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Hey, what a day we are live. Give me some sound effects. Here we go. It's another day in the rollup headquarters south. The rollup sign, you can see it's glistening behind me. I've got my coffee in a paper cup. We've got the green tinge on the right. We've got the plant on the left. This is the rollup headquarters live from South Florida. Today's August 26 and we're bringing you guys another fantastic show. I mean, lineup this entire week has been fantastic. It's been stellar. We've got Solana Foundation joining us in a moment, live a little bit later today. So, we're going to get right into today's guests after today's topics, weather, markets, per usual. We'll hit our headlines later in today's show. And guys, hit me up in the chat as always. We want to hear from you. Make sure that you're getting your questions answered. I know we've got the tried and true, the absolute crew in the chat with us today. Freedom guy, you're the man. And I'm sure we're going to get some more. Greg, good to see you. Great show yesterday. Love Alex's appearance in Robbie's interview. Really appreciate that from Greg. Guys, continue to tune in day in day out. And that's how you're going to outperform. How are we doing? Let me know in the chat what you guys want to hear about. We're going to speedrun through markets, weather, and more.
Today's topics, as always, big shout out to Plume. These guys sponsor rollup headquarters north in New York City from the Empire State Building, the tokenization tower. And sit Greg sender 5163. How are we doing? Let me know in the chat. Let me know what you guys want to hear about.
Plenty that we're watching both on the traditional side of things as well as the digital asset side of things. And we're going to continue to rock and roll today. Markets and weather and then Pedro from Solana Foundation, Superstate co-founder Robert Leshner, also co-founder of Compound from the old DeFi summer days, and then Ethan Buchman who is a true OG founder of Cosmos. So I mean just all across the board guys, absolute stellar lineup here today and I'm excited to bring you to everything that you need to know at the forefront of the market. Let's keep rolling through. We're going to get into markets and weather before Pedro comes up.
Before we do, let me tell you about Dinari. Tokenized equities super cycle is upon us. Hundred trillion dollars of assets and this is becoming tokenized. Dinari is the tokenization partner for this asset class. They are bringing these things on chain in the form of equities. We will see these propagate throughout the entire multi-chain world. Starts with Dinari. They'll give you exactly what you want on the tokenized equities front. Do more with your stocks. Weather's a little bit overcast, 85 degrees out. We're going to speedrun through the weather because I think you guys want to hear about the markets. First, let me tell you about Frax. Open, stable, and borderless. Frax is crushing the stablecoin game. One of the few stablecoins that we treat as money and they are extending lines of credit to companies all across the globe. Onchain, offchain, different regions, different jurisdictions, stablecoin consortiums. These guys are everywhere in the stablecoin world.
We're going to improve our markets widget, but that's a little bit of alpha for you guys today. That's going to be coming up soon. Solana just under that $100 mark. Bitcoin retracing to 78k a little bit. We're seeing some floundering in the momentum behind the liquidity supply with respect to the long end of the curve. Markets as always powered by Zama, but nevertheless we're seeing these things progress. And so what we have here is NEAR still holding that 180 level. Chainlink, honestly one of the strongest on the board today and over the last couple of weeks. We believe Chainlink is one of the primary benefactors of the legitimization of the industry. So remember, sure you guys haven't forgotten by now, but industry leaders including founder of Chainlink Sergey Nazarov was shaking the hand of the president of the United States, also in the room for the CFTC advisory committee. And we're seeing this buildout take place right before our eyes. Chainlink, we believe as legitimization in the industry continues, Chainlink is one of the places where value will accrue because they are tapped into DeFi, stablecoins, perps, vaults stretching across the industry as a whole. Big believers in Chainlink as a benefactor of this upcoming cycle.
Bitcoin and ETH also holding the line. 83K is a level that everyone's watching on the Bitcoin side. Ethereum had a real nice pop off the lows and I think the reflexivity as a result of the DATs, Sharplink Gaming and BitMine taking Ethereum supply off the table is going to lead to extra reflexivity in Ethereum's asset. Guys, Bit 5050, pleasure to have you. Little Miss Gun, good to see you again. Fra is King from Nebuluck and Royal. Good to see you guys here today. Keep it up in the chat, guys. We want to hear from you guys and see everything that you guys have going on. First guest is going to join us in just a moment. We're just checking to see whether or not he is set up. Let's get into a couple of the tweets. And then we are going to bring up our first guest.
But first, I want to tell you guys about NEAR. These guys are absolutely crushing. You see them on the board and they are holding levels nicely. We believe this is a benefactor of the tokenization super cycle as well as Zcash as well as AI buildout. AI is not slowing down. The debasement trade has picked up more momentum. NEAR is sort of at the crossroads of several of these things. And so we believe that NEAR is going to be a benefactor especially as a result of the buildout not only in the tokenized equities market but also in the AI world. The confluence of several factors and NEAR is cracked. We know this because they've been building for such a long time.
