🚨LIVE: TOKENIZATION SUPERCYCLE Continues! Market Wants HIGHER! Eric Conner, Haseeb & Yoshi Join

Yeah well look I'll say we're feeling pretty good. I think we own pretty much everything that you mentioned. Uh you're looking pretty good. You look like you're in a lot of euphoria right now. What? Where are you? What What is this look? Is this like the new

you know, old guy sipping the margarita on the beach vibe for the week. You know what I mean? And took off took off the penguin and unveiled his true personality here.

So, for a long time, pers have been one of these missing markets. And by missing markets, what I mean is that it was it wasn't obvious in the very beginning that DeFi trading was going to be big because onchain is slower. It's just kind of got these UX crinkles that are going to make it more difficult for people to be able to use this stuff the way they use stuff in in in traditional centralized exchanges. But once spot trading started to work on chain, we always asked ourselves the question of okay, where's derivatives? If spot is this big, derivatives should be even bigger because that's how it always looks in every traditional market is that spot is something like 20% of derivatives in any given market once it gets to maturity. So we were back I mean this must have been like you know 2018 2019 when we invested into dYdX and we invested into Derivex and we invested into a lot of these early attempts at building perps on chain and they just never worked. It the the UX wasn't there, the latency wasn't there, the performance wasn't there. It wasn't really until Hyperliquid cracked the code that all of a sudden people realized, "Aha, you must be this tall to ride in terms of UX, latency, performance, and everybody." It kind of set this uh this pacing that everybody could start to follow as they started sprinting. So, we're investors as as as you mentioned, uh we own Hyperliquid. We're early investors into Lighter and Variational that we invested into obviously Variational pre

using an RFQ model rather than using an orderbook model. But all three of them have unique angles of attack on how to to go at this perps market. I think the answer is that largely, you know, it's it's it's hard to see exactly how the crypto per market is going to grow that much because there's only so much crypto trading in the world. It's more like taking market share away from the centralized venues. And you've seen that with Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid is now a meaningful portion of Binance's total volumes. And they've been going up and up in terms of open interest and in terms of volume. But the really bigger story is that crypto trading on the whole is not the TAM for Hyperliquid now already more than 50% of their volume is RWAs and the RWA TAM for for trading if you look at like the global CFD market to say nothing of the onshore you know regulated trading market is absolutely enormous so much bigger than the crypto market so the bigger story is that okay I'm not trying to be Coinbase I'm trying to be ICE I'm trying to be the New York Stock Exchange I'm trying to be the NASDAQ that you know we used to talk about this meme of like oh the NASDAQ on the blockchain but like the meme is actually happening now

that is the much bigger market which tells you that this trade has a lot farther to go even if you look at you know the volumes that are happening on Hyperliquid and the liquidity available on Hyperliquid on real world assets. So you know when you see people trading WTI see people trading you know SK highix or or gold um these are very very small relative to the overall market compared to Bitcoin and ETH which are now pretty significant relative to what's getting traded on Binance. So that delta is the room to grow for this trade. Now there's a lot more work that you have to do in terms of market development and in terms of getting the the liquidity and also getting the awareness. We've got headlines now of people talking about, oh, the price discovery happening on the weekends or happening on uh a bank holiday uh or a trading holiday. That stuff, okay, that's now happening when the market's closed on Hyperliquid, that that gets a lot of mainstream attention. But getting that day-to-day price awareness happening on um uh Hyperliquid or on decentralized venues, that's the bigger unlock. So, in my mind, there's a lot more room to go.

yeah so I I'd say if you look at Variational and you look at Lighter right so Variational right now obviously they're prety

valuation is like four to five billion uh Variational depends on where you price it depending on the points market in a given day but you know call it somewhere between one and two billion for for Variational um that right now is if you just look at the TAM right let's say the TAM is not even all the stuff that I just talked about let's say the TAM is just Hyperliquid is how much can these guys take a bite out of Hyperliquid and then one level up how much can Hyperliquid take a bite out of Binance um you're assuming no TAM expansion you're assuming not that we're going to eat anything else just that freeze the market where it is today, how much further do these guys have to grow? Um, right now, you know, Hyperliquid fully diluted is at like what is 80 billion, 90 billion. Um, if you look at where Variational is today, that's another basically they're like 2% of the market, 1 to 2%. Um and if you look at Lighter and like four to 5% of where Hyperl is sitting today which tells you that from their side any any advantages that they have whether it's on the US go to market or whether it's on you know the product side that they're improving on or for for Variational if it's on having a genuinely different model around RFQ and being able to offer deeper liquidity with their swaps product uh relative to traditional approaches to doing RWAs with you know old-fashioned oracles and and kind of just regular old

that underwriting that require like that's a venture type outcome and that's the kind of stuff that we do that's our bread and butter. Um, now Hyperliquid, that's kind of the market, right? It's like asking what's the fair value of ETH.

