Avichal Garg

Managing Partner, Electric Capital

Avichal Garg On Investing in Crypto, AI and Ethereum’s Path Forward

🎥 May 01, 2026 📺 Empire ⏱ 61m

This week, Avichal grag joins the show to discuss how he is currently allocating to crypto in 2026. We deep dive into the ...

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About Avichal Garg

Avichal Garg, co-founder and managing partner of Electric Capital, appeared on two podcasts in mid-2026 where he discussed his investment philosophy, the state of AI and crypto markets, and his views on Ethereum. On the "Empire" podcast in May, Garg described crypto tokens as a potential "escape valve" for wealth creation in countries that cannot access U.S. markets like the QQQ, and said that professional investors "tend to make their money in bear markets" while "anyone can make money in the bull market." He also stated that the "right time to be investing in AI was 5 years ago or 10 years ago" and that early-stage investors should focus on "things that are not hot today," such as crypto and fintech. In a July appearance on "The Investor Who Backed 10 Unicorns Explains the AI Bubble," Garg compared his role as a venture investor to music producer Rick Rubin, saying he seeks people who "have something interesting to say in the world" through code, which he described as "an artistic endeavor." He noted that when software "eats" an industry, the winning companies tend to be run by software engineers, citing Amazon as an example. Garg also identified the U.S. seizure of Russian assets in dollar terms as a "turning point" for Ethereum, describing it as "a US dollar denominated system that nobody in the world controls" and where the U.S. "can't steal your assets." He cautioned that in the current bull market it is "too easy to get over your skis" and "drink the Kool-Aid."

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Avichal Garg's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (109 segments)

Narrator0:00

Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds or projects discussed.

Host0:26

All right, everyone. Very excited about this. So, we've got Avichal Garg, co-founder of Electric Capital, back on the pod. I think you might hold the record for most times on Empire. You're at least top five now.

Avichal Garg0:34

Oh, amazing.

Host0:35

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's like an incentive in, you know, podcast. It's like if you bring the views, then we'll have you on more. We bring the views. So, Oh, amazing. Great.

Avichal Garg0:42

And some some good.

Host0:43

Well, you know, I only I only I do like your pod. I do. I do like I don't do I purposely don't do that many actually.

Avichal Garg0:49

Do you have any are you and like rivals? because you're both like you both have good takes and you're public figures and

Host0:54

Uh we're uh I mean he's actually a really good friend of mine.

Avichal Garg0:57

Yeah.

Host0:57

But in

Avichal Garg0:58

We gotta get the drama, baby.

Host1:00

Drama in public. We're we're we're fremies. Nice. Nice.

Avichal Garg1:04

But I you know I really I do enjoy the reason I like going on his pot too is um he's just he's just opinionated and uh he's not afraid to assert opinions and um it's fun just like as an intellectual exercise to disagree with him to you try to steel man the other side of it because he's a really smart guy.

Host1:18

Totally. And so you're like, what is the strongest argument for the other side?

Avichal Garg1:21

And I've now spent enough time with him that sometimes I will purposely like I know how to needle him a little bit, you know? And I, you know, I mean, you have friends, right? And so like, you know, you know how to like get under each other's skin a little bit. So I know how to do that with him a little bit. Makes it really fun.

Host1:32

That's great. Um, okay. So we are recording this in San Francisco at your guys's office. So first off, thanks for having me here. Um, I wanted to do this with you because we're at an interesting moment in time where basically AI has sucked up all of the attention, capital, human capital, financial capital. Um, you know, we're on the precipice of the three largest IPOs maybe in the history of the world, SpaceX, uh, you know, Anthropic and OpenAI. And um you probably more than any other crypto VC or than most other crypto VCs are both at the center of crypto investing and have spent maybe two decades at the center of Silicon Valley investing. I think your angel, you know, record is, you know, pretty good. Um so I wanted to just get your take on like broad sense of how you think about crypto in light of AI sucking up all the attention and capital.