Okay, similar on this AI front, Coin Bureau is reporting that someone built an entire Wall Street style trading desk using nine free Grok bots. Not sure if you guys have utilized Grokbot a little bit, but this is one of the new harnesses. Obviously, you know, when it comes to Claude, people like to use OpenClaude, ChatGPT, you can use Hermes. There's a few different harnesses out there. NEAR, our AI partner, actually has their own harness and they call it Ironclaw. So, there's a couple of harnesses out there. I haven't experimented too much in the harness world, but this is what we're seeing. And someone decided to use the harness for Grok to build this an entire trading desk vertically integrated and apparently it's profitable. In a similar vein, I saw a friend of the show, founder of Nansen, Alex, also talk about basically Make Money Bot literally this this bot that you just instruct it. It's an agent. It is plugged into the smartest models, probably the open weight models. But what we see is that these things are actually profitable. There was a very early frontier in this world where agents you kind of just put them out there and it was like the prediction market agentic world and it was at the same time Kalshi and Polymarket were kind of in this badge war and you had these agents build out prediction market bots and they were arbitraging between the two. You were basically providing liquidity on illiquid prediction markets on both Polymarket and Kalshi at the same time and it could arbitrage between the two. That was the early rendition of this but we're actually starting to see it get a lot more mature and sophisticated as the world gets built out a little bit more. There is a video so we're going to play the video but just to point you guys into this, definitely do your own research. Plenty more to investigate here, but we're seeing it not only as a result of this Grokbot experiment, but also we're seeing Nansen provide the tools for this. So, if you're technical, this could be something where you could do your own research, do a little bit more investigation, and set up agents that have assets that are trading on these things and actually profitable, making money in real time. Just with the prompt, make money. Don't make any mistakes. Let's go ahead and play the video. See how this works.
No audio on this thing. And the funny part is that you can actually see the agents going to different parts of the trading desk in real time. Pretty hilarious. You can see the trades on the right. That's the tape. You go to the middle to actually make the trades. You got the sigmoid chart in the middle. You can go to the OTC desk. Go to the terminal. Go here. Check your research.
So funny. So funny to see this.
The funny part I think here is that these things are actually starting to make money, right? It was Alex from Nansen that said, look, Make Money v0, which is this AI product from Nansen. I don't know if it's publicly available yet, but it is starting to work. These things are moving beyond just the early rendition of hey prediction market arbitrage bot. That was early. We're now seeing this actually play out in real time right before our eyes. It's actually seeming to work. These things actually make money. So very cool to see and I'm excited because I think this is going to be the new frontier. This is where these agents actually get competitive and we're going to see a lot more as a result of these agents getting a lot smarter and the custody solutions improving quite a bit as well.
Excuse me. I'm allergic to not making money. And I think that we're going to see these things get a lot a lot better. And so let's go ahead and flip to our next tweet before we get our next guest and our first guest of the day, Pedro, from the Solana Foundation as well. We're going to cover a little bit of macro here. Druckenmiller was Bessent's boss from 1991 to 2000 and from 2011 to 2015. Druckenmiller was Warsh's boss from 2011 to 2026. I'm seeing a lot of conspiracy and I want to know from you guys in the chat. Hit us up on Twitter and on YouTube. Leave us a comment. Leave us a question. What do you guys want to know? Because what we have here is this three-headed beast. Warsh in charge of the Fed, Bessent in charge of the Treasury, and Druckenmiller sort of playing the shadow Wizard of Oz behind the scenes puppet master. Right. Warsh and Bessent both worked for Druckenmiller. Bessent and Druckenmiller helped take down the Bank of England when their currency was floundering. And both of these guys worked under George Soros at the fund. And so Stanley Druckenmiller has served as a mentor and boss to both Bessent and Warsh. These guys all work together and now you have them leading different parts of the macroeconomic system. And so people are speculating that when Bessent made the announcement, right, that he was going to supply liquidity from the Treasury to boost the bond market, this is what skyrocketed crypto off the lows. Okay, this is there's really no disputing this is what led to the bounce. It just so happens to coincide with the industry leaders in the White House and in the CFTC the next day. But this liquidity announcement is exactly what got us up off the lows. Now people are thinking that, you know, this isn't quite money printer quantitative easing quite yet. Okay. What we have here is that this is pressure being put on the Fed. And we have an announcement, a big speech from Kevin Warsh in the next couple of days. My co-host Andy is going to be on the ground reporting from Jackson Hole, Montana or Wyoming. Wyoming, kind of in the middle of nowhere, but it's beautiful out there on the floor with the Fed president giving the speech, FOMC chair. And so we're going to hear from the ground floor what is happening from Kevin Warsh and how Treasury Secretary Bessent and Kevin Warsh are either at odds or working together to ultimately bring this Treasury liquidity supply to market. Okay. And so right now the way I've been describing this, the way that I'm thinking about this is that they are preheating the money printer. You know when you turn on the oven, you're going to cook, you got to preheat the oven. That's what they're doing to the money printer. They're preheating the money printer because they are about to cook and that means higher for longer. And so we are treating dips for buying. I want to know in the chat what you guys are thinking and how you're thinking about this market. We're just talking to you about our thesis here. And I'll tell you our thesis for