bittracks like all these things like traded against actual tether, like not US dollars.
4:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And so when USDC came on the market,
4:28
[SPEAKER_01]: for me as a trader, like the big selling point was like, oh, Tether is unattested and they're offshore and they're, you know, again, you know, things have changed radically now and I just saw the president shout out to Paloard.
4:39
[SPEAKER_01]: We know.
4:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, Tether, like, what a great business.
4:42
[SPEAKER_00]: It was on my list in February, Coinbase, so like, I also, you know, had it to, like for that too.
4:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
4:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, USTC always had that sort of stamp of like, yeah, regulatory approval almost.
4:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and you know, I think one of the big key reasons why you were CC was winning was also besides being fee free at the time and multi-ish or so less risk.
5:03
[SPEAKER_00]: It was also like fast.
5:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So we were the first to integrate what Silvergate said.
5:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was really, it was like a couple seconds to mint and a couple seconds to burn.
5:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you're a large skill market maker, you don't want that risk of like how long is it going to take for me to get into this thing.
5:16
[SPEAKER_00]: So that helped us kind of get there.
5:18
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I did everything I could do at Circle at the time.
5:21
[SPEAKER_00]: They had sold Plony X and sold the OTC trade desk and pivoted in the entire business towards USDC and I kind of saw the running on the wall where I went from having very few bosses to all the bosses at one time.
5:33
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of just one off of my own again ended up getting an offer at Coinbase to join pre-IPO as CEO of the Exchange Business.
5:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And at that time, the Exchange Business we only traded twenty token spot US.
5:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It was kind of a simple business.
5:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The matching engine was pretty bad at that time.
5:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Patrick, my co-founder, joined us.
5:58
[SPEAKER_00]: He built his seventh matching engine at your market, so he's kind of a matching engine expert, kind of helped us scale that up a lucky number.
6:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly, lucky number seven.
6:06
[SPEAKER_00]: So, he helped us scale that business and allow us to do acid addition, so I was in charge of acid addition from twenty assets to one or thirty five.
6:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And then behind the scenes.
6:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for your service.
6:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
6:20
[SPEAKER_00]: I was just like, you know, many ways, just a, you know, a head product, you know, guy with leading a small or get a big company.
6:26
[SPEAKER_00]: But the reality was like, we knew that asset edition was really important.
6:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Brian had kind of pushed us to think about being the Amazon of assets and kind of fighting for market share.
6:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we start looking at market share, we're looking at, well, the real markets are derivatives, right?
6:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there was a real push internally to like figure out derivatives.
6:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So one of my mandates was to expand into derivatives.
6:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So we, one of the, I think the third biggest acquisition in crypto, the Thomas Fairx, so the company that we bought, that was regulated CPC regular DCM.
6:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we launched Coinbase to ribbed the physics change in the US, so you recently saw them launch like you perp style into US out of that business.
7:04
[SPEAKER_00]: We also took that engine, and this is before FTX blew up, we took that engine, and we, we,
7:12
[SPEAKER_00]: without hiring any engineers, we created Coinbase International Exchange, the perpetual futures exchange.
7:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I left on my day about warrants.
7:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think on the best days of Coinbase International Exchange is ten percent of the purpose market.
7:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So I kind of did the work to kind of scale that business, but I was there.
7:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I gave myself two to four years when I took the job and I stayed at three.
7:35
[SPEAKER_00]: So I nailed it.
7:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And really,
7:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Patrick and I have always kind of wanted to build businesses together.
7:42
[SPEAKER_00]: We've never done anything venture back on our own.
7:44
[SPEAKER_00]: We've always been backed by a company or backed by individuals.
7:48
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's just probably our time.
7:51
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm forty five years old and it's time to build our own stuff.
7:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we've done a lot to build in the crypto industry.
7:57
[SPEAKER_00]: We've been putting our fingerprints on a lot of this stuff and I think it was just time for us to try something new.
8:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I completely agree.
8:04
[SPEAKER_01]: It's your time.
8:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And you guys have got a great product and a really interesting product because it's something that's a lot different than what's out there.
8:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, Coinbase holds your keys and they're the custody of your crypto.
8:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And if I go to something like Uniswap, I'm only the custodian and there's not really much of an interface.
8:22
[SPEAKER_01]: True markets almost feels like
8:24
[SPEAKER_01]: hybrid between a great centralized trading experience, but also the benefits and the pros of having true self custody.
8:33
[SPEAKER_01]: So why was it?
8:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, of all of your experience, it kind of makes sense why you would go down this route.
8:38
[SPEAKER_01]: But tell us, you know, from the horses mouth, why did you choose like this is my baby?
8:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so just to define true markets, we're a non-custodial, hybrid C-Fi device, like exchange that leverages tablecoins as a core on-ramp to bring dollars in.
8:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, we saw a couple of things like kind of work really well and didn't work really well and both the C-Fi and D-Fi side.
9:00
[SPEAKER_00]: So, like a good example of that is like acid additional is painful.
9:04
[SPEAKER_00]: So, going from twenty-assus to twenty-three-five took years and it took
9:09
[SPEAKER_00]: hundreds of people just to get it through the process of of this like digital assets listing group that we had at Coinbase just to get it across the line and I was really kind of like the last I was like the last guy at the end to be like okay let's get the markets up and like even that was extremely hard right so you never want to hear the word how we again
9:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's a process and the reality is like, in a world where new assets are being created on the fly all the time and like, you know, Trump launches a token and it takes too long for it to be listed on a centralized exchange.
9:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, we see the benefits of defying just enabling an asset.
9:44
[SPEAKER_00]: We, being non-castodial, we, we use turn key walls behind the scenes, which, you know, we love the guys that turn key.
9:49
[SPEAKER_00]: They, they really kind of enable our non-castodial wallets.
9:53
[SPEAKER_00]: But on the other side of it, we use a qualified custodian pacto, so really well-known name and industry.
9:59
[SPEAKER_00]: It's hold things like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and other stablecoins if you want to hold them in a QC.
10:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So really kind of blending, you know, in many ways our current version looks like a moonshaw competitor, but by the end of September, we'll be trading Bitcoin Ethereum Solana, settled to a QualFly custodian, which even Coinbase doesn't settle your retail, you retail trades to a QualFly custodian, your prime trades do.
10:23
[SPEAKER_00]: We give you the added security of being a non-custodial and separation of the execution and custody.
10:28
[SPEAKER_00]: We, you'll be able to trade Bitcoin Ethereum, Sloan, SPL, EVM, based tokens on our platform by the end of September this year.
10:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And that kind of gives us the like, I think the one key ethos that we have here that is different than most players that we believe in fair pricing.
10:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think if you look at some of these exchanges, you look at some of these platforms, you know, like,
10:50
[SPEAKER_00]: some of them are charging an extreme amount of money for like one dollar trades or ten dollar trades.
10:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It's still kind of like two hundred and fifty basis points to buy Bitcoin right now, a spot.
10:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's extremely hard to get exposure to Bitcoin spot, for example, and that's been around for a long time.
11:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, man.
11:06
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really the kind of, in my opinion, sort of what the market really needs.
11:10
[SPEAKER_01]: It's something the market has tried to do for a long time.
11:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I could think of like just the graveyard of apps in the past who just like never found product market fit trying to do something.
11:18
[SPEAKER_01]: But like the timing right now is just so sweet.
11:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're like you said with turn key like having like the back end super dialed in, then having the regulation and like having all these policies now they're like, you know, enshrining stable coins is like a key part of digital infrastructure.
11:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Now it's like the timing meets like the innovation and you're like you're doing it right now.
11:39
[SPEAKER_01]: That's crazy.
11:39
[SPEAKER_00]: We're post FTX, we're a U.S.
11:43
[SPEAKER_00]: based things.
11:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Last August, we came out of stealth before really kind of pushed his crypto initiative.
11:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And we said, we're going to the U.S.
11:50
[SPEAKER_00]: first.
11:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And we were the kind of first platform that said that.
11:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And we've got our own matching engines.
11:56
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got our own CPI-D-Fi settlement.
11:58
[SPEAKER_00]: We're just kind of ramping up.
11:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're going to offer something safer, fair, and just better than what the market has right now.
12:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so let's walk through some of the stable coins stuff, you know, right, you know, with the Genius Act and you're the expert on stable coins not me.
12:14
[SPEAKER_01]: The Genius Act, I know it only allows for certain kinds of stable coins to like be legally permissible in certain environments.
12:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Like what kind of stable coins would your platform accept and what kinds would you not accept?
12:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think like, let's stay focused on our U.S.
12:29
[SPEAKER_00]: business, you know, right now we accept the U.S.
12:31
[SPEAKER_00]: D.C.
12:31
[SPEAKER_00]: and P.Y.
12:32
[SPEAKER_00]: U.S.
12:32
[SPEAKER_00]: D. So that gives you an idea of kind of like fully backed, fully regulated.
12:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And circle.
12:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, circle.
12:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So we, we, and we actually handle state requirements a little bit differently than most platforms were like FTX would just kind of bucket them and cold them U.S.
12:45
[SPEAKER_00]: D.
12:46
[SPEAKER_00]: platforms like Coinbase only really speak USDC and they can't like if you try to like use PayPal for PYUSD for collateral it's really it's not possible the way we do it is we have a default stablecoin where we kind of take let's say if you come in with USDC we we our default stablecoin is PayPal's PYUSD so we have a deal with PayPal PayPal's an investor and through the platform
13:08
[SPEAKER_00]: We did denote all the order books and PYUSD.
13:11
[SPEAKER_00]: If a client comes in with USTC, we handle it through multi-light orders and a bunch of other things.
13:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So we just do it the cleaner way.
13:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The risk is on the market makers, not the market.
13:20
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the right way to do it.
13:21
[SPEAKER_00]: We've been thinking about stablecoins and markets for a long time.
13:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been in markets since Oto.
13:26
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a little bit of gray in my stuff.
13:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I promise I'm old and I look.
13:31
[SPEAKER_00]: So we've been thinking about these things a long time.
13:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And stablecoins are a key unlock, right?
13:36
[SPEAKER_00]: What's happening right now with the genus act and all the other things that are happening is that
13:40
[SPEAKER_00]: USDC is essentially ninety-nine percent of the U.S.
13:43
[SPEAKER_00]: domicile U.S.
13:44
[SPEAKER_00]: denominated, right?
13:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, that's the ex-tether world.
13:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And you expect to see with clarity of regulation, you're going to expect to see a lot more competitors, you know, the stripes from big banks and everything.
13:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Big banks and web two giants and exchanges themselves.
14:00
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're going to be creating their own stablecoins.
14:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And we want to be a stablecoin-ignostic platform.
14:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's our goal smart.
14:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we can pivot to any stablecoin you want to bring in.
14:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And we behind the scenes like,
14:10
[SPEAKER_00]: the kind of like the Trojan Horses is obviously the trading business we're building but like behind the scenes we're building core stable coin infrastructure to go from one to the other and kind of just handle these trades effectively multi-chain.
14:21
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're like hard tech core infrastructure guys and we have like an app right like if in many ways we look like you know it's like it's open AI and chatGbT we're hard tech we have a match engine
14:33
[SPEAKER_00]: We have C-Fide D-Fide Settleman, we've routing, we've a bunch of cool stuff that we've been building, and then we built an app really kind of like last minute to get it out to retail and it's been taken off.
14:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So people really like what we built so far.
14:46
[SPEAKER_01]: What's been kind of the biggest selling point to your customers to really incentivize folks to say, hey, leave your current trading set up, which you've got a lot of comfort and security with, and all that, and come on over and test it out.
14:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there any, I know a lot of crypto companies do air drops or some kind of subsidies or incentives?
15:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you have any of that?
15:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Or is it just, hey, we just got a better experience?
15:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a really good question.
15:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't think we're like really targeting someone like that is an existing, let's call them like,
15:14
[SPEAKER_00]: in exchange player, they've been in crypto for a long time.
15:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not like trying to necessarily pull them.
15:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trying to, you know, there's so many people that I've never touched crypto.
15:21
[SPEAKER_00]: There's so many people that are afraid of trade in general.
15:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So the reason why I call it true markets is like, obviously we're focused on crypto, but there's so many other things to trade.
15:29
[SPEAKER_00]: There's prediction markets, there's securities, there's derivatives, there's all these things that we want to enable.
15:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that if there's a key competitor, it's Robin Hood, right?
15:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, we want to enable these retail plus customers that say, hey, I'm smart enough to know that I shouldn't be
15:44
[SPEAKER_00]: being charged to a hundred fifty bases point to buy Bitcoin like that's that's actually insane because on the other side of it the institutions are definitely not paying that the market maker is definitely not paying that and retail pays it because they want access to it in the app that's beautiful and so we can do that too and people will ask me like why can you do it nobody else can do it like well we're like
16:04
[SPEAKER_00]: a handful of very focused, I call us like the Navy SEALs not the Navy.
16:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I really dedicated a ninety percent of my team used to work for me at one point or another where the Navy SEALs doing something amazing and we could do it at much better fair pricing.
16:19
[SPEAKER_00]: So I really, the one thing about crypto that kind of irks me is that if you really look at the fees, they're not that fair.
16:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and Bitcoin is so damn liquid.
16:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if you go into the open market and you execute orders, you could
16:33
[SPEAKER_01]: fire off a clip of a million dollars and have no slippage.
16:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's, it's really wrong for these exchange, not wrong.
16:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they're, they're a business, it's capitalism, that kind of thing.
16:41
[SPEAKER_01]: But I guess their margin is your opportunity.
16:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
16:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the Jeff phase, those quote, all right.
16:47
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I'm, I'm a, again, if they're the Navy SEALs and not, you know, we're the Navy, like, if we're the Navy SEALs and they're the Navy, like we're just like, I'm, this is what I was born for.
16:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm definitely missionary and not a mercenary here.
17:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been in the market for a long time.
17:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just see it as a trader.
17:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, I buy Bitcoin when I can.
17:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And honestly, like, I hate that I have to pay retail fees, you know?
17:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And that drives me nuts because I know how liquid it is, how able we are to get that liquidity.
17:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And people are being pushed to the ETFs and things like that because the spot is too hard.
17:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
17:21
[SPEAKER_01]: So when you launched this, what was the biggest surprise upon launching it?
17:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Or even that surprise could be a pro surprise, a con surprise?
17:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Was there anything that kind of just like caught you off guard during the development or the launch?
17:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the team has really come together as like they've chilled so quickly and again, half these people have worked together before and like the reality is like there's a bright arm from quote somewhere where like action breeds information and like our ability to like just we have these two weeks sprints where we're just going very quickly.
17:52
[SPEAKER_00]: We went from we went from six asses to twelve asses to ninety nine asses and two weeks.
17:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And to do something like that at a big company, we just couldn't do that, right?
18:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So the speed of innovation at a smaller team where you have one guy building the app instead of a whole team, people kind of overthinking it is amazing.
18:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're highly, highly efficient.
18:11
[SPEAKER_00]: We live in a world where we can raise a good amount of capital, we can park it in a stable coin or somewhere that pays us four hundred or five hundred basis points.
18:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I can hire a quarter of as many engineers as I needed before in the past and they can be
18:26
[SPEAKER_00]: twice as efficient and on a side coating with AI.
18:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's funny.
18:31
[SPEAKER_00]: It's you allow people to kind of like breathe in their own like space.
18:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Like if an app developer has four other people he has to work with, you know, he's spending a lot more time like coaching and kind of like commenting and make sure that everybody like works together and the reality is if you're just like, you know, a twenty-x engineer, you can just like make it happen very quickly.
18:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, it's good because it enables that, you know, engineers, you know, not to like, um, discriminator, whatever, but it's like, you know, they're generally like, you want to keep them engineering, not like managing people and facing off with people.
19:03
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, engineer.
19:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And like this allows you.
19:05
[SPEAKER_00]: My CTO is coding all day.
19:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Like he is.
19:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, a lot of CTO sometimes I'm like, so do code and they're like, no, I'm like, my CTO is coding all day.
19:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Now our team is also highly skilled and doesn't need a lot of management, but that happens.
19:20
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's take a quick zoom out, just high level, like crypto right now anywhere on any given day between three and a half trillion and, you know, four trillion dollar market cap.
19:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's virtually, you know, we've got there with no government support, with really no institutional support.
19:36
[SPEAKER_01]: How big could this pie get?
19:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that there's going to be a blend here, right?
19:41
[SPEAKER_00]: We still think about crypto versus, like, track five.
19:44
[SPEAKER_00]: We think about there's a barrier there somewhere.
19:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we still think about technology and AI as there's some sort of barrier there.
19:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think all these things start to blend over time.
19:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And like, FinTech is crypto and crypto is FinTech at some point.
19:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Dollars into the system that turn into stablecoins are all like, are technically, you know, that's technically crypto, but like,
20:04
[SPEAKER_00]: hopefully just blends into all the applications that the application layer and you don't really think about it.
20:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It's funny people always ask me about like what's happening in the stablecoin market in the reality is like the dollars themselves are commoditized.
20:16
[SPEAKER_00]: They're all sitting in a bank account somewhere.
20:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the wrapper that's not commoditized.
20:20
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a USB-C or a P-WA, but on the application level, in my case, like an exchange level, we just want to speak dollars anyway.
20:27
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're always kind of wrapping it on wrapping something that's commoditized in any ways.
20:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And over time, I think all of these things blur.
20:33
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't care about what the stable coin looks like.
20:35
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't care about what chain.
20:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Even like thinking about how many of the ones are out there, the end client doesn't really care.
20:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The end client doesn't care if you're on A, A, W, S, or another cloud services, right?
20:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, I mean, I always think it's, you know, you set it perfectly.
20:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I just wanted to build on that of like this whole idea of internet streaming.
20:56
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't call like, oh, I'm going to go internet stream on this new application.
21:00
[SPEAKER_01]: You're just going to watch a movie, right?
21:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you don't have to know all the underpinnings of what's going on in the backend and servers.
21:07
[SPEAKER_01]: web sockets you just experience it and so crypto is actually just going to consume finance and even that word like this podcast called crypto one on one it's been around since twenty seventeen crypto was a really really you know key term but that actually might face out and it's going to be called finance
21:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it's just going to subsume all of all of finance is going to be on crypto rails.
21:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all for where it's a world.
21:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Crypto eats finance rails.
21:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The blend will happen.
21:33
[SPEAKER_00]: These things will blend together.
21:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been in God five for many years.
21:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been in the traditional world.
21:38
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been in FinTech.
21:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been in crypto and kind of like had my finger print on all those things and I'd say they all look and feel the same.
21:45
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, when we talk about markets and securities or options or derivatives, it's the same way I think about, you know, spot or derivatives in crypto.
21:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I think about like collateral, it's okay, dollar collateral or stable one collateral, like at some point we're all talking the same thing anyways.
21:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
21:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, I love it.
22:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And then if we kind of zoom into the platform a little bit, what could people expect to experience that could kind of give them the edge in trading?
22:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Are there any tools, visualizations on chain off chain data?
22:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a really good question.
22:13
[SPEAKER_00]: So our first innovation is we use these amazing sparklines, and I will ask your clients here, your audience here, to download the app, and we use these two sparklines, so you can see breakouts.
22:25
[SPEAKER_00]: So if something is kind of like charging ahead, you'll see the market in a different way.
22:30
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just a simple, twenty-four-hour chart, which will have as well.
22:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The sparkline itself kind of shows you that, hey, it's green, green, green, green, green.
22:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like it's launching off.
22:40
[SPEAKER_00]: If you look at like the Apple stock app or even look at like Robin Hood or even Coinbase, you just have these little like green or red charts and it's like, it doesn't tell you anything.
22:48
[SPEAKER_00]: You need a visualization that's condensed and it's like, but you can see it and you can put it into your like, you know, your widgets and you just want to see is Bitcoin ripping or not.
22:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And it might be taking action.
22:59
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's like step one.
23:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And then step two, we live in this like amazing world where we have all this data.
23:04
[SPEAKER_00]: We have this AI and a bunch of other things that are tool sets that we can now use.
23:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So instead of just having price alerts and things like that that, you know, have never been really traditionally that good.
23:12
[SPEAKER_00]: We use AI driven notifications.
23:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So we can say, hey, there's something breaking out or something trading ten times a week's spec.
23:19
[SPEAKER_00]: There's something happening.
23:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're going to tell you that before any other app, you don't have to use a DEX screen or anything else.
23:24
[SPEAKER_00]: We're just going to force you within the app.
23:27
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, we've been this right now.
23:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's your market.
23:31
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a black icon.
23:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, and I think that another question I get a lot are like, oh, are you going to have this available on desktop?
23:38
[SPEAKER_00]: You can have it available everywhere.
23:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, no, Instagram is a available on desktop eventually, but like the reality is like, twenty four hour, twenty four seven trading should happen on your mobile device where we have bio metrics and a bunch of other things that like are just beautiful.
23:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And like the reality is like,
23:53
[SPEAKER_00]: When I look at the Robin Hoods in the world, it looks like they're taking their desktop view and trying to cram it into a simple version of the mobile view.
24:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And it doesn't feel like the premier way to trade on their platform.
24:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And so our goal is to make our app should be the premier way to trade.
24:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And honestly, I'm a trader.
24:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I make it a point to try to trade only on mobile.
24:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I have my backup there.
24:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It's right in my pocket.
24:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that no one's like, you know, I know exactly where everything is.
24:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And I like sometimes I'm in the gym and I have some of the markets moving and I want to do something about it.
24:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to have to wait until I get to a desktop.
24:27
[SPEAKER_00]: So if we can't provide like the best service on mobile app, we just got to try harder.
24:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So I love the app.
24:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Try it out.
24:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It's going to move fast every two weeks.
24:35
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll see a new little update.
24:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm excited.
24:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Not literally why you were just talking.
24:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I scanned your QR code.
24:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Downloaded it.
24:42
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'll provide my candid feedback and I love that.
24:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Super excited.
24:46
[SPEAKER_01]: But look, I mean, there's a lot of different directions we can go.
24:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I know you guys kind of are on Solana primarily.
24:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to go a little bit about that design decision and just the ethos behind Solana.
24:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And if I have stable coins on Ethereum as there's some conversions.
25:02
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a good question.
25:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So like, you know, the first and foremost, we had a bunch of L ones, like as investors in our platform, and that that wasn't the reason Solana was one of those L ones.
25:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Rajam, self as an investor in our platform.
25:13
[SPEAKER_00]: But that didn't, that didn't sway us.
25:14
[SPEAKER_00]: What's widows was that a customer just wanted to trade assets around Solana.
25:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's where we started and they honestly like their foundation was really helpful and kind of like pulling us together and kind of bringing us up.
25:25
[SPEAKER_00]: So when we had to make a choice on like with where should we support first it was Solana.
25:30
[SPEAKER_00]: But by the end of summer we should be Solana base EVM and a bunch of other tokens and we will do where gas is platform.
25:38
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't like we don't tell you hey this is a Solana us DC or basically we handle it all behind the scenes.
25:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So our goal is, yeah, so right now I would say we're like a moonshot competitor by the end of summer.
25:48
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to be a Coinbase competitor.
25:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And moonshot for those who don't know, it's like the hottest app in twenty twenty five, uh, allows you to basically buy meme coins straight from your Apple pay.
25:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean it was like literally the first platform that could really handle dollar to Trump token and that really gave them a benefit there and the reality is like there's so much more to do, right?
26:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's really hard to trade prediction markets.
26:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really hard to trade based tokens.
26:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really hard to trade all those in one platform and kind of do all the bridging and all the other things you have to figure out.
26:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And we use stablecoins across like all these different dimensions that kind of work is like the conduit between these dimensions.
26:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So
26:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The the inventive like stable points really allowed us to do these things and again I don't think the customer himself themselves need to know that this is an SPL token or a based token.
26:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you know just what's like what's going on?
26:35
[SPEAKER_00]: What's going down what do I want to get exposure in?
26:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, totally.
26:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And so one of the things that I always kind of preach here for the past, you know, better part of a decade is just like great security practices and thank God that since ten years ago, security has gotten so much better and so much more.
26:55
[SPEAKER_01]: commoditized and like we've got these trusted execution environments and every phone.
26:59
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got really, really, really strong encryption.
27:02
[SPEAKER_01]: But I still see people get hacked with soft wallets.
27:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I still see people click links get browser keys drained.
27:10
[SPEAKER_01]: So I always recommend using and connecting with a ledger or a hardware wallet.
27:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that something that you guys enable or tell me how you think about the security stack?
27:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I think you guys should probably bring like the turnkey guys on.
27:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I would love to.
27:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to make it.
27:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Tvo, if you're, if you're, yeah, I think that's price is amazing and it seems amazing.
27:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll I'll tell you that like there's always an evolution of thought and security here, especially in crypto.
27:35
[SPEAKER_00]: There's ideas around NPC wallets and other things that like in terms of non-custodial like hosted wallets space that I think is really interesting.
27:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I think what pretty is done, what Turnkey's done has made it even safer, right?
27:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm very comfortable with the idea of using turnkey wallets for your defy assets and that's you know, I think we should dig in deeper with that and kind of
27:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And then also on the other side of things, you're going to ask, well, should your exchange be holding your Bitcoin?
28:06
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a really good question.
28:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reality is I think that the FTX, whatever happened to FTX and all the other hacks that we've seen,
28:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Number one, this separation of execution and custody is super important.
28:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Security there is super important.
28:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And also just being held in like a truster and being held in it at a QC is really important.
28:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So if the QC goes down, your Bitcoin doesn't go down with it.
28:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the qualified custodian.
28:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that's going to be kind of going into the next year of regulation and innovation.
28:35
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to see an ask of like, well, are my assets being held at a QC?
28:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So like, if you're an R, if you're an R, A, like, it has to be a QC.
28:43
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you're just retail, it doesn't.
28:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reality is like, we want to offer that to retail at and not add a premium.