Avichal Garg2:23

Uh there's a lot of ways to cut that. Um I mean something we think about a lot. I think um undoubtedly AI is the center of the universe right now. It's interesting though as an investor um that is very difficult right because what you really want to do is be like the right time to be investing in AI was 5 years ago or 10 years ago. Um and it's really hard to do right now unless you are willing to throw a lot of money around and take certain kinds of bets. Um you know for example investing in OpenAI at 100 billion was still a good investment right um but if you're an early stage investor then what you really want to be doing is investing in the things that are not hot today um which I think crypto is not hot today, fintech is not hot right now. Um you know there like those kinds of categories I think are actually from an early stage perspective more interesting in many ways than AI right now um because AI is just so so noisy and I think that one of the lessons we've learned on uh being on the crypto side for a while too is um that's not when things get like this parabolic is like not the time that you want to be putting a lot of capital to work. You kind of want to be really patient or you want to be investing so early in things where it's you're practically like pre-incubating them because it's like it's just going to take so long for the thing to work. So we just did one of those. It's sort of at the intersection of crypto and AI. Um but actually it's it's very difficult to invest in AI right now. And I think it's actually like pretty not that difficult to invest in fintech uh in crypto right now.

Host3:49

Yeah. So, it actually sort of it pushes us away from like let's let's let's go focus on the things that a lot of people aren't focusing on and aren't really popular right now.

Avichal Garg3:56

Yeah. Interesting. How do you um how do you decide what those things are? Do you have like, you know, big team meetings where you're like, what's the second order effect of this and the third order and the fourth order? Or do you have, you know, the smartest founders in the world come pitch you guys and you say, "That's a good idea. I'd never thought of that." Or,

Host4:10

Yeah, a little of both. Um and so I think part of it, um I I'll give you a concrete example, right? So, we were just talking about this. So um if you think about the side effect of of all these AI tools and models and all these things that are you know going to be able to hack all the things um then clearly like cyber security starts to matter a lot more and how do you how do you secure the code and there are lots of different ways to do that and I think one of the ways that it would make a lot of sense to do that is um through formal verification um and so you can sort of think through like uh you know what are the consequences of what's happening in the world and what are the effects of that and what does that mean um And and for us, we try to find things that are that are gonna have some sort of like technical moat or gonna have something where it's like hard for the average person, for the average VC to to sort of get up to speed on it. And something like formal verification, um Curtis, my co-founder at Electric, um has gone down that rabbit for years. We we did the series A of a company called Certora which does formal verification for a lot of um uh DeFi protocols and works really closely um with with many teams across Solana and ETH and and the whole ecosystem. Um and those guys are world experts like Mooly Mooly is one of the godfathers. He's a professor was one of the godfathers of formal verification.

Avichal Garg5:25

Formal verification for those who don't know it is the idea that you can turn it's very hand wavy so Mooly I apologize but it's it's basically the idea is you you can turn code into mathematical statements and then you can mathematically prove whether or not your code does what you think it does and historically it was used in places like um aviation or or um space programs like satellites or or NASA and the reason you would use it in those contexts is you have a relatively because it's very expensive computationally to do these things and it's a lot of work um like from human labor to sort of construct these these proofs basically. But um you know you would do it in places where you had relatively small amounts of code but the consequences of a bug were catastrophic, right? Like you send a probe to Mars and if you have a bug in it the thing crashes and you're like well I just lost right like 18 years of work, right? And so you really want to make sure your code is doing what you think it's going to do, right? You don't you don't have bugs. And it turns out um smart contracts in DeFi are a perfect fit for that, right? relatively small amounts of code but the consequences are like you know it secures you know billions and billions and billions of dollars and so that's a perfect fit for that and so works with a for example um but now all of a sudden those techniques um become extremely important because if if models or whatever you know the open equivalent is going to be you know these things that that can hack all the things um you know you got to go back and check all the medical device software you got to go check you know every like bank software you got to think about how do you harden your systems from um voice emulation right so like I can I can socially engineer people and so now my entire customer support group can be socially engineered and so how do I you know there's like all these points of of cyber security you know uh vulnerability now um and so all of a sudden I think formal verification becomes super important.

Host7:12

So if you have that insight then you say well that's probably not a thing that your typical VC is thinking about right there they're just it's like difficult to think about what the hell is even formal verification so an idea like that. Is that you guys in a room whiteboarding saying second order fact, third order, let's go find the best or is it someone who you know maybe you've had a relationship, they come in and they both.

Avichal Garg7:29

Yeah. So yeah, a lot of it is I mean a lot of um it's it's sort of like preparation meets opportunity, right? And so it's just like having talked to enough smart people, you start to build some intuitions and then um you know it's like some some person that you've invested in is having a dinner and you go hang out and they invite one of their friends and their friend is really smart and then their friend says something like, "Oh, that's really interesting. I never thought of it that way." and you take it back to your other smart friends, you know, that you work with and you have that conversation. And so it's it's pretty organic. It's hard to um you know, we try to put some structure around it. It's like, okay, let's go do a market map or let's go have this conversation about this topic and whatever, but a lot of it ends up being organic and you sort of have these moments of insight and brilliance where you're like, that is a great insight from that person.