outperformance here. It's a barbell. On one hand, we have monetary premium. Those are direct benefactors of this liquidity situation at a macro level which is transforming into an accommodative monetary policy. Bitcoin, Zcash, ETH, gold, potentially Solana, all of these fit into this monetary premium thesis and that's what we're seeing. Okay. And then on the other hand, you've got this revenue meta. The Rollup is who coined the revenue meta. We were a little bit early to this game. And so we've been tracking the revenue meta, the buyback thesis, the value accrual mechanisms for quite a long time. Pump.fun, Hyperliquid, Lighter, Aerodrome, all fit this value accrual thesis extremely well. Obviously, there is the trenches and then there's different confluence of factors here, right? We got this perpetual flywheel of market go up, more attention, more market participants. Those are guys who are into the trenches, right? But at a high level, barbell is monetary premium assets on one side, revenue assets on the other. And what we have is a confluence of factors. Legitimization of the industry, macro liquidity, accommodative monetary premium and the revenue meta and these things actually being valued on fundamentals. So, we're going to bring up our first guest, Pedro. He's going to be joining us in just a moment and we're going to bring him up and we're going to have a fantastic chat. Solana and Pump.fun are certainly on the forefront of this. I see a lot of friends in the chat. Marty, head low. Good to see you. Greg is asking, should I sell my XRP and put it into Solana ETH? That's hilarious. We are going to not tell you exactly what to do, but we'll tell you that we're not big fans of XRP. We're big fans of chains that are going to be here for the next decade and continue to provide value in both the monetary premium world as well as the revenue world and support applications building on those chains. Plenty of buybacks and burns. Dubious rational, good to see you as well. Shadowman, plenty happening in the trenches and we're going to see some blue chips here that we're going to continue to talk about. I believe our first guest is ready. I think we got him all set up in the back. So, we're going to bring him up in just a moment. Let's go ahead flip the headline and get our first guest on the show. He is part of the Solana Foundation, head of consumer at the Solana Foundation. Pedro Miranda, where he leads consumer growth, hosts the foundation's Billions podcast, and he spent the past year interviewing founders behind Solana's breakout consumer apps from Pudgy Penguins to Collector Crypt, obviously Pump.fun as well. Current obsession is the onchain collectibles boom. We've been keeping track of this as well because it feels like this is a non-fungible asset class that could be ripe for tokenization. So, let's go ahead bring him up. Pedro Miranda of Solana Foundation. And there he is. Pedro, welcome to the show, man. It's a pleasure to have you.
Thank you, Robbie. Excited to be here. How you doing?
Absolutely. I'm doing good, man. I'm doing good. I appreciate you working through us our our process there behind the scenes and staying patient. And I'm glad that we got you here today. It's your first time on the show, I believe. So, let's let's let's get into it. You host a show yourself in Billions. So, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about the lore behind behind yourself, how you found Solana, and how you made your way into the space.
Yeah, that's a that's a loaded question. In in terms of how I found my way into the space, I actually really wanted to be an economist of all things. So, I was studying global macro trends, you know what people how people act in in certain communities and certain you know sub societies and I fell in love with this concept of ownership, the notion that you know you could actually own assets from from real estate but also cultural assets and that's kind of how I fell into NFTs as this ultimate social capital generating asset. So in in 2021 I was fortunate to join a startup called Metaplex which originally ran the NFT infrastructure standard for Solana and now they power 99% of all token launches in the Solana ecosystem. And from there my obsession of okay what else can we own that Solana uniquely enables that the traditional financial world couldn't. So you mentioned collectibles. To me that the concept that you can own culture in various different expressions whether it be through owning a Pokemon card that you've had an obsession with when you were a little kid to also obviously these cultural I would say meme coins or meme stocks on chain is extremely interesting and that's what we're doing in the Solana Foundation, right? We're we're seeing what types of expressions of of ownership is actually a 10x experience relative to the traditional financial system. Not only net new cultural assets but also you know traditional assets like what ways and venues can we actually make that really clear. And pertaining to my my podcast I I just want to talk to really smart people and
And and learn and it's a great excuse just to call up a Luca, call up a Tam, and call up a say from FOMO and say hey how do you view the world and why are you building what you're building.
Yeah, it it is incredible. I mean that has been a lot of the philosophy at this show as well is let's talk to people smarter than ourselves, bring them on and then we're just this amalgamation of everyone who comes on and we just continuously get to upgrade our mental model and our thesis when everyone presents us with new information. So it's I mean it's a blast. It it is great to be here even you know throughout the bear. We've been here as you have been. We didn't pivot to AI. We've been here and now it's it's time to have some fun. And so I I think we've got a lot to get into. I want to get into the NFT things. I want to get into the the concept of owning one's nostalgia. But before we do, I want to just talk about Solana's positioning in consumerism because, you know, there's been a lot of different perspectives on how blockchains should operate. Ultimately, it's a very general technology that can support lots of different use cases. We've seen blockchains go after finance. We've seen blockchains go real world assets and memes. Some have these two wolves, some focus on one or the other. Where is Solana's positioning right now given the success of consumer applications like Pump.fun, like FOMO, like Collector Crypt? What is the positioning of Solana in a nutshell in 2026?