Any given day, people are going to, you know, they're going to give you 15 different models to decide what what is the way in which you're going to value ETH. Um, I'd say as investors, we're largely agnostic to that. There's a lot of different ways that you can skin the cat about how to value the TAM for Hyperliquid. Um, and I also don't want to be in the position of making your market call, but the the the large answer is that look, just take Hyperliquid versus Binance and look at that chart historically, which is that it it's basically been a one-way ratchet for Hyperliquid relative to Binance. Now, the two move together almost certainly when crypto trading is down, when volatility is down, both of them decrease in volume. But the relative number has basically been kind of one way only. And that's the number that I would keep an eye on if you're thinking about sizing uh the the overall tamp for Hyperliquid.

Yeah, I mean look those are directly correct. I'd say prediction markets are also a big area of a lot of growth as well as the intersection of crypto and AI. Um you know we we recently led around into Venice AI which you know VVV has been on a tear over the last month or so. Um it's it's I mean the other thing that you also want to be mindful of is that you never want to index too much on what's happening literally right now if you're a VC

because you're you're trying to not you know we're not traders right as a trader you're kind of thinking about what's going to move in the next week what's going to move in the next month um we're thinking what's going to move two years from now three years from now when a company that we're investing into at a seed stage or at a series A is going to be coming to the four like you know when we were investing into Lighter We invested in Lighter before Hyperliquid had its moment and before this thing was a a big category. We invested in a poly market before the 2024 election. Um like the the the time when you as a VC want to be shoveling money into startups is you want to try to see around corners and and think a little bit further ahead than just like what the high water mark is for the present market cycle.

Um interesting question. Um, least bullish I would say maybe vaults. Um, I think vaults are, you know, it's clear that vaults have a lot of product market fit. There's a lot of demand for them. However, they they don't it's not obvious to me that they're going to have a lot of defensibility. Um, ultimately like the biggest beneficiaries of vaults may be the issuers themselves and not the vaults platforms. Um again there's there's a lot of game left to be played on how people are going to package these up and distribute them. But right now my observation has been that uh I don't know that the vaults platforms themselves are going to be big winners. Uh this might be a very commodified product at the end of the day even if there's a lot of demand for it you know so uh for a lot of these traditional financial products they're often loss leaders even though they have they gobble up a lot of AUM it's not where the money is made for a lot of these big financial institutions that offer a lot of these commodified products. So,

Uh, I don't want to speak to that particular thing because I don't know the details of how it's being offered or what Ondo is adding to the table. Um I I do think actually tokenization is one of these things that is um doesn't have quite the feature of a vault, right? So if you think about it, let's say there's uh two vaults that are offering the same underlying yield, right? So they're doing some kind of uh carry trade, right? And this vault is using this carry trade in order to give me some yield. I don't really care if I'm if I'm going to vault A or vault B. So basically, there should be pure price competition, right? As long as I have some redemption rights, I kind of don't care if it's vault A or vault B. provided that both of them are legit and I have some guarantees that, you know, it's going to be it's going to be a solid while I'm in this uh in this vault. On the other side, tokenization, I really do care about being in the most liquid tokenized version of this asset, right? Because tokenization, I'm trading this thing, I'm moving it around. I really am going to get hurt by fragmentation. So tokenization is kind of the opposite of vaults in that sense because of the fact that vault I'm holding it for a very long time. um doesn't really matter if I'm in the less liquid vault or in the more liquid vault provided that I have the same redemption terms and that you know again I'm not going to be worried about the the vault u you know if the underlying is the same shouldn't really matter. Yeah, you know I'm not going to put my money into a vault run by some random bozo but I'm just a lot less sensitive to market fragmentation in vaults than I am in the alternative. So

so that's why I think tokenization has more economies of scale and obviously that's where plays primarily. Um, the reality though is I think tokenization is probably going to be secondary to per.