Host8:07

And then that sort of cascades into like, oh yeah, we really should be thinking about that.

Avichal Garg8:11

Um and then you have to intersect that with like where where are you uniquely positioned to win, right? And so for us it turns out understanding cryptography and distributed systems and um you know Curtis and I both worked at um Facebook on on large scale machine learning systems and so we kind of understand that world and so you start to then say okay well you know like if we're going to go try to try to work with a founder um to build something because usually we're we're first money in can we do we have is there a reason the founder would want to work with us versus Peter Thiel or Mark Andre or you know Sean or Alfred at Sequoia and so we we have to feel confident that if we go talk to that founder that we are we are uniquely well suited to help that person win, right? And so then you got to intersect those two things. So it's like you get some great insight about the way the world is going to be and you intersect that with what are you what are you uniquely good at and it turns out something like formal formal verification we're like uniquely well suited to do.

Host9:00

Going back to just this crypto opportunity versus the AI opportunity. It feels like the only thing to invest in is some variation of AI, right? That's the that's the the moment that we're in today. Whether it's the memory, you know, SanDisk and Micron or it's you know you know retail allocation to you know SpaceX or it's you know the squeezing in a last round of Anthropic before they go public like up and down the capital stack that is the the flavor of the of the moment. How you know the the thing that is definitely not the flavor are crypto tokens. Yeah. How do you view even this you know this idea that you just brought up a formal verification this is crypto meets AI in a sense right? How do you view like the pure play crypto opportunities today?

Avichal Garg9:41

Yeah. Um we are still very very optimistic about that. I mean that's for us when we when we first got off the ground in um in 2018 with angel investors before that but that was sort of like when we formally created electric capital. Our the thesis paper that we wrote which I think has turned out to be true is uh we called it programmable money. We said like what this stuff is really uniquely well suited for is moving money around and that's what it's going to be used for. Um and we call that programmable money. I think that that basically turned out to be correct. And when you look at it through that lens, I think similar to, you know, I think both crypto and AI share this thing which is that um at the end of the day like what isn't AI? Like what isn't AI enabled? It's just going to be in every business. And I think similarly for crypto it's like well everything needs cryptography in a world that agents are doing all the things or everything needs cryptography if you're talking about moving money around. And it turns out um money and liquidity and and these kinds of network effects are one of the few long-term defensible things in any business, which is why every business is trying to become a wallet.

Host10:43

And so if every business is trying to become a wallet and move money around and that's such a core part of their business, then it's that's going to happen on crypto rails. So,

Avichal Garg10:49

You know, we kind of look at it as like, well, every business is going to be AI and every business is going to be crypto and then the technology just sort of disappears. To your point around the specific crypto tokens. Um, I think the the crypto as money thing we still think is still relatively early. Um, and so that means things like Bitcoin and ETH as as perspective stores of value. Um that means um underlying rails that move these assets around in various forms and I think that's things like uh potentially Solana or you know um some of the L2s on ETH um things like EigenLayer where you might build sort of semi-permission networks for certain use cases that that um are compatible with ETH and settle ultimately on ETH in in interesting ways um or even applications that use the idea of tokens as participatory mechanisms. And I think we're just starting to see the beginnings of that when we think of like Hype and and Venice um as examples of that. Um but all of those at their core are really about um moving money, capital formation like it's it's it's the entire fintech stack basically. Um REI is another good example. It's another one in our portfolio um where it's a reinsurance business. It's a fintech um you know Cayman Island registered regulated. It's a just a reinsurance business. It's a phenomenal for people that don't know reinsurance. Um, reinsurance like Warren Buffett has made billions billions of dollars on reinsurance. The idea is insurance for insurance companies. And um it's a it's a phenomenal business if you do it right because it's just law of large numbers. It's you know it's like I'm going to underwrite the insurance companies that do workers compensation in Maryland and Florida and California and like what's the likelihood that all of a sudden there's something like catastrophic that hits all the workers compensations policies in these places? And so it just ends up being a spreadsheet formula and you can make a bunch of money and the the rough math of it basically boils down to um some leverage multiple on top of the treasury rate.

Host12:37

That's right.