Yeah, it's a it's an amazing question and you actually talked about a lot of assets that I call the the horseshoe theory of asset adoption. So you're seeing an increase in tokenized treasuries for example onchain and Solana is leading adoption pertaining to tokenized equities but also on the other hand, right, you have the entertainment finance thesis happening in the global macroeconomy and Solana is the the impetus of this for crypto on FOMO for example, the net new celebrity or the net new celebrity is going to be the new trader, right? Finding an asset early or publishing a thesis about it. So a blockchain such as Solana is not just about the the tech. The tech is going to continue to improve. It's increased bandwidth, you know, reduce latency, but it's also the culture and the network effects of a general purpose blockchain such as Solana. Collector Crypt is an amazing example of that horseshoe thesis where you have folks owning their nostalgia, so to speak. But as a result of being on chain and be able to tap into, hey, other apps and other developers, you can actually lend against your Pokemon cards and unlock liquidity that you would have never had in the real world or you would have to go through some weird OTC deal. So by leveraging you know Jupiter Lend and Collector Crypt you unlock this really interesting consumer experience and Solana is an expression of that throughout its time. FOMO is a great example of they're leveraging Solana as a social graph in the sense where the trades are information that they're expressing within that application. So we're going to continue to see from the consumer perspective Solana evolve as not just an exchange but a global network state where people can plug in liquidity the same way that they were just browsing the internet you know a few years ago.
And and I'm curious because you spent a lot of time thinking about this. What is your mental model? We've heard a lot of people talk about this phenomenon in a few different ways. Some people call it monetizing attention. You know, people call it the attention economy. You you you know, I've heard you call it, you know, owning their the nostalgia, right? And in in a variety of ways, these things are all correct. Whether it's something that has persistent attention and nostalgia and kind of, you know, a timeless element to it, or it's something that, you know, is kind of viral in a moment, like a memecoin and it captures a ton of attention and then that attention ultimately subsides. Either way, this is, you know, a fun mechanism and vehicle for people to express their interests, for society and and culture to express itself. And so, what, you know, is your perspective on this? What is your mental model? What is your framing for how we should think about, you know, collectibles on chain, these productive assets, meme coins? What is the right way to think about these things?
Yeah, the the thing that excites me the most is for the first time we have a proper way to value attention. And that is something that traditional finance, whether it be through a a common DCF or what have you, has never been able to to do before. So, a good example is the the Clinosaur team through Hebron. They're doing a raise for their token sale using Metaplex right now. That's a team that's essentially saying, hey, listen. Super fans have value and contribute value to their IP ecosystem, whether by watching, whether referring friends or contributing to their own story lines. But that value has never been tapped in before besides maybe a, you know, ad targeted ad for a $5, you know, free movie ticket or what have you. So the ability to value attention on chain in a liquid fashion is really fascinating and a 10x experience in my opinion where super fans can actually get the value back that they're creating for ecosystems such as Clinosaur or creating liquid markets for collectibles and Pokemon cards. Not only for Pokemon cards but also niche tail end indie stories is going to be a really interesting market or games for example. And then the memecoin element I I find is is not actually cyclical. I think it's actually going to be here to stay when you look at you know trends that are actually happening outside of crypto. A lot of times when I see you know new tokens being created you can actually see see the tickers and see what is happening in the world before actually reading the news myself and I find that so powerful the same way with prediction markets, World.xyz, which is a Solana native prediction market embedded into Phantom itself. The same way prediction markets are doing this where people are looking at charts before they see the news and you're actually going to see a lot of those throughout different asset classes in in the consumer space and that's really exciting to me.
Yeah. You know, I I respect Pump.fun in particular because they've been able to create the horseshoe that you described earlier with respect to Solana generally, but also, you know, Pump.fun has been able to create such a, you know, distribution channel and monetize that, but then they also have, you know, the tokenomics with the buyback model, that I think the market is valuing these days. You mentioned, you know, you don't think meme coins are cyclical. This has been the retort to Pump.fun in general is that the revenues aren't durable and that's why it's trading at such a low like price to earnings or you know market cap to earnings ratio. What is your thesis here? Why do you think memecoins is not a circular cyclical trend?
I I I view this in the macro again. I I think of that quote I think it was an IMF paper where it's you'll own nothing and be happy. There's just a financial nihilism in the younger generations where there is this weird going back to this horseshoe theory of as more and more things become unaffordable in a in a day-to-day basis they're going to look at what can we actually own from a digital perspective, right? And I think whether it be TikTok trends which FOMO has been doing an amazing job from a user generating user generated content perspective hopping on trends early identifying the value of them or whether it be content creators. I I'm still amazed that for example you're still you're starting to see this but um I that I can't call or invest in an early content creator and I know a lot of those are regulatory headwinds and finding out the the right model for that. But that's also something that is really that's really exciting to me. But I think there are macro forces that are going to continue to propel memecoins forward in this industry.
Yeah. And you know I I want to I I think that's a a great segue actually because I wanted to ask you about Ansem's token. You know he's a content creator. He's been on you know for for quite a while in this industry. And I want to tell you my, you know, perspective or or reaction to what he's doing and get your thoughts on it as well. Because when I kind of read his thesis, it sounded a lot like MrBeast who, you know, basically has this flywheel where people watch his videos, they get a chance to go and make money on his videos and then he gets a lot of money just from the the AdSense of, you know, these social platforms like YouTube paying him for to create these videos and then he recycles all of that pretty much back into his videos and gives away more money and then the cycle continues. And then he's been able to just create a a you know, juggernaut of a business, you know, has investors all across the board. When I first read Ansem's thesis, it sounded a lot like MrBeast's thesis, but he cut out the middleman. He cut out the YouTube and he just has the people, the fans pay him directly and then he recycles that directly back into the fans. They don't need to watch YouTube and then YouTube pays, you know, the content creator like MrBeast and then he gives it back to the fans, you know, cuts out YouTube, cuts out the middleman. Is that the right way to think about this? Like this is essentially monetizing a fan base but cutting out the middleman. Is that Ansem's thesis here with his token?
