I think a lot to be positive about going into 2026. I think 2025 we've done like the really tough work of like, you know, if you've got like a body that is infected with gangrene, you need to cut off those limbs, and I think we've just eviscerated those limbs. And maybe we have like one leg and you know like half an arm, but like we're regrowing them in a more productive direction, and I think that's about as much as the industry can really hope for. It's not a nuclear winter. There's fundamentally things being driven. There's inflows from these ETFs, but we really do need to leave behind the meme coining, the NFT stuff, the over-focus on decentralization. You don't need to disavow these things, but you just need to kind of move past those as the focal point of this industry because it's just not.
Hey everyone, quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode. Nothing said on Bell Curve is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Our guests and I may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.
Okay, we are recording. There we go. All right. Well, um, we have not come up with a name for the new podcast yet, nor have we made any other logistical plans to put it on the air. And as such, we are returning for a special guest episode of Michael and myself to Bell Curve, the podcast that we were formerly a part of.
Yeah, we are working on a couple of titles, to be honest. I think some of them are kind of hilarious how bad they are, but we're going to let them simmer over the next couple of weeks while we enjoy some holiday time and reset for 2026. But we did want to get back on the air just to be able to put out some thoughts on 2025, kind of do a little bit of a review, a fun time given everything that's going on. But then also think about what's going forward into 2026 and kind of like, where are we with crypto? I'd say this will definitely be kind of a continuation of the conversations that we've had over the last few years on Bell Curve. I think it'll be very crypto dominated in terms of the content and the conversation, but looking into next year, just as crypto is doing, I think we're going to be expanding into other areas that are adjacent. They're connected to crypto and blockchain technology, but things like energy, more institutionalized financial services, things like AI. Those are areas that are definitely growing on their own, but they're also being integrated into the crypto landscape in unique and interesting ways. So we're looking forward to coming back in the new year with a new title for this pod and a slightly different, new set of content.
So, I think kind of the first thing to do is give maybe not a super in-depth interview or review of 2025, but I think at least acknowledging that 2025 has been choppy to say the least. There's been so many different chapters. The memecoin mania was really kicking off in Q1 this year with the Trump memecoin. Hyperliquid launched probably like a year and a month ago. There has been so many different narratives within crypto and probably the death of some as well for the benefit of the industry. But maybe just to kick it off, Michael, what's your 2025 rap?
I mean, I yeah, going back, let's say probably a little bit more than just a year. Thinking about November 5th, 2024, Trump is elected, Bitcoin rips, everybody thinks that this is going to become like the Bitcoin presidency. You've got a very strong market leading into the end of 2024. I think if you polled the audience of participating crypto members, they would, nine out of ten, eight out of ten, say 2025 is going to be the year. And I think if you talk to founders in the space too, it led everyone in the direction of, this is going to be the year to make it. We finally, you know, four-year cycle, not four-year cycle, well, base cases, four-year cycle, and if it's not, it's still going to be bullish because Trump, all of this, that and the other. I think everybody, there were no higher expectations going into a year for crypto than we had basically coming into 2025. And we had a lot of footfalls and maybe even way bigger issues than just footfalls. I think we, as an industry, did a lot of things to hurt ourselves, and the things like the Trump, Melania, whatever tokens, meme coins, they didn't help either. So I think it started off with some up and down in terms of price action and interest, and I think people were still kind of searching for a narrative as to what this year was going to be about. And because meme coins are basically 99% speculative, 1% likeness or whatever you want to derive as the tangible value, if there is any, they go up and down in rapid succession. I mean, thinking back to January, February, that's when you had Melania coin launch, and that's when everybody started to go out and talk about how they were starting these agencies to help people launch their meme coins. And then it kind of all came to a crashing halt when you had, what's his name? With that Palm Angel shirt on going on the interview, and I can't even remember his name. Also, we also nuked the president of Argentina in the process. There are some really bad mistakes. But I think, yeah, the first part of the year was, okay, everybody just kind of get your ducks in a line, and we're going to see where this thing goes. And I also think, just to call it out, it was in a lot of ways the ending of that which happened very rapidly. It didn't last much further than like February or March, that kind of speculative fervor really took off, went parabolic, dropped parabolically. And then it really kind of had to settle for a while. That's when you also started to see the tariff tantrum starting in March, April, and then come into a crescendo, I think, May 8th or something like that. There was just a lot of structural change. We talked about this internally, but you had a regime change in the ways that these token projects were launching and kind of cultivating community and getting their growth. It has completely shifted. So broadly, I would say 2025, and there's tons more stuff just to talk about, but my broad case before Vance, hearing your perspective on 2025, is frankly, 2021 going all the way back was 90% retail capital, 10% institutional capital. And the institutions were, you know, the few liquid funds that existed and the venture funds that were buying tokens, but it was mostly retail. The vast majority was retail. And what 2025 kind of encapsulated, which was a shift over time over the last four years, was a complete reversion of that percentage, where it's now 90% institutional capital, 10% retail capital. And we kind of say this tongue in cheek, but after October 10th, the remaining 10% of retail capital went down another 90%. So now it's closer to 99 to 1. But I think, at least my perspective, taking a step back, it was the final nail in the coffin of the retail capital speculative fervor. And that kind of ended with the tariff tantrum and memecoins kind of not being the thing people equated crypto to, which ultimately I think is a good thing. Like we can put that chapter behind us, and that's a positive thing for the industry.
Yeah, I agree with all of that. I think since 2022, we've kind of been in this series of rolling bubbles. I would say the immediate aftermath of like 2023, 2024 was kind of like this reflationary bubble where even like I remember Polygon going to like $34 billion, and now it's sub two, sub one something like that. But people just thought that FTX was the only problem, let's reflate this bubble. Then we reflated it, I think that happened to a lot of vaults. Then in 2024, what people realized is that some of the alts were not probably as durable or fundamentally driven, where the TAM wasn't as large as people thought, so you had this rotation from BTC or ETH into Sol, from the polygons or lidos into World, into more fundamentally driven alts. Then I think you had the meme coins, the kind of speculative nihilism era, and I think we've kind of crossed all of those off in terms of process of elimination, and the industry has kind of come towards this whole idea that fundamentals is the only thing that matters. And because DeFi is the only thing with fundamentals, the industry is re-anchoring to its roots. And again, we don't think that there are a hundred protocols that are interesting. There's probably five. But that's kind of how the stock market works too. There's not 10 data center providers, there's four. There's not 150 hyperscalers, there's seven. So those same dynamics playing out here is not surprising. I think what we also saw was the death of the kind of escape velocity strategy, where you can farm out tokens at a high enough FTV to get yourself traction, treasury runway, to then go off and challenge the incumbents. I think the solution for too many tokens and too much supply overhang has been more tokens in some way, and now that there's been sufficiently issued tokens, I don't think there's going to be a ton of fast follows. So like if you're a Morpho or something, you're probably not going to be challenged by a new lending protocol for at least the next three or four years. And I would say the stable coins are in that position, and I would say probably Hyperliquid, and maybe even things like Uniswap, although DFlow is kind of coming to their business pretty quickly. The incumbents have never been as safe, which is great because that means they're able to innovate on a level playing field. But there's plenty of good stuff that happened. The BlackRock ETFs, the institutional adoption, a lot of just window dressing for a future cycle, which I don't think is necessarily three or four years away. I think you continue to see this stuff grind up. With the ETF flows, the BlackRock ETF had $500 million of inflows yesterday, which was super surprising for Bitcoin. I think you're going to continue to see this industry be more linear, be less cyclical in terms of the four-year cycle, and be more driven by downstream currents like AI, general risk appetite, and just general institutional adoption. So overall, I think 2025 was positive, painful in some degree obviously with things getting kind of culled out, but we do have to kind of disabuse people of this notion that there is an alt season. Because that's not true. What is true is that the things that are fundamentally driven will continue to do well, and that tees us up for 2026 because Clarity, which is the market structure bill, seems like it will happen in Q1. And I think people have kind of gotten more bearish on recently, but Michael, maybe your take would be interesting to get on just what this means. We've talked about equity research and stuff like that, but maybe more connotations to the altcoin universe. What does it mean?
Yeah. So before we get too far into the regulatory environment, I think one other kind of take on 2025, which also does kind of go into a take on 2026 projections, but I think 2025 was a recognition that if you want to be X big and have the opportunity to have a token that's live and valuable, there used to be a path where you could serve clients or customers that are crypto-indigenous. What I mean by that is you could be serving just people who are in the crypto ecosystem. And that is enough of a business or enough of a protocol for you to build something that's successful, whatever that definition is. And I think the recognition is that there are certain things that are crypto-native that will do super well. Hyperliquid is another I would say one of the biggest 2025 things to happen in general. I know it started in 2024, but it really took off in 2025. And I would say that that is a case in point of something that does serve the crypto-native audience. But I think the recognition broadly is that the vast majority of things that are going to be successful in crypto are actually bringing things into the crypto universe that don't happen naturally within crypto. And this is why I think from the outset we were saying things like energy, AI, financial services. Obviously, financial institutions can come on chain, and what does that actually mean? Are they moving their assets over? Well, you got Apollo, Atre, you got BlackRock, Fiddle, you got tokenization of assets broadly, real-world assets. We need a new term for it. We need to get rid of that. But that is essentially what I mean. And that transition, I think, is going to take a really long time. But the biggest strides of that transition happened in 2025, which kind of leaves you a step away from having a breakout year in 2026. So going back to the original question on Clarity or market structure, whatever we end up calling it, our view is that it's going to happen. There are certain people who think it won't, there are certain people who think it will. Our read of the situation is more positive than negative. Now the question is what is in it and what are the definitions? The things that we know it will contain are definitionally what is a security, what is a commodity. It probably won't contain things like what is... It's going to push a lot of the rulemaking to the regulators. It's going to say, CFTC, you regulate perps and derivatives. SEC, you regulate fundraising and securities offerings, etc., etc. So I think it's just going to, no pun intended, provide market clarity. And that is super important because what people are waiting for, especially as we bring assets on-chain or bring new businesses on-chain, energy, AI, what have you, is the people who run those businesses or people who have that perspective on those industries need to have an understanding of what these assets are. They need to know how they can work within the confines of crypto. Doing so, I think, will also provide coverage for the industry researchers or the equity researchers at these banks to actually start writing reports on them. Every single security that's over a certain size that trades in the stock market has coverage analysts and equity researchers who write reports on it, usually on a quarterly basis. And this is one of the benefits of going and working with a bank for financing: the researchers start writing coverage about you. And there is this whole Chinese wall of if you are on the banking side, you're not allowed to talk to the research side. They're supposed to be impartial. They all work at Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley, but you know, Chinese wall. The point is that once they start covering you, the industry starts to understand how to value you, and they start writing reports with valuation metrics. And each one of these reports says, "We're choosing to do this valuation heuristic." So if you choose this valuation heuristic at a 10x price-to-earnings ratio, if your earnings go up another 2x, your valuation should go up 2x. That is what we don't have in crypto. So when we talk about what is the fundamentals basis of these new assets, it's not just fundamentals for fundamentals purposes. It's not so that we can say the buyback is X and therefore token should be Y. Every single one of these protocols is different. So the two things that I am looking forward to are number one, and Blockworks is actually doing a great job of this, standardizing a lot of the data when it comes to financial reporting and financial metrics. That standardization in the real world is called GAAP, generally accepted accounting principles. We don't have that in crypto. We could have that or should have that in crypto. So that's number one. Number two is people at these major banks who cover crypto equities, Coinbase, Robinhood, etc., are looking forward to being able to cover the crypto assets themselves. When you can have a research report for, let's say, Sky which is doing X in revenue and Y in profit, etc., they want to write that report because that's a new coverage area for them. It's novel, it's interesting, it would get a ton of readership. And I think as soon as we have market structure, whatever that bill is, we will be able to start to see these banks covering these assets because they'll know how to recommend them. Because ultimately, that's what you're doing. It's are you recommending this as a buy, sell, or hold? And they don't initiate coverage on things that are sells. That's not really the business that they're in. And you do have to start somewhere. So even for things like CoreWeave that IPOed this year, no one would cover them for the first nine months. It was like Robert Baird Securities or, my favorite one was, remember the bank that was like JP, it wasn't JP Morgan.
At JPM Securities. Not JP Morgan. You're going to have the lesser research houses covering the alts first, but you will eventually get the big banks doing it if Clarity goes through.
And Caner just put out a report on Hyper.
Right. I mean, technically that is a coverage report on the Hyper perp data. But we're getting closer to a point where people will be broadcasted the message through channels that they're used to seeing these things through, which is the most important thing. And to disaggregate the market, I think for 2026, it's totally different than going into 2025 where people thought 200, 300, 400K Bitcoin. I do think Bitcoin, ETH, and Sol get to new all-time highs driven primarily by the ETF flows that are coming and the staking products that they will incorporate. I think you'll have that be a surprising feature of 2026, just to see those doing well. I think you're going to see these DeFi coins that are blue chip and are covered in Clarity get their fair share. But then I think retail is actually going to have their prayers answered where they're going to be less a part of the market because there's going to be fewer tokens launching. And if I've seen one thing on crypto Twitter this year, it's that CT wants less coins. I think you now are going to have that dynamic. Maybe you'll have some kind of 2021 holdovers seek to launch their coins at the end of this year or next year. But really, that pipeline is broken. That supply chain of capital is broken. And I think it is broken for the better of the industry because now the only things that will exist will be high-quality projects. And maybe putting out a different prediction here, but all of these IPOs, maybe you can think of those in the same way, and those are fundamentally driven businesses. But like all the things that people invested in in 2021 that they tried to get out the door this year or next, I think what you're going to see is a lot of that similar dynamic plays out for the traditional equity where, sure, software companies theoretically should trade at high price-to-sales multiples, but we haven't seen that recently. And I think the reason we haven't seen that recently is because there's been so many of them, and people can't disaggregate which one's good versus bad versus which one will stick along. But I think if you IPO Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, Stripe, Canva, there's just not enough liquidity for these things. And the prices are going to be far below their private market marks. And that will be a moment that TradFi has to go through, specifically, that I think crypto VC went through last year. But it's kind of all this larger project of how do you price things accurately and how do you fix capital markets in the US?
And this is not a new phenomenon. If you recall right before Airbnb went public, I believe they had that structured round that Silvergate did.
That was like the latest stage rounds that a lot of these pre-IPO companies, as they're called, will do. They are highly structured. Basically what that means is someone who knows that you're going to go public will literally put a covenant in there that says you have to go public in 18 months, and if you don't, I get a payment in kind of additional 10% of my equity. They will structure this so that they're guaranteed not to lose, basically. They will have limited upside, but the upside will be something like they have a small percentage of your company to keep that valuation at a high level, but they have like zero downside. It's basically a call option, how they would structure it. I do think that there's going to be a lot of, I agree with that prediction which wasn't on our list, but I agree with it. I think there's going to be a lot of structured stuff that makes IPOs happen. But it doesn't mean that the floating price will be above those structured prices.
And you saw this with CoreWeave, which was the hottest stock of the year until it hit unlocks. And it does feel like TradFi is discovering things at roughly the same pace that crypto is, which is that the mechanical supply-demand imbalance is a real thing in any market condition, in any coin. Doesn't matter the business. You're seeing this with Hyperliquid today. You even saw it with Robinhood in 2022. It bottomed at $7 and it's now at like $130. There's just no escaping the financial gravity of needing a lower price point for your sellers to get out so that they can be matched by buyers. And it's a time-dependent thing. If a buyer doesn't show up on the same day as a seller, you're now advertising that sell pressure into the future. So it's just a process. But I think what crypto has going for it right now is that Bitcoin, ETH, and Sol are going to be recommended by BlackRock. A single-digit percentage of your net worth goes into those. I think those flows are going to overpower the bear case. I think the DeFi alts are trading at such low PEs, and maybe Hyperliquid is an exception. They're trading at probably 20-25x, which is where the stock market is. But Sky is at like eight. But they built the discipline of like, no one will believe your story unless you're literally committing violence in the order books, aka buying your own token every single day with every single dollar that you produce. The tech companies have none of that discipline. And I think that lack of discipline from them, combined with the complexity of the AI story getting more pronounced, means that crypto probably has a better tailwind to deliver value and earnings in the near term than AI. I think this year was basically, you throw a dart at the data center theme and it goes up 10x and everyone's super happy. They need power. Now it's a question of which one will be solvent? Who's working with OpenAI? Who's working with Anthropic? Which chip is the one that you should do? Which data center designer is the one that you should use? And it's becoming less straightforward. I think also the value prop of AI is getting pushed out further. Next year is probably not going to be an explosive year in the same context as this year and the last, as people get used to ChatGPT being just a feature of their daily lives. And I think in a weird way, the AI trade becoming more complex and stalling out a little bit gives crypto a lot of breathing room to run. The kind of logic is this: If AI is going to solve all society's problems immediately, we're going to disaggregate... and Bitcoin relies on kind of secular stagnation and the collapse of institutions. And I think ETH as well, to some degree. But if that is not the case, and it looks like the national debt is not going to be solved, AI is not the cure-all for all of our problems, I think Bitcoin specifically plays better in that world. So thematically, I think the AI trade cooling off. It can't fall apart, right? If it falls apart, then we're all kind of in trouble. But if OpenAI can raise $100 billion, if we can get to new levels of users without significant churn and just keep it intact enough that there's a not too hot, not too cold area for crypto, that probably is very good in 2026.
Yep. Going back to 2025 review a bit, as it leads into 2026, I think what ultimately, and this is maybe I'll answer it but want to get your take as well. What do we call basically everything post-October 10th? Is that the end of the four-year cycle? Is it the death of the four-year cycle? Is it just your run-of-the-mill 30% selloff in a bull market? Obviously, we don't know because it is still down. So the longer it goes, the more clarity on the definition we get because it defines, there's no V-shaped recovery. My take generally is that we are at the end of the four-year cycle. I think you kind of said this as well: if we do hit all-time highs of ETH, BTC, and Sol, or just some combination of two or three of them, that disproves that we're in a four-year cycle. That's my base case. The way that I describe this transition of retail capital to institutional capital is that institutions are not like they're coming in size or on one day or in one quarter. It's like this global TWAP on the major assets. They're thinking about it in terms of, well, I want to allocate half a percent this year, 1% next year, and then up to 3% the year after that. So it's just this kind of like they're buying a little bit all the time. And when you have the end of the four-year cycle, and we heard from people on our team who were in Abu Dhabi that the Asian whales sold all their Bitcoin or most of their Bitcoin, the logic behind it wasn't anything more than, "Oh, it's the end of the four-year cycle, we'll just buy back lower." So when you have a global TWAP that is inherently just this slow buying, buying, buying, but then you have this mad rush for the exits catalyzed by this fake end of four-year cycle thing, it's why you have a dip for 30%. Because the TWAP can't sustain that much unified selling in a shorter period of time. I think October 10th was some event, but it was just the one event that tipped the scales. It could have been something that happens in November or December or January. Who knows? It just happened to be October 10th. And maybe someone had a hole in their balance sheet that they needed to shore up. It seems like it's basically done now. And now we've moved into, okay, well, tax loss selling for the end of the year, or wash sale, whatever it may be, locking in gains, but end of the year kind of takes over. So I think the prediction here is that we actually come back pretty strong in January, and it happens pretty quickly. Because you have a lot of people who will recognize that this isn't, and if we are in a four-year cycle and the word from the Asian whales who sold their BTC was, "We'll just buy it back at 60K," it's like, well, we're trading at 85 right now. Do you really think it gets down there? Are you willing, how long until you say, "Okay, well, I sold it at 105, but it's not going to get down to 60, so maybe I'm just going to buy it at 86." And that time duration kind of leads you in the direction of buying back in. So I think there's going to be some pretty volatile or just up-down kind of movements as we've seen this week. I think that'll continue basically for the next 12 days, 13 days, rest of the year. But I think after that, the selling turns to buying pretty fast.
And one of the learnings I had from 2022 is that on a year where you hit a huge peak and then you come off significantly, you're going to have tax loss selling at the end of the year. Usually people do it the week before Christmas. Not many people are trading markets actively the week of Christmas, maybe the week after, but the selling does stop at some point, and I think it's kind of time to be year-end because there is a tax benefit to sell. Let's talk through stable coins. Next year, I think, is kind of where the market has settled as the most promising direction for the industry at large. Even when we talk to people about what Framework is doing, it's mostly like we're working on stablecoins. It becomes this language, permission structure to work in crypto, but on something that is not kind of nefarious or unregulated.
I think I was just going to interject and say, unpack what it's hard to make a venture-scale outcome on a dollar-based asset. That's like, "Oh, what is the stablecoin going to go to, like $2?" Well, yeah, of course the stablecoin isn't going to go to $2. The promise of this business model is that you have corporate equity, or in our context, a governance token that sits on top of a protocol that is issuing stablecoins, lending stablecoins, or creating yield sources for those stablecoins.
And I think what you're going to see next year is, you know, Clari USD, you'll probably see Stripe USD, you'll probably see a variety of others. I think SoFi actually just launched their stablecoin today. My prediction on those is that they're flops. I don't think they're going to be flops because those organizations are not skillful. I think they're going to be flops. I would say maybe Stripe USD, I don't know if that's coming, but I would say that's kind of the exception. They're going to be flops because they don't understand what is going on inside of crypto. And I think what's going on inside of crypto is basically capital formation and yield distribution in a permissionless way. There's product-market fit for that, as we've seen with USDS. But what we're going to see now is people doing energy lending, doing AI lending, doing crypto capital markets lending, doing trade finance, structured credit, and seeking to get the backing of stablecoins as the base layer for their own TVL. It'll become less about retail. And I think one downstream implication of that is RWA looping. I can't tell if that's a feature six months from now of this industry or maybe it's just a flash in the pan. I've tweeted about it before, but retail capital, I don't think, is driving altcoin price discovery, price discovery of majors, or frankly, on-chain activity anymore. It seems to be 100 to a thousand institutions with a ton of money each, $100 million to a billion, that are really interested in this subsection of the economy. That's kind of this captive customer base. And I don't think the existing stablecoin fintechs are going to be able to provide that same level of experience or set of trade-offs for the feature set. So I'm kind of bearish on those, but I'm super bullish on the winners keeping to it, staying winning. Circle growing, Tether growing, Sky growing. I also don't see any new projects like Athena, you know, tried to hit escape velocity, lost 70% of its TVL. I think they're going to be the last person that has tried that because it's just such a capital-destructive strategy. So my prediction is maybe slightly different but maybe similar in that um yeah, so I think one of the data points is look at PYUSD and basically the lackluster TVL that it has. Pi is PayPal which owns Venmo. This should be the largest payment stablecoin because of Venmo just in and of itself. But it's not, and nobody uses it. They also had the $300 trillion bug or however big that was that they minted, which I think just, it doesn't seem like the A-team is working on it.
On PIUSD. I do think that all the different launches for PayPal, SoFi, Plaid, what they are going to eat into is basically Circle's lunch and they are going to be going after the institutionalized financial services application, fintech application, probably US-centric or European-centric models that eat into specifically Circle. So my bet is that yes, Circle from a total assets in USDC probably grows. It definitely grows in 2026, but I think that one of the narratives that pops off in 2026 is that Tether, which already has basically two-thirds of the stablecoin market, if not more, increases its market share by a substantial margin in 2026. I think that is going to be driven by rest of world phenomenon. Tether also has at least announced the USAT, the GENIUS compliant stablecoin for US-centric stablecoin adoption. I'm guessing that takes off as well just because of the Tether brand and distribution. So stablecoins is payment. Stablecoins in particular is going to be a really interesting place to watch in 2026 because it's going to be this fight where you've got competition if you're Circle, you've got competition above you and you got competition below you. It's going to be really tough. Also a rate cutting environment where you are going to suck for the people who are GENIUS compliant. I think a real re-evaluation of whether you want to be GENIUS compliant is probably in the cards for most stablecoin issuers. I think it makes sense from a business perspective like Tether where you can issue a GENIUS compliant stablecoin and GENIUS compliant basically means you're backed up by T-bills in cash but your business is based around what is the yield of those T-bills. So if your entire business is going to be based around that, which is the case for Circle, it's going to be very difficult to have that be your business. Circle gives up much of their yield. We'll see how this works but there is rumors and discussion around whether or not that's going to be a remaining capability based on the market structure. That was something that was blessed in GENIUS, but it's a question as to whether that's persisted after market structure. My guess is it probably is but there is a question. If that doesn't happen then what happens to the growth metrics, the growth vehicles for Circle and USDC because a lot of that is Coinbase. I think this is going to be one of the most fascinating places to watch. All that being said, your description of yield coins or businesses that you're bringing on chain, that is not payment stablecoins just to be clear. What you basically take is the payment stablecoin which is deliverable to a dollar, redeemable for a dollar, and you give that to a business who's doing GPU-backed lending. I think that is the most interesting place to play from a venture perspective but also just like bringing businesses on chain in 2026.
And all the asset managers, the fintechs that are trying to launch stablecoins are kind of one bucket and what they want is savings products. They want to announce some crypto stuff to drag their multiples higher. But I think the asset managers of the world have capital to contribute to the onchain economy, the Apollo, the BlackRocks, the different private equity firms that we talked to. But they also are looking for capital to come from crypto into them and the origination side to flow both on and off chain. When we started investing in crypto a long time ago, there were no fundamentals. I remember we bought the Chainlink ICO at like 60 million, 70 million FTV.