Avichal Garg12:38

And so you can get like 5 to 7x leverage on treasuries basically the way the regulations work. And so if rates are like 4% you're making like 20%. Um which is pretty phenomenal as as like an IRR on your business. Um, and what's interesting about REI is they've built a a protocol on the back end that uses the stablecoin markets as their capital market function. So like typically in a reinsurance business, what you have to do is like go raise a bunch of money from Blackstone or from insurance, you know, from pension funds to finance this whole thing. And what REI is doing is saying we'll create a smart contract. Anybody on chain can deposit stables, we'll offboard those, finance the business. And you get real yield. You get like real 12% or real 14%. This is not like Terra Luna stuff. It's like there's something productive, right, happening in the world with this that you get paid. Um, and so you look at those kinds of things and you're like that's real, right? That's that that's what we talked about for a long time. That's actually real. Um, but I think a lot of like crypto Twitter is stuck in this um like L1 wars or like memecoins or like that's and that's just I think slowly dying. Yeah. Um meanwhile I think you have things that are like Hype or VVV or REI which are real. There's like something productive happening there. There's something interesting happening there. and the tokens and the infrastructure are all actually useful in some fundamental way. And I think we're just starting to see the beginnings of that. And so, you know, there's it's like very the future is here, but it's very lumpy. I think people don't realize that that stuff is real.

Host13:58

Yeah. So, what do you think uh what do you think we got right and what did we get wrong? Right. Because it feels like, you know, originally we thought all things would become cryptoified, right? We had, you know, the, you know, the Uber on the blockchain. We had the, you know, all games would become crypto games. Basically, you'd own every skin and it would live on a blockchain. It feels like that maybe was the wrong idea, but the right idea is that capital markets are hundred times bigger, a thousand times bigger than anyone in crypto realized and that all capital markets will move on chain.

Avichal Garg14:27

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was um I mean, to toot our own horn a little bit, I think we were basically right about that. We didn't programmable money. We didn't do much beyond that. Um we never did um like social stuff or apps or Uber on chain. We never did any of that stuff. we basically just did programmable money. Um, and I think we were we were basically right. Um, now that doesn't mean I think that's I think that stuff can happen um eventually, but it just goes back to this idea of well, it's because all of these other things may have elements that benefit from this infrastructure. They need to move stables around, for example. Um, and this is going to be the rails that all the stable coins move on. Um, or um these tokens allow you to own a piece of the product and the network that you're participating in. So that that's what I think is so interesting about like the VVV token mechanics where you sort of get this like you know free usage for the LLM by holding the token and you're getting effectively getting like a share of the upside in the in the protocol and we we talked about that a lot in sort of like 16 17 18 era of participatory capitalism right and I think it's actually happening um and so

Host15:32

Right say say one more line about that go a little deeper into why why that's exciting and what is the thing that is exciting there

Avichal Garg15:38

Well the the intuition always was you know It it somehow feels um maybe unfair is too strong a word, but you sort of have this intuition that's like well the first hundred or the first thousand Uber drivers really should have made more than 15 bucks an hour if the thing ends up being worth 100 billion. Like they got the network effect off the ground. They're they're the supply side of the supply and demand marketplace and they didn't really get to benefit. And how would you do that? Like do you give those people equity in the thing? How do you you know it's just like mechanically speaking? How do you even do that? Right? There's SEC rules around shareholders and do you give them profit interest? you don't want them to like vote on your governance stuff, right? It's like how do you do that? And and tokens actually solve that, right? Like you can own a piece of Hype and and they're doing buybacks and and there's effectively economic value that gets created by the product and you can be a heavy user of the product and you can benefit from the overall success of that ecosystem um using tokens and and um the real value there I think is that that that it's it's about capital formation. It's about capital flows and and so even in that use case I think it's programmable money. What you're really it's like a it's like a type of equity. It's not equity in a traditional sense, but it's a share in the profit of the thing. Um, which is enabled by this infrastructure. And so those profits can flow across those rails in a way that you just couldn't with Uber or Airbnb. You can with Hype, you can with VVV.

Host16:53

It's so it's so interesting you say. I think a lot of people think that Uber on the blockchain because everyone's heard this idea, right? And people look at it as a thing that didn't work and you would say it actually is working. It is literally working.

Avichal Garg17:03

It just turns out it's really hard to build an amazing product.

Host17:06

Correct. That that's what crypto folks maybe got wrong.

Avichal Garg17:09

Exactly. Is that it's really really really hard for every you know for every Uber there's 100,000 startups in Silicon Valley that died.

Host17:14

That's right.

Avichal Garg17:15

So it took it takes a long time to get to a Hyperliquid. It looks like Yeah. I mean you mentioned VVV a couple times like maybe Venice is another breakout thing. It's hard to hard to build a breakout app.