I would say yes. And I it's more it's more nuanced and sustainable than that. It reminds me of the the creator coin meta with Zora, which I actually I actually value and the experimentation that they've done to this day. But the Ansem creator coin ecosystem is extremely interesting from the perspective that he's also building up sustainably an ecosystem where projects can actually tap into his IP which is really fascinating. Whereas the MrBeast ecosystem doesn't have that incentive today. Actually, it's it's the opposite. It's it's almost litigious in some respects to build off of a creator IP. So, there's an incentive alignment to grow the the IP and the creator branding, which I'm just very excited about. And I I think you make a point, an interesting point about what happens to platforms, what happens to to middlemen. And I I I think it's the Pump and the and the FOMO thesis where I see FOMO as a social network and they're going to to grow at social first in my opinion and Pump also offering the service to their own creators. Platforms are going to have to evolve in terms of the values that they're giving back to their creators whether it be creator callouts or rewards. And and I think they're going to give their incumbents a run for their money today. That's why you're seeing a lot of trader, big web two traders come on board from a content creating perspective.
Yeah. And I think they're starting to realize it. I I think there are some more nimble and and faster moving social platforms that are realizing it first, but I think like X I'm sure you've saw you saw this like they let you trade but you have to go to the different platform. It's just a matter of time before they integrate it directly, right? And they realize that they have to innovate or else they will be disrupted by the social trading experiences that you're talking about.
A thousand percent. X is the ultimate developer of financial intent in the world and it makes too much sense for them to to go closer to that how that financial intention is actually being developed. That's also why from a from a context perspective, Solana was the first blockchain with complete coverage of of token addresses on X. That's also because a lot of the financial intention that we talked about today in terms of in terms of the trends is actually being developed on Solana. So, I'm very excited about how X and other platforms are going to capture that financial intention. Whether it be through trading or call outs, it's going to look very similar to what FOMO is doing and I'm just intrigued to see how that develops.
Maybe can you just speak to the to the rise of FOMO and the success of FOMO because you know we see the the Pump, FOMO, the similarities and the differences and the competition between the two. Maybe you can just and and I think there was a lot of people that you know they were here for the rise of Pump.fun whether they loved it or hated it. You know it was a very contentious thing as it kind of rose to success. People saw it, they they now understand it. No matter their feelings towards memecoins, you know, they they understand Pump.fun. Can you describe the the unique differentiator of FOMO relative to Pump.fun? Is there room for both of these in the market? And maybe you can describe the competition between the two.
I think it's I think it's awesome that there is the competition and the future of entertainment finance is happening on Solana. It's a privilege at least personally to see this the battle of the greats happen on a day-to-day basis and mostly on on Solana is where the innovation is happening where the user activity is happening but also I I think users benefit here whether it be through incentives rewards or just fee compression users are are benefiting across the board. It's interesting because Pump feeds a lot of obviously tokens into into FOMO, right? Like FOMO traders are trading Pump-generated assets in a way. So I think it's I I think it's more so a strategic question of one is FOMO going to continue to be social first and what does that mean from an onchain perspective? Does that mean it's it's an aggregator and they're going to they're going to add, you know, are they going to add comments? Are they going to add kind of likes, more social graph features or are they going to lean into more so the trading side? Whereas from Pump's perspective, it's kind of the opposite question, right? Are they going to focus on on continue to focus on asset issuance and generation?
So I think those are the two core differences. And they're pretty complementary on paper to each other. But it just depends on, you know, the TAM. I think the pie is still small, too small for anyone to be competing with each other directly on a long-term basis.
Yeah. And I mean the the same thesis that you described earlier about why these things aren't cyclical, right? So, you know, just the the monetization of attention as people, you know, continue to spiral towards this future of, you know, owning entertainment, owning this this nostalgia, owning attention, it, you know, these the the particular attention pieces, you know, whether that's a viral meme or a content creator, those might go in and out of favor, but the the fact remains that attention is going to persist. Nostalgia is going to persist. These high-level concepts and these are the platforms in which you can own those ideas and those concepts.
Yeah, it's extremely valuable, right? I think valuing ideas, attention, beliefs is net positive for society. You can ascribe know how much economic value there is to to these beliefs. And I think you're going to see some interesting innovation. That is kind of my request for startups here is you know tapping in. And I know people are even looking at prediction markets and memecoins for you know for political elections right and kind of seeing how that surface is moving. Crypto as a whole today is also a higher LTV user than I think the the general world. So it is an interesting subset to kind of see what these high LTV traders are actually thinking on and actually believing.
Yeah. And you know you spoke to sort of like which way you know the these platforms are going from an app perspective and we touched on it early on about Solana's positioning right with this horseshoe. Is there a particular way in which Solana is going to be leaning? Are you guys going more tokenized equity you know onchain NASDAQ these sorts of things or leaning a little bit more? I mean you are head of consumer there at the Solana Foundation. So I I feel like it's your job to sort of push the ecosystem in in this consumer direction, but how do you see the the positioning of Solana continue to progress over you know this upcoming cycle?