28:49
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to do it at less fees than what's out there in the market.
28:52
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I would beg people to download the app, try it, and give us feedback.
28:56
[SPEAKER_00]: We're gonna have like a live texting support within the app that will literally hit me and the other co-founders, Patrick.
29:03
[SPEAKER_01]: That's going to be epic.
29:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm just selfishly I have a question, you know, so the longtime listeners know I run a hedge fund called Tower eighteen and we've got different counterparts, different wallets and all that kind of stuff is true markets facing off with institutions can I sign up for, you know, an institutional account.
29:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you can, so right now, highly focused on market makers and systematic traders on the other side of our retail trades at this point.
29:30
[SPEAKER_00]: But we will be essentially building what we build for retail for institutions, but doing it the right way.
29:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that there's a, you know,
29:38
[SPEAKER_00]: There was always like this like drum beat of like the institutions are coming.
29:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The institutions are coming and the reality is like an crypto institution looks very different than tried by institution and we have to build for that.
29:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we're like I said, we have like this hard tech of like match engine, settlement, and it's in both CFID fi.
29:54
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got all those beautiful stuff and we just have like a retail app on top of the reality is like we have all this like really cool tech that we'd love to like
30:01
[SPEAKER_00]: We're considering white labeling to other platforms.
30:04
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's many ways you may be able to touch us over time.
30:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think institutions are going to be a big part of the next year or two.
30:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, kind of pivoting just to touch, but on stable coins, it just kind of ran through my mind again, the quote from Scott Besson about the stable coin market currently around two hundred fifty billion.
30:23
[SPEAKER_01]: He thinks by the end of the decade, it could kind of grow to three point seven trillion.
30:27
[SPEAKER_01]: So roughly a ten X in stable coin market cap.
30:31
[SPEAKER_01]: What would that do to, you know, Bitcoin Ethereum, Solana, and just the market at large?
30:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Does that kind of lift market values?
30:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
30:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you think so?
30:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I think that like with the idea that Stamecoin the pie is going to continue to grow and obviously we're going to see fragmentation there and with fragmentation.
30:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess you're going to see a need for you know innovation and infrastructure that's all all these things will grow.
30:57
[SPEAKER_00]: There'll be these side businesses that are sitting right next to a stable coin that are offering services that so the whole like crypto industry will grow for sure and like as we again like I think things start to go changing not stick over time, but there's still gas
31:09
[SPEAKER_00]: gas fees being paid and there's still like underlying infrastructure that's super important.
31:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that the infrastructure of crypto is is the most interesting things.
31:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I look at like trends like AI, you're going to see a world where one AI is paying another AI and they don't really have the ability to do that outside of crypto.
31:26
[SPEAKER_00]: They can.
31:27
[SPEAKER_00]: when a credit card or bank account, but they can't have a wallet.
31:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's where I think all those numbers start going up into the right, because transaction services are going to be huge and using crypto rails.
31:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, we all say crypto crypto crypto and the reality is it's just me, you know, dollar rails, right?
31:42
[SPEAKER_00]: These are going to be US dollar rails.
31:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And like, you know, as a government, like the US government should be looking at this is like, hey, this is what's going to backfill any like any question or whether or not the US dollar is like global currency or not.
31:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And the fact that like the entire market, specifically XUS, has said, hey, we need this dollar-dominated, is a blessing, and we should lean into it.
32:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what they've done, and that's amazing.
32:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think it really does, you know, really galinized America's place as, you know, that exorbitant privilege.
32:13
[SPEAKER_01]: It extends that exorbitant privilege with the dollar.
32:16
[SPEAKER_01]: It just makes everybody all around the world able to use the dollar so much easier.
32:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And importantly, if you think of Scott Besson as what he is, which is a bond salesman, he needs more places to stuff these bonds.
32:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And so now he has legislation which is going to have a bunch of places to stuff these bonds and so America is going to be able to continue to finance itself and stable coins are a huge part of that.
32:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think there's a superpower with like stablecoins that like even the CFOs and non-crypto companies are going to start to ask themselves, well, I have all these pockets of dollars that are sitting everywhere and I need to like deploy them in short duration, long duration bonds and that's like a lot of work.
32:52
[SPEAKER_00]: What if I could just use something like a stablecoin where like on the whole on the universal level, someone is like taking care of that for me.
32:59
[SPEAKER_00]: where I can very efficiently as well.
33:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're going to give you higher yield.
33:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think one of the less talked about superpowers of these stablecoins is that someone else is managing the yield and doing it on a bigger level and you don't have to worry about the short duration and long duration.
33:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So I have corporate funds and I want those all on stablecoins.
33:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, it's awesome.
33:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And you could also earn yield very easily with DeFi.
33:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's one of the things that, you know, to Robin Hood's advantage, they're offering, you know, basically any cash, money, cash brokerage dollars that are in your account, like it's automatically earning yield.
33:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And I would imagine that in DeFi would also be capable to do that.
33:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So if somebody deposit stable coins onto your platform, are they able to automatically generate yielders that something totally just different?
33:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we're definitely considering those things.
33:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I think what we learned about the last kind of blowups was that everybody kind of moved the claddle around, right?
33:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody kind of claddle many times.
33:57
[SPEAKER_00]: We could be careful about those things.
33:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I think in many ways you build, you build in a traditional way on defy rails.
34:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And you need to know what the claddle is, you need to be able to pull it out.
34:07
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to be able to do all the things you need to do, but just using defy rails.
34:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, I think that there's a version of this where we offer a beautiful solution that
34:18
[SPEAKER_00]: This is where Coinbase actually does a really good job of like kind of creating that like D-Fi mallet where it feels very web to upfront and all of a sudden it's very web three behind the scenes and like I think that those solutions are important but the key is you don't want just one player that you can lend from.
34:34
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't want just one player you can trade from.
34:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Like in Tradvile you have the Goldman Sachs, the Morgan Stanley, the city groups and in
34:41
[SPEAKER_00]: In the U.S.
34:42
[SPEAKER_00]: currently in crypto, you know, U.S.
34:44
[SPEAKER_00]: to see is ninety-nine percent of U.S.
34:46
[SPEAKER_00]: like U.S.
34:47
[SPEAKER_00]: denominator, U.S.
34:49
[SPEAKER_00]: dollar domiciled, whereas Coinbase is seventy to seventy-five percent of U.S.
34:54
[SPEAKER_00]: spot.
34:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you want competition here, you want like other players to kind of come in.
34:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And with clear regulation, you're seeing that like regulatory like capture kind of lower and allow players like us to jump in.
35:07
[SPEAKER_01]: love it.
35:07
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, before we move on, you know, basically currently, you know, big moon shot competitor, but by the end of the year, early next year, we're going to be taking on Coinbase.
35:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there anything that we didn't ask that we should have, or anything that we didn't really touch on that, that is worthy of highlighting?
35:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think, you know, there's a lot of talk about like tokenized assets, uh, regular mass securities, things like that.
35:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I, I ran securities at Coinbase and I'd say that like there's a lot of like missteps here and I would say we have to be careful.
35:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Like whenever you tokenize anything, it's always a question of utility versus risk.
35:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And the beautiful thing about the dollar was it was very high utility like, hey, I can use UCC for collateral leverage, all the other things I could do is I can air drop an interest.
35:46
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a bunch of things you could potentially do.
35:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's like very little risk as long as I know that the dollars are there as long as I know I can mint and burn as quickly as possible.
35:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that's like a beautiful way of like hey, we should definitely like I'd rather have USDC than a paper dollar for many reasons.
36:02
[SPEAKER_00]: For regular insecurities there's very low utility right now like I can't really use it for collateral like I can't really use and there's like a bunch of reasons why you don't want to do it that way yet.
36:11
[SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't mean it can't do it.
36:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It means that regulators need to catch up and we need to kind of like smooth out a couple bumps there.
36:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But I do think that like something like the U.S.
36:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Security's markets needs a re-haul.
36:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that we're not twenty-four-seven and we're not even close to twenty-four-five is scary.
36:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been in security for a long time.
36:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And we haven't really done anything.
36:30
[SPEAKER_00]: We haven't like innovated.
36:32
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the one thing I would love Wall Street to get from like from the West Coast is like move faster.
36:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, yeah, move bigger things.
36:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, why are we not like trading Tesla, twenty four seven?
36:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Why can't like someone from Singapore touch like a regular mass security that the right way?
36:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Why can't you trade options really, twenty four seven?
36:47
[SPEAKER_00]: That was my old business.
36:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And like the fact that we had a shutdown of markets at then that they feel feels kind of crazy now.
36:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So I love to animate there in those areas.
36:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're called true markets for many reasons.
36:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Prediction markets are really interesting.
36:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I think what chain and the policy teams are all like Polymarkid and the policy teams have been doing are amazing.
37:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I think just getting people to focus on them is great post-election and done a great job.
37:10
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's a lot of innovation left in markets across the board.
37:13
[SPEAKER_00]: But the idea of using a prediction market over a poll to find the truth is I was kind of like part of the reason why we call the true markets.
37:20
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a novel quote out there somewhere
37:23
[SPEAKER_00]: where he says, you know, a group of people that think the same and come to a conclusion is a mob and a group of people that think differently and come to a conclusion is a market.
37:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's something beautiful about finding truth within markets, which is why we call it true markets.
37:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that.
37:41
[SPEAKER_01]: No, that's super interesting.
37:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm very excited to see all the different iterations that you guys turn out and see what sticks and see what the people really, really want.
37:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's going to be awesome.
37:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And I love that just the regulations are just coming down and giving you business builders so much clarity, which is kind of something I wanted to ask your opinion on is the clarity act, which it's probably an acronym for something.
38:05
[SPEAKER_01]: But does that come to bear on your business at all?
38:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean,
38:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It definitely will.
38:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think we're building towards the future of where regulation will be.
38:12
[SPEAKER_00]: We've run regulated like CFTC regulated businesses.
38:15
[SPEAKER_00]: We run SEC and it finner regulated businesses.
38:19
[SPEAKER_00]: We've run these businesses before.
38:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And everything we're doing at your markets is built with that idea.
38:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to trade securities as quickly as possible.
38:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we're almost been
38:29
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we're a little bit different than most like West Coast entrepreneurs.
38:33
[SPEAKER_00]: We come from, you know, we're all engineers.
38:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So I wouldn't be able to make that clear.
38:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I'll even hire an engineer.
38:39
[SPEAKER_00]: But we spent our time in traditional markets and we aren't, we aren't making this silly, you know, you know, some of the silly decisions you make early on.
38:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what's a matching is in it?
38:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Why should I do this over that?
38:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, we've solved those things.
38:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm excited to kind of put our,
38:54
[SPEAKER_00]: like show people what we can build.
38:58
[SPEAKER_00]: This is your crown jewel.
38:58
[SPEAKER_00]: This is your magnum opus.
39:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life.
39:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
39:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
39:03
[SPEAKER_01]: This is your legacy.
39:06
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's awesome.
39:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like it's super impressive and really radical and like, you know, we could probably talk all day on just all the interesting things you're doing.
39:14
[SPEAKER_01]: while I still had your time and you've been very generous with your time.
39:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I just kind of want to get some wisdom just as a guy who's, you know, more, I'm more up and coming.
39:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And like you said, you got some grace.
39:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm still looking for a couple of grace.
39:25
[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, a lot of, you know, folks who are trading and even if folks who are listening who are older folks older than both of us, but are just new to crypto and saying, hey, I've heard about crypto, I'm trying to get in.
39:36
[SPEAKER_01]: What are just some words of wisdom from a crypto veteran, but also a financial wizard veteran?
39:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
39:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a good question.
39:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I definitely come from the old school way of thinking, I, you know, I, I as a exchange operator, very rarely trade crypto.
39:54
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't want your exchange operator and active trader at the same time on crypto.
39:58
[SPEAKER_00]: But I would say you should trade, you should own what you know and what you love.
40:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And like, there's many ways of looking at that and crypto rails in general are just like beautiful and they're going to like open up the, the pipe to a lot of different investment opportunities.
40:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I like tend not to like own things that I can't draw like I can't write an option on.
40:15
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like the reality is there's a lot of like interesting things about time value and like so I like to think about time value a lot.
40:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It's extremely hard to trade options on crypto still and those are some of the things I'd love to build.
40:26
[SPEAKER_00]: My old team purchased there a bit and I think that was a smart move and
40:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that we'll continue to see innovation on the options side.
40:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that's going to happen.
40:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So like, no real investment advice besides like, you should know what your edge is.
40:39
[SPEAKER_00]: You should know what knowledge you have and nobody else has.
40:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, I was in college, we used to spread trade.
40:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it was Nvidia and ATI technologies because we used to build like
40:48
[SPEAKER_00]: We used to build like video game boxes like out of like our PCs and we would be playing Quake and Quake two and we knew about graphics cards so we would like if only just bought in video and held it.
40:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I know.
40:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I held some of it on enough.
41:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
41:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
41:03
[SPEAKER_01]: But no, I would say where you know.
41:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
41:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Tray what you know, throw what you know, I like that one too.
41:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, I love it.
41:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And kind of like, you know, as we wrap up, we always kind of like to try and ask people just, you know, outside of anything that you're building on or anything you're directly involved in, like, what else you look around the crypto landscape or even AI and Robo.
41:23
[SPEAKER_01]: What else just gets you pumped up about the future?
41:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, there's so much out there.
41:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the combo of AI and crypto or crypto rails or dollar rails is really interesting.
41:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're kind of just scratching the surface on that right now.
41:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And that definitely is interesting to me.
41:39
[SPEAKER_00]: There's people I admire a lot.
41:41
[SPEAKER_00]: You guys kind of prompt me with that question before.
41:45
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, I always look at, you know, crypto haze man like that guy's OG and like, we're talking about it in a couple of times.
41:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And like the guy brought purpose to the market, you know, our hays was just amazing guy brought purpose to the market and didn't really well.
41:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And like, you know, he's always got some to say, and you know, you don't have to agree with him, but he's definitely got something to say.
42:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And I always kind of
42:07
[SPEAKER_00]: You look at Sam, you look at CZ, but there's Arthur Hayes as the OG that's still around, kind of still like primed shape, fought off the CFTC in the DOJ.
42:21
[SPEAKER_00]: That guy is a proper boss.
42:23
[SPEAKER_00]: That guy is interesting.
42:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, I'm really interested to see how the traditional businesses like the web, I would say web too, but I don't know if that's the case, but like, I like what stripes doing.
42:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I think like with their recent purchases of bridge and privy, like it's pretty obvious that they're like doubling down in the space.
42:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's going to be interesting to see what like circle does with their high valuation currently, like how are they going to, you know, I see like a lot of opportunities in the exchange and lending space if you own the stable coin and really kind of putting up their dukes in like the space knowing that like we now have a regulation clarity, like I'd love to see what they do and you know Jeremy Shaw and the rest of the team there are pretty sharp and I'd love to see what they can do with it.
43:05
[SPEAKER_01]: excited, excited.
43:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Vashal, thank you so much for joining us today on the crypto one-on-one podcast.
43:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Where can people follow along with your story, or you big on X, or you far-caster?
43:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So Vashal, okay, gipped on X, and you know, true markets co on on X and also truemarkers.co, download the app, love to get some feedback, email me directly at Vashal at truemarkers.co, and send me feedback.
43:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll take it amazing.
43:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for shawling.
43:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Everybody at home watching, please go to the show notes.
43:32
[SPEAKER_01]: We will have links in there so you can follow along with the true markets story and journey.
43:38
[SPEAKER_01]: But until next time, we'll see you soon.
43:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Keep building and we'll give you some feedback.