Host17:25

Yeah. REI I think is another good example where you can you can participate and and you know I think um to me it's so funny because um if you're on Twitter all day what you would think is that uh crypto is dying but it's because everybody's like paying attention to price charts um but those are lagging right and if you go spend time with founders uh you actually or you go spend time with the institutions in in New York that are talking about moving all their stuff you know tokenizing and moving all you have like such a different perspective of what's happening in the And that's where we spend all of our time. We're very It's I always laugh. We talk about it internally. It's just we're pretty low-key on Twitter and we're pretty low-key in terms of like media in general because I think it's too easy to fall into this trap of thinking that that's real work. That's not real work, right? The real work is like spending time with founders. The real work is figuring out how to raise the next round of money. The real work is building a good product. And so, we try to spend as much of our time on that stuff as possible. And if you do that, I think you just have a really different perspective. And so I look at things like Venice or Hype um or REI and I'm like, "Wow, it's actually working." The stuff we were talking about 8 years ago is working um all the infrastructure is in place. And so if you have the ability to build a really good product, you now have tools in your toolkit that actually a lot of people don't even understand yet. the idea of using stable coins as a capital market, the ability to have your your users actually share in the upside of what you're doing, the ability to distribute these products globally like um I was just uh was Keone from Monad was uh was just tweeting about this um and um I think he's totally right is you know the one of the side effects I think that people don't understand about of what's happened with crypto is you now have the ability to build a a financial services company or a fintech um and not have to start it in the US Like historically you basically could you if you look at Revolut or you look at any of the fintechs Ramp or Braze or whatever they could only really start in like one or two markets um and then you had so much regulatory overhead to scaling that business that it was extremely cost prohibitive and it was very very difficult like Revolut was UK and then they're not breaking out of the UK. Yeah. They they try to go to other markets and every now and then you get like a new bank in Brazil but it's like pretty rare. Um most of them actually happen out of the US Robinhood and Coinbase. It's because the market is large enough. You have one giant US market. The regulatory regime is the same. You try to do that in Europe, it's really hard. You try to do that in Asia, it's really hard. And those markets are small. But now with crypto, what you have is actually a sizable enough global market of people holding stables and they all have um you know, EVM or Solana-based wallets. Um, and so I think you have a large enough market that you can build financial products for, get to scale, and then back into competing against companies in the US, which is a huge advantage for startups. Like for the first time, you don't have to go raise $50 million and get all the licenses and um, uh, you know, figure out how you're going to be competing for CAC against like BlackRock or Fidelity, right? Right. like all of a sudden you have tens of millions of people that have stables and have wallets that you can reach and the mechanics around how you acquire those customers are completely different. um the way you build your business the infrastructure is completely different and and you can actually get to scale you can build a Hype scale business um which is real business and once you have that like if you look at what what um Jeff is doing it's it's phenomenal execution he's like got the ETF going he's got the SEC on his side right like he is doing exactly that playbook and typically when you see that happen it's not one and done it's like that's it's not like oh Hyperliquid is the only person that's ever going to figure out how to get to scale on a business and then back into the US and have like a real regulated credible business. I think that's the first of many. Right. So, back to the idea of like I think there's so much opportunity now because all the things we were talking about 8 years ago, the infrastructure is actually ready to go. Um that there's no better time, but but people I I think a lot of people that spend most of their time on social media are not going to realize that that's happened until it's already happened.

Avichal Garg21:14

I agree. Right. And so 5 years from now, all people will wake up and be like, oh, the right time to be investing in crypto tokens that are have real fundamental value was 5 years ago.

Host21:21

There's actually you talk about spending time with founders. I think there's unbelievable alpha I know it's your job to because you have to go meet with the founders and invest in them but there's just unbelievable even retail alpha in spending time with founders because they'll tell you what's actually happening which is the last 18 months was really freaking hard and now the last couple of months most people's numbers have changed.

Avichal Garg21:41

Yeah. Like stuff is starting to work.

Host21:42

Yes. Yeah. Stuff is really working. So what do you um what are you guys most excited for? So we mentioned Venice, we mentioned Hype. Are you by the way are you guys invested in

Avichal Garg21:51

Oh yeah, we should call that. Oh yeah, we should also call out please don't listen to me about this is not financial advice.

Host21:54

Yeah, of course. Of course.