It's so funny you mentioned that because obviously the obviously the yes the natural role extension is is saying yes of course the fun assets right on Solana today you can collect you can tokenize fossils through Jurassic and actually own a piece of a dinosaur which is insane. We we talked about collectibles. There's a bee market for like actual bees that you can own. So I think net new asset expansion and on the creative piece you know, owning a piece of a creator of an IP and engaging in that IP will continue to grow from an asset issuance perspective. But it is also my mission so to speak to to make traditional asset ownership sexy again. I think what's happening with with Backpack and Sunrise which effectively is you can buy for example a biotech stock on Solana or silver or oil and it's a fungible permissionless token on Solana you could trade it one to one for the actual share and send it to and from your brokerage that's amazing that's really cool you can tap into the composable ecosystem of Solana lend against it do a lot of interesting pairing against either a memecoin or another stock. The amount of primitives are like the design space is is wide open. So while I call them traditional assets and while I call it this horseshoe theory, what I what I think is that it's it's all entertainment finance. It's all net new expression of boring assets that we haven't had the ability or the technology to do so yet today. And Solana uniquely enables that.
And do you think that it's possible to create an ecosystem where you get the best of both worlds? Because what I'm what I'm understanding is like the breadth of assets, right? Solana is like where net new assets become where they come into existence. Is it also possible to be the deepest liquidity and the best price execution for some of you know the more traditional assets both crypto-native assets and you know the the traditional equities? Can you get both the depth and the breadth?
It goes back to the macro. Absolutely. I think so. So, I'm based in New York City. I've had the pleasure of, you know, a lot of my my friend group they work in traditional finance and their their assets, their portfolios look like a a horseshoe theory, right? It's it's your it's your S&P, it's your gold, but it's also prediction markets. It's also creators. It's also like, you know, I've got someone to to buy this, you know, tokenized fossil, right? It's that's where the macro is headed. It's this notion of okay, we can't own a house as fast as our parents. What else can we own? So I the macro answers that question and Solana saying that it's just an everything exchange is actually constraining the TAM of what we're doing because we're also a major ecosystem for applications and users to build on top of that everything exchange and that network effect is going to be extremely valuable for this horseshoe theory that we've been talking about.
Yeah. Yeah. And I had someone on yesterday talking about the you know there there's this massive TAM and you can kind of project out the the potential growth of that that TAM as it expands. But then there's also the things that we can't really predict the the non-skeuomorphic things that aren't really in the domain of just this growth that we can foresee. There's things outside of that that we can't foresee that are actually additional network effects because we don't know what it's going to look like when we get, you know, price discovery for tokenized equities that actually beats price discovery on Interactive Brokers. Like we didn't know, you know, fossils, I think, is a great example or bees. Like what happens when you get, you know, a liquidity pool between fossils and bees and that's paired together and then you have them both in a vault? Like there's new financial primitives that were previous that previously didn't exist and so we couldn't really understand what the potential flywheel and wealth effect or network effects of those things are but as those start to compound it's sort of like you know imagination is the limit as far as what these things can do and then you know that that ultimately gets you know taken exponentially as it compounds further and I just I mean I can't help but you know look at Solana as a place where there's been a lot of ingenuity a lot of you know financial experimentation and creativity and I think that's one of the most powerful things that the ecosystem has to offer.
Yeah, you you said it you said it yourself, right? The the financial experimentation and innovation on Solana is is a privilege to be involved and also on the sides for you mentioned kind of shocks or external events and you mentioned bees and I I thought of I thought of impacts to climate or just changes in the climate for for bees or someone on Solana going to be announced at Breakpoint actually is tokenizing regenerative soil. So what happens when you actually can have access on a retail level to these assets and express express a thesis or a trade idea of where you think the world is going in a more accurate way that isn't just you know buying a climate index or you know shorting a particular stock I think that becomes really powerful and it gives agency to retail and institutions.
Yeah, I I got just like one or two more questions for you. I know you're probably tight on time, but it it does come up in my mind like how these asset classes will evolve because they are entirely new like we haven't been able to trade fossils in a liquid market before. Have you seen demand from market makers or like are these traditional players that are now entering a new asset class or are these entirely new market participants? They weren't previous market makers and now they just happen to have industry expertise that are entering this market.
I view oh that's such a fascinating question. There's two directions that we can take this one or or two examples. One is prediction markets where you're seeing the larger market makers actually come on board alongside retail. And then also second is the collectibles market where you have inventory for card management also having they're not market makers so to speak but there are large card collectors or actually institutions expressing a view and purchasing you know 10% of a specific Pokemon card or something just because they have a thesis about that. And for me for example I use Collector Crypt. I purchased all of the the Pokemon cards that I had this nostalgia for. So I had my Lugias, my my Charizard and I have that on chain and I could prove ownership and I'm sitting alongside you know that fund who is expressing a view or thesis of the
world, and I think you'll see that for different asset classes. Obviously, the liquidity model needs to be correct, and you know, Solana from like a prop AMM structure provides a more efficient liquidity model, better pricing, etc. That is going to be really fascinating to just express or impose that efficient liquidity on assets that have been illiquid for such a long time. And you're going to find out new information, right? It's the ultimate truth market of what is something actually worth. Um, and I think retail is going to have some different opinions on, you know, either they're going to own bees because they love bees, or hey, listen, maybe there's like a climate change trade that someone wants to express.