Um, that may not be true the farther out you go, but if you're talking about like one year from now, I would still bet on pers over tokenization. But five years from now, that might change, right? And why do I say that? I say that because when do you want to tokenize something as opposed to trade on a per? The answer is when you are saving for the long term and holding a position over a long period of time as opposed to making a short-term directional trade. If you're making a short-term directional trade, that's when you want a per because a per allows you to get leverage. You don't need to worry about how much of the underlying is held in inventory. You don't you're not like, okay, there's not enough capacity in this market, right? like with a per it's all cash settled and so you can have doesn't matter how much AMC is out there if the AMC guy's like I don't I don't like this I don't want you tokenizing this you know nobody has to go out there and like hold actual AMC uh onchain in order for you to have AMC per trading around so uh AMC and of course the other thing about tokenization is that people are talking about doing real tokenization in which case they have to be KYC there has to be some some more regulatory surface area for doing this quote unquote real tokenization as opposed to these debt instruments which are kind of these YOLO tokenizations where you get the economic exposure but you don't have the governance or you know the real stock quote unquote that you're that you have exposure to.

So you want that when you want to save but if you're not saving if you're instead speculating or investing over short periods of time that is what most crypto natives are doing today. There's not a lot of people saving like people who are saving are saving using dollars, right? So they have stable coins, they're in some emerging market and they're not at the stage right now where they're like, "Yeah, I want to go invest in AMC." I don't know anyone's investing in AMC. Um but, you know, to the extent you're investing in the S&P or, you know, whatever in, you know, a Fortune50 company, um that's still a niche behavior on chain relative to the crypto natives who are mostly betting and short-term trading. So the CFD market coming on chain I think much more probable much more similar to the existing crypto user base but in the long run I do believe that savers are going to come on chain where it's normal people distributed through fintech just like the stable coins are today where you have some fintech some emerging markets person is like hey I I have exposure to dollars through some fintech that's in my region allows me to offboard my local currency into stable coins but I can also invest into a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds the same way that you or I might. Um, that behavior will come, but I think it's going to take longer to get here than the pers are going to take to grow.

Yeah. So, uh I'll take those in order. So, so Kalshi uh wash rating allegations. So, look, these are allegations. I I think the the answers to them have been somewhat satisfactory, somewhat less satisfactory. I think like the the the ratio between the open interest and the trading volume on Kalshi is a little bit lopsided.

It's it's it's not great. That said, like obviously this is not the main story of Kalshi. This is not how they're making their money. You know, this is like kind of a side market thing. Um so I I you know, look, I think every exchange does stuff to try to bootstrap. I think they they tried to own it. I don't know that they successfully owned it in the public eye, but um you know them them trying to walk things back the way that this whole drama unfurled was incredibly entertaining. I do have to thank them for that. Uh just because it was a little bit of a quiet weekend and u a personal drama turned into something so spectacular. Uh was just it was kind of great television. So kudos to them for that keeping it interesting. Um, I'd say on the on the on the New York uh attorney general thing where where Leticia Leticia James, I think is her name, uh, she came out of Polymarket and called them an unlicensed gambling operation. So, look, um, you know, basically what she's saying is that you guys, not that, you know, you can't do this. It's that you need to get a state gaming license and pay taxes in New York. It's about taxes, right? And like for all these state attorneys general who are suing all the prediction markets, Kalshi, Crypto.com and Coinbase and Polymarket, they're suing all of them. And the reason why they're suing them is that they want taxes. It's not that you can't do this, that you can do this, but you have to pay taxes to the states. Um, obviously the the prediction markets and the CFTC have taken the position that no, these are federally regulated markets and therefore they do not have to get state-by-state licenses. We have a precedence for this which is all the other markets that are licensed by the CFTC don't do this. They don't pay state-by-state taxes. They don't get licensed in every single jurisdiction because for federally regulated stuff, there's a different licensing path than every single state has a D. So very clearly now there's a circuit split. Some of the circuits that this has been challenged in, it's gone up to an appellate court and the appellate court has has voted in or not voted but uh ruled in favor of the prediction markets. Some of them they've ruled in favor of the states. That means now this is going to Supreme Court. It's very likely Supreme Court is going to take this case and probably sometime next year there's going to be a Supreme Court ruling. So this latest thing in New York is not like a oh my god I can't believe they did this. It's like oh every single state is fighting this fight because they all want money. Um so no surprise that this is what's happening. Uh