Avichal Garg21:55

Can we cut that and put that in the front? Yeah. Just don't listen to me about anything. I'm not I'm not your financial adviser. Exactly. Um so you guys have the So we should electric you have the venture fund and you have a liquid fund.

Host22:05

Yeah, we do both.

Avichal Garg22:06

Uh the venture stuff can also do early stage protocols and tokens. Um uh pretty much everything that I used as an example we have we're investors in we see investors in Near seed investors in REI we um uh have a bunch of Venice um yada yada a bunch of ETH. We have a bunch of Bitcoin.

Host22:24

Do you have Hype?

Avichal Garg22:25

Uh we have not announced whether or not we have yet.

Host22:28

All right, fair enough. Something like Venice. Did they raise any venture rounds or it was just you buy the token on the open market?

Avichal Garg22:34

Um uh or a third option? Yeah, I can't speak for Eric on whether or not he's raised. Um but um you should ask him but um we we just bought on the open market some time ago.

Host22:43

Yeah.

Avichal Garg22:44

Um we saw that because we were seeing investors in Near and there's we s we can see the like Near intent started working recently. We were we we invested in Near in like 2018. So we we've been known Ilia for a long time and so and we've known Eric actually Voorhees for a long time too.

Host22:56

Yeah. From ShapeShift days.

Avichal Garg22:57

Way early ShapeShift days. Yeah. He's great.

Host22:59

It makes me a side note, it makes me very happy to see Eric winning.

Avichal Garg23:01

Yeah. He totally deserves to win. Yeah. He like actually And Ilia too. Yeah. Which is what I think also is like that's another good signal, right? Like I think people for a long time it it felt I feel like trying I'm searching for the right words to say this cuz it's going to sound too judgmental but it felt like the wrong people were winning. You know what I mean? Um you had these like brilliant technologists and like people who had who had done who had made these leaps 10 years ago for the right reasons. Um for philosophical reasons because they wanted to see certain things happen in the world because they believe in um fairness. they believe in in um you know transparent systems that don't screw people and um you know all these kinds of things. Um and a bunch of those people were just were just were just getting punched in the face for years and years, right? I think that's Ilia. I think that's Eric Voorhees. I think I think ETH is going through that right now. Um you know, Totally and Solana is going through that right now. like um but I think what you're starting to see is that the people who are who have actually created real technology and who have actually created things that people use are starting to win and the people who have not are slowly dying away like like I saw some some stuff around like you know the final like Litecoin bulls like finally capitulating and I'm like okay this is a sign right like good like that that this is like a real sign that stuff is actually the market is rationalizing and so I think if you play this out two three, four years, I think people will look at the top 10 or top 20 or top 30 crypto assets and this happens in every cycle where you're like really like these things are in the top 10 or like these things are top 20. Like what about this other thing that's actually really useful? Yeah. And that's like, you know, number 100.

Host24:38

Do you think this could be the cycle where it finally

Avichal Garg24:40

I think it actually normalizes. I think you're actually fixing where people are like, "Oh, yeah, these are actually the things that are that are useful." That's not to say there won't be speculation. I mean, there's tremendous speculation on the AI side for for example, right? Um, so this is not like a uniquely crypto phenomenon. Um, and so there will certainly be a handful of things, but I think by and large like value um is going to converge into the places that are actually creating value, you know, like I think we're starting to begin. Let's hope.

Host25:06

Yeah, I think it's happening.

Avichal Garg25:07

That's the goal.

Host25:08

Well, part of this too is I think I do think there is like markets are not uh you know that that saying they're not rational in the short term. It's like in the short term they're a popularity uh contest and in the long term it's a you know it's a weighing machine or whatever the Warren Buffett quote is.

Avichal Garg25:24

I think we're in the in the process of that and so I think the people who have actually created real value over the you know over the last five years um will be vindicated in the next five years. It's just you kind of have to suffer through it. But you know all the more um reason why I think those people tend to win. I mean look at somebody like Eric. He's had very clear, consistent principles for his entire adult life, which is why he was early Bitcoin. That's why he was doing ShapeShift. He's always acted in accordance with those principles. And so he's never had FOMO. He's never had the like in fact he was willing to kill his company ShapeShift to to do what the right thing was, right? And um and I think when you have that's the only way to do things across cycles which is why I think people who are um philosophically minded or or technologically minded or or they have some reason other than the speculation and the money to do the thing end up having longevity and then those people win right and so that's part of the reason it's it's it's not like um it's not like a karmic thing. It's not like oh good people win. I think what happens is that like the people who are extractive and short-term minded and yada yada do their extraction and then leave and then the people who are left for long enough that create real value yeah are the ones who have something other than money that they're driven by and over 10 years eventually people realize that they're like oh they've actually created something really useful and then eventually the money shows up and those two those two things kind of come I mean look at like OpenAI right those guys were you know they've been around forever DeepMind these people have been around for like 15 years this is not like oh all of a sudden they showed up four years ago So it's like there were people grinding on this stuff for for a decade. Yeah. Um and they did it because they really believed in it.