Yeah, I love it. And I think you're absolutely right. Um, that this is again, you know, these horseshoes just continue to present themselves. Um, last thing I got for you is, um, you know, everyone wants something to look forward to, and I'm not going to ask you for price predictions or any of that kind of stuff. Um, but I'm curious like as head of consumer at the Solana Foundation, what is the next milestone that you have for the consumer ecosystem on Solana for these consumer applications? Is there a milestone in terms of daily active users or, you know, amount of activity or anything that you can point to as your north star that you're looking to hit in the near future?
It's an amazing question. Of course there are quantitative metrics that we look at. Uh, but I don't want to constrain actually to the crypto cycles. So my main metric is essentially countercyclical, right? You could actually plot MAU of blockchains to market cycles pretty elegantly. I want to see an inverse correlation of that breakout so that there are actually net new users MAU to Solana applications from collector crypto to FOMO and others that are inversely correlated with the market. And you're also seeing that with a lot of these teams are maturing and they are actually conducting ad spend on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and bringing in net new people. I want to see that reflected in the data. I think that's going to be a breakout and maturing moment for the Solana ecosystem. We have specific apps who have that inverse correlation or breaking out of that price and market driven correlation, but I want to see that for the entire Solana ecosystem and the consumer ecosystem as a whole.
Yeah, love it. Pedro, you're the man. Appreciate you coming on. Uh, we'll, I'll go on your podcast, you'll come back, we'll keep doing these mashups and uh, yeah, I mean you're absolutely crushing uh on the consumer application ecosystem all over Solana. Um, I mean it's a pretty clear leader at this point. So uh, I think you earned a raise or at least a good SOL pump and uh best of luck and uh really appreciate you coming on today, man.
Thank you, Robbie. I'll see you in New York soon.
Absolutely. Let's do it. Catch you later.
All right, we're going to keep things moving. Uh, Pedro, rockstar guest. You can tell this guy's a pro. He's been here before. Hosted his own show. Go check it out. Billions on Solana. Um, and we're keeping uh, we're keeping the show alive. We're uh bringing you guys everything that you need to know across ecosystems. I mean, next guest is a rockstar in tokenization, Robert Leshner. This guy's been here a long time. Uh, a true OG in the Ethereum DeFi space. They're bringing one OG leader of consumer in Solana all the way through to a true DeFi OG on Ethereum. Uh, the rollup is truly doing as the name suggests, rolling up the best in the business, bringing them direct to you guys. Keep us, keep us going in the chat, fam. Woomerick, Greg Sosa, I love these handles. I mean, you guys rock. Freedom Guy as always. Mr. Elena Don. Uh, some new names and uh some old friends in here. Newtype, good to see you in here as well. Go ahead. Send uh send in our next guest. Let's get the animation going and we're going to bring uh up Robert Leshner of Superstate on Stabled Up episode 47.
Welcome back to another episode of Stabled Up, our premier weekly show covering the ins and outs of digital dollars, stablecoins, and the future of decentralized finance. The show is made possible by Frax, and Frax is powering the financial engine of the internet, powering FXUSD and genius-compliant stablecoins. This is the stablecoin supercycle made possible by Frax. Now enjoy Stabled Up, our weekly stablecoin show.
Stabled Up episode 47 here on the rollup. We are here live with Robert Leshner, true OG in the space. And uh, Robert, we've had your co-founder on the show several times. Uh, we've been here since the old Compound days and so uh, I don't know how we haven't made this happen uh before now, but it's a pleasure to have you, man.
Thanks. I'm the bashful one, I guess. You know.
It's all good, man. I'm glad we made it happen. Uh, Superstate is absolutely crushing. Uh, we chatted with Jim when uh, I believe it was Invesco kind of took over the last fund and you know, you guys were able to make a smooth handoff which is very, very cool. Um, and so on today, I know this is stablecoin segment. Uh, you guys are uh powering this Fund OS, uh Coinbase stablecoin yield fund. So there's plenty to talk about in this world generally. You guys are uh leaders and front runners and pioneers in the tokenization space. So, just speaking about tokenization broadly here. I'll tell you this thesis. I think it's a good place to start because it kind of opens up a lot of what we're seeing play out these days, which is that we're in this tokenization supercycle. We saw industry leaders shaking hands with the president of the United States up there with the leaders, the CFTC, leaders of regulation here. And ultimately, this is legitimizing the industry. We're seeing the biggest financial institutions now have FOMO coming into the space and doing it at record speeds. And then all of these tokenized assets end up propagating across all of these blockchains and end up in the DeFi protocols that have been here building making these resilient systems from the very beginning. Now they're doing that for the largest asset classes in the world. And so that's kind of what we're seeing play out. I'd love your take on this, your perspective, and just, you know, a little bit as far as what your mental model is for how the tokenization thesis is progressing.
Yeah. So, first off, good thesis. I generally agree with everything you said. We are at the beginning of the maturation of tokenized assets. What does that mean? You know, beyond all of the industry leaders being on stage shaking Trump's hand and talking about crypto and tokenization. We have, you know, the leaders of every bank and every asset management firm on TV talking about tokenization. You know, this is the chapter one and a half moment, I think, for this. There's a lot of pilots out there. There's a lot of proof of concepts out there. Everybody is building products, some of which are starting to get traction, but it's still incredibly early, right? Almost every single bank has announced they're doing tokenized deposits. Like literally pick any name out of the largest banks, they're all doing tokenized deposits, right? They all want to use that as a stepping stone to do tokenized securities, right? Tokenized more complex products than a deposit. You have every asset management firm out there, right? From BlackRock and Vanguard and Fidelity all the way down, all of them are interested in this, right? So the question is not like who is interested, it's who's not interested. And anyone on that list is a dinosaur and they're going to be outcompeted and they're going to go to zero fundamentally, right? Almost everybody that matters in all of finance is interested. And it's because over the last eight years we've proven out, you know, hey, tokens on a blockchain that are programmable are amazing. They can do interesting things. They can settle instantly. They're super transferable. They're programmable. You can put them inside DeFi protocols. You can open up access around the world. You know, there's a lot of like edge case things to figure out, which the SEC and the CFTC are totally on top of to iron out the last like gray areas of this, but we're very quickly coming to the point where it's all proven and now it's just the time to go, go, and everybody is lining up on the starting line to go.
Yeah, absolutely. And we'll get into Superstate's product stack, how you're working with some of these financial institutions and how you had the foresight to ultimately recognize this and build for that future. But I just want to give some color to the point that you made about the levels of adoption that we're seeing here and at the bank level, the progression from tokenized deposits to tokenized equities. And today, literally this morning, we had Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Santander, and over a dozen major banks move forward with plans to launch a stablecoin. And so I'm curious just, you know, because I feel like you might have insight where, you know, some of us don't. How do you foresee these bank-sponsored stablecoins moving and partnering and working their way through the market compared to what we've seen up until this point which has been a complex sort of experimentation process of algorithmic stablecoins and decentralized stablecoins and then ultimately to the duopoly of, you know, Circle and Tether today. How do you see these bank-sponsored stablecoins entering the stablecoin market?
Yeah, it's a great question and I don't have all of the answers, but I do have analogies to work with with like, you know, historical patterns. So, if you zoom way out, right, like back in the 90s when the internet and the world wide web were pretty novel things and every single bank offered its services not on the internet, right? They were 0% online. You know, as the internet and as the web came out, everybody was interested. There wasn't a single bank CEO who was like, you know, going on their earnings call and bashing the idea of the internet. In fact, they all said like, 'Hey, we want to figure out how to leverage this, right?' The ways in which they leveraged this over time, you know, it started off where they're like, 'Hey, we're going to have an internet portal for you,' and like, hey, eventually it's going to lead to like a Zelle and like all of these things. But at this point, we have 100% adoption. There's not a single bank out there that's not completely scaled entirely into we use the internet to deliver banking because it's faster, cheaper, better 24/7-ish, you know, and just fundamentally better. Crypto rails are just the next evolution, right? And it's just as transformative, especially for any money services, security services, any like transfer of value. Crypto is equally as transformative. And so, you know, what does the end state look like in 20 years, right? Well, probably every bank, probably every asset manager, probably everybody on Wall Street, probably every investment advisor, probably every portfolio, probably every user on their phone, probably everybody everywhere somewhere is using tokenized assets, right? What are the killer apps, right? You know, there have been a lot of different ideas about how to build a web portal for people to use internet plus money, right? And there's still experimentation there. It's still not figured out, right? Every year there's like something that's slightly better than before. I can't tell you with a, you know, crystal ball exactly what it's going to look like when tokenization has scaled, right? Do I think the end state is that there's 30 successful tokenized deposits like Bank of America's a tokenized deposit and JP Morgan does and Wells Fargo does and they all are successful while they're all competing with each other? Probably not. I don't think that's a viable end state. I think there's probably going to be, you know, a federated deposit stablecoin where like 15 banks all get together and like have one that sort of wins. I could see a single bank on their own succeeding at scale like a Bank of America or JP Morgan potentially. I could see, you know, a hundred different approaches to tokenized securities. That's a really big umbrella, you know, scanning, you know, everything from like tokenized equities to tokenized private securities to tokenized real estate to tokenized alternative assets that their clients use to like everything in between. The things that take off and are sticky and like really work has not been proven yet. Everyone is throwing irons in the fire, you know, trying to put some fuel on it and trying to see where the actual product market fit is. Right? That goes from startup to the largest bank in America.
Yeah. Yeah. Um, I mean I think it's extraordinarily well said because it also reminds us that we're still early. Like we all sort of have this general directional thesis that this is going to be the endgame. This is where we're headed. But how we get there and which things ultimately are kind of the thrust, the gasoline, the acceleration that do get us there, that is still very much up for grabs. Um, and there's, you know, several different facets in which, you know, there are players that can fit into this market, ultimately provide the infrastructure to build out this onchain economy, this tokenized world. But it's still very much fair game as far as, you know, what are the major pieces and which ones are maybe the minor pieces. The total addressable market is massive when we think about this thing at scale, but we aren't really sure which ones are going to be the bigger wedges. And I think that's where I want to get into Superstate's product stack because you've, you know, kind of laid your flag in the ground, put, you know, claimed your stake in this tokenized fund world, a little bit in the stablecoin world, but, you know, you've spent plenty of time thinking about this thesis and what this landscape is looking like and have thrown some irons into the fire yourself. And so I'd love, you know, your experience and so what are the irons that Superstate has thrown into the fire and what has your experience been with the adoption curve of those things?