when we go to the Supreme Court the big question is going to be how is the Supreme Court going to rule? Are they going to rule and say, "Look, this is an entirely federally regulated market. States back off." Is it going to be federal government, back off, give this all to the states, each of them is going to have to go state by state and get licenses and pay the taxes in each state. Or are they going to split the baby and say, "Well, you know, some of these markets are appropriate for federal regulations. Some of them are going to be state specific." You know, if I had to guess, it's probably going to be some kind of splitting the baby. Um, that's I think often the way the Supreme Court likes to do these things is say, "Well, each of you have good points. We're going to meet you somewhere in the middle and like parts of these things are going to be able to exist globally, parts of them are are not." Um, I I think that's likely where we're going. Um, at the end of the day, like a lot of the reason why the public sentiment against these these companies has turned so negative, and I agree that it has, is because these companies are super young. They're very brash. They're very aggressive, and like they're just more in your face than a lot of rational.

full-fledged all like take the take the clothes off and just here's what we're doing. Like it's just in your face.

Yeah, that's right. So, look, I I think the answer is going to be that people will get like both the companies are going to mature and you're going to see less of them in the headlines and I think like the market is also going to saturate. A lot of the reason why this advertising is working so well and why they're paying so much for all this advertising is that a lot of people genuinely don't know about these companies and they're growing super fast. But eventually they will saturate the market. Everyone will have heard about them. It'll become more brand marketing rather than actual, you know, trying to acquire new customers because look, if you don't want to use one of these prediction markets, you're not going to use them. But today, a lot of people still genuinely don't know about them. They're in the early parts of their growth curves. That's a big part of the reason why the marketing is so aggressive these days.

No. So, the the CFTC will likely be an amicus, meaning a friend of the court. It'll be somebody who's giving their own opinions and sharing their perspective in court. But the CFTC is not going to be the defendant. When when a Supreme Court hears a case, the case is an appeal from a case that was at a district court or it's an aggregation of multiple cases that happened at a district court. Those cases overwhelmingly are going to be the states versus some of the prediction markets or maybe just Kalshi given that Kalshi was the first in in the US context and they have most of these lawsuits against

It will very likely be that Kalshi is the one up there that's defending prediction markets at the Supreme Court, but it's possible they aggregate cases from multiple prediction market cases.

Will the CFTC accelerate on? I think that's probably pretty orthogonal to be honest. I think the CFTC—clearly there was a report the CFTC was investigating the reports of what's going on here with Kalshi and probably they'll issue some kind of fine or something. I don't think it's like a showstopper. You know, the reality is that all this stuff was publicly accessible via API. You could get all this data yourself and verify that this was happening. So they weren't trying to hide this per se. It's part of the reason why I got called out publicly. This wasn't like a whistleblower. This was somebody looking at very obvious public data and saying, 'Hey, this doesn't look like organic trading activity.'

On the Near Zcash side, look, we're investors in both NEAR and Zcash. I'm a personal investor in Zashi, the Zcash wallet. I'll say very clearly, this is kind of again one of these mega trends that they're both leaning into—the reawakening of privacy as Bitcoin and crypto is institutionalizing. There's always thesis antithesis happening at the same time. And I feel like that's a lot of the reason why you see this big Zcash resurgence. Near I think is part of the same story, but also part of the account abstraction story that was something we were promised a long time ago—that blockchains are fragmenting, but they're also going to get easier to use because we're going to unify everything into one central experience. It kind of didn't really happen. You know, there's still a lot of complexity in managing wallets and moving assets here to there. FOMO really rose to success having solved this in the form factor of an app, and I made the argument on Twitter that Near is also solving this problem but from the other side—that Near is basically making the single account abstraction for every single chain, every single trading venue, every kind of financial activity you can do onchain, whether it's something like buying Zcash—which you can't buy through FOMO—or like do shielded activity through FOMO. It's not about that, it's about memecoin trading.

One part crypto ethos is I want to show everyone my P&L and scream it from the rooftops. The other part of the crypto ethos is that I want to disappear into the specter of privacy and not let anyone know I exist. That's what Near is more about. Those aren't mutually exclusive either. They happen one after the other. First you make a bunch of money, you shout it from the rooftops and then you get off—then you hide. You make enough money and then you want to hide.

Sounds good. Sounds good.

We're having fun again. Thanks.

Bye.