Host26:58

How do you think about um if you are a founder right now building a crypto company, should you have a token or uh raise equity or that you know the the dual structure?

Avichal Garg27:08

Yeah, we are we are fans of raising equity and then thinking about how to have a token later. Um even though that then creates two structures. I think it can be done. Um uh I think there are certain cases where it may make sense to have both. Um I think there are certain cases where you should just um dissolve the equity basically have the equity go to zero and have it all in the token. Um and I think um there will be more and more people who are willing to do that.

Host27:33

Dissolve the equity.

Avichal Garg27:34

Correct. Yeah. Um and I think it makes sense actually rationally speaking because um and the reason I think that makes sense to do the equity first is I think in the ear like one of the mistakes I think people made and we've been very consistent in this over the last several years is I don't think you want to raise venture dollars from the retail market. Like retail doesn't understand what it actually takes to to build something and be patient for five years to make it work. That's our job. And a lot of what what the reason we can exist and have a business is that that's that's very difficult, right? To sort of, you know, anybody who's done a startup knows this and I've said this in other contexts. So, you know, you one day you go into a seed stage or series A company and you're like, "Oh my gosh, this thing's gonna IPO. It's the next OpenAI. It's going to be worth $10 billion." And then you go in two weeks later and you're like, "Oh my god, these guys are definitely going bankrupt." Like this thing's definitely And then repeat that every four weeks. It's like literally every two weeks.

Host28:26

I was thinking that when the um when the pump when the pump fund guys were, you know, they they were on a historic run and then obviously, you know, Noah and crew got humbled by, you know, the markets and bear market and stuff like that. And um they've built an amazing business and company and product. And I I couldn't help but think this is just a startup that shouldn't have a public token.

Avichal Garg28:46

Yeah, that's right.

Host28:46

That shouldn't have retail. Yeah. Saying that they should do things every week because this is just a startup going through it.

Avichal Garg28:51

Yeah. Yeah. This is why Stripe doesn't want to IPO. This is why OpenAI didn't want IPO. It's just like it's that that external pressure from people who don't understand who have not built startups who apply short-term pressure is a very difficult thing as a founder. And so I think if you're getting a thing off the ground pre-product market fit and while you're post-product market fit and scaling, it makes a lot of sense to have people around the table that give you the money to run the thing that understand that that's what it takes and how long it will take and that that's that's the natural order of things. But there comes a point at which um I think this idea of participatory capitalism is a real thing. And I think purely, you know, you could say that philosophically like the users deserve to benefit and and actually as a like wealth creation mechanism, owning pieces of things that are working is a really important societal good. Like if you didn't have the public stock markets and it's something I worry about with things like SpaceX and OpenAI and Anthropic going public at the scale that they are is like are is retail just left holding the bag? Um now fortunately we've had Nvidia and Facebook and Google and all these companies that went public that you could have participated in. And so I was just looking I just saw a tweet about the numbers but it's you know like the NASDAQ is up like six and a half x over 10 years. That's real returns for people right like even as a venture manager there not a lot of funds that did six and a half over 10 years it's really good right so that as a wealth creation mechanism is really important in society because that's how average people who are good hardworking people when they like you know pay their mortgage every month and they work their jobs and they take care of their families like they deserve to have a good retirement and that's how they're going to do that. Um and and so I think that idea of people having access to wealth and wealth creation mechanisms is is a really important thing. Now what's interesting is we have

that in the United States through the QQQ. A lot of the world can't access that stuff, right? Like if you're in Vietnam, if you're in Lebanon, if you're in South America, you can't access the US. How do you access the US markets? You can't. And so I think the escape valve for that stuff is actually going to be the tokens. And I don't mean tokenized equities because I think that gets into some gnarly sort of legislative regulatory side of equities. Very tricky, right? But I think things like Hyperliquid or Near, right, these things are, or Solana, like things that have actual fees and a fee stream and you can model that. You know, I think the thought process for a lot of people in the world is going to be, oh wait a second, I can finally get dollars because everybody in the world has to deal with inflation and buying goods relative to dollars. And so the dollar is a store of value for a lot of people in the world. So they want dollars, which is why stablecoins have such product market fit. But the natural thought after you have stablecoins is, wait, what do I do with this? Like it's great, I can have it. And then someone comes along and says, do you want to make 4% on your dollars? Like I can give you treasury yield. And you know, effectively that flows through to things like Aave. And so you know, that means like everybody in the world that has dollars will just want to make 4% through some money market or treasury or whatever. And then they'll look around and somebody will come along and say, somebody like Ethena will say, hey, do you want to make like 12%? Like, and it's reinsurance over here. And if you're in one of these markets, you're like, wait a second, like 12% in US dollar terms and I'm getting inflated away relative to dollars. Like if you're in India right now, like historic lows on the rupee versus the dollar, you know, like you're down 10% because of inflation already. You're down at 12. Like you just made like 22% a year in rupee terms. Like you're crushing. Like where can you put money if you're in some of these markets that you're going to make like 20 plus percent a year and your savings are like self-custodied and they're away from your financial system and they're yours and they're in dollars and like this is pretty killer. And so I think if you start thinking of this, we go back to '21 with 0% interest rates, how did that manifest in the market? Well, when you exist in a low interest rate regime or a high inflation rate regime, your willingness to pay for assets goes up. The way that manifests in equity terms is PE ratios go up. And so I think actually there's a huge population of the world, literally five or six billion people, whose willingness to pay for cash flows is actually greater than the US institutions that really dominate the US equities markets. So as a founder, I think the right question to ask is, is this a product that the stablecoin holders of the world will be willing to pay me a higher PE ratio for that same cash flow relative to what I could get on the US equities markets? And I think in many cases, the answer will be yes. That actually those markets are willing to pay you a higher PE for that cash flow because they don't have access to alternatives.

Host33:14

Oh, that's interesting.

Avichal Garg33:14

Right. And so for some period of time, I think it will actually be more rational. Like maybe this normalizes one day, but I don't think it normalizes for the next 10 years where actually if you have a really, really great business, you are better off doing a token launch and getting it in the hands of your users and retail all over the world because their willingness to pay a higher PE ratio is a function of them not having access to all the other stuff that your US pension funds have access to.

Host33:36

Do you have an idea of what is the catalyst that makes that happen? Because okay, so you know, first 10 years of crypto, let's say starting from 2015 with ETH, right? For like 10 years tokens had a premium. Like there was the L1 premium, there was the L2 premium, there was DEXs launching and a year later they trade at $3 billion. We are now in an era where tokens are for the first time ever trading at a discount to what they probably should trade at. Many of them, there's still I'm sure some overvalued ones, but I think that if you were a founder choosing between token and equity, if you launched a token, you would be valued higher than if you had equity. Now it's the opposite. I think if you launch a token, you're valued almost lower. Is there a catalyst that changes that? And maybe it's as simple as you need a couple tokens to really rip, things catch a bid. Maybe that's Hyperliquid.

Avichal Garg34:24

Zcash and VVV or something like that. Yeah, I think it's basically the market doing what it's doing right now, which is rerating the things that actually have product market fit and are working. And looking at the revenues. I mean that's another piece of infrastructure that didn't exist eight years ago, which is like how do you actually validate how much money the thing is making and now you can actually do that on chain. Like you can see the cash flows and you can see the buybacks. And so I think Hyperliquid and Ethena and Near and, you know, Zcash doesn't have cash flows, I think that's sort of in the Bitcoin, ETH camp of is this a form of store of value. But I would put Ethena into that camp, right? It's just like there's some interest rate, there's some productive thing that's happening, there's value getting created in the world and the software gets to capture a piece of that and then it takes that and it cycles that back to the token holders in some form and that's just a spreadsheet that you can model. And I think that's starting to happen. And so what you need is like three, four, five examples of this. So an analogy here, it's always risky to reason by analogy, but I think it's useful to understand why things happen, is like after the internet crash, all these internet stocks, Amazon for example, is the classic one people talk about, just got crushed. And people didn't properly on a go forward basis understand the growth and how to value these things. And in my opinion, like probably one of the big catalysts was the Google IPO. Like Google IPO is in 2005. And people look at the numbers and they're like, wait a second, this thing's real. Like this isn't like some internet hype thing. Like you look at the numbers and you can put a PE ratio on that. And we know how to value that. And I think that was a really important catalyst. And it took another several years on the other side of that for all the internet stocks to rerate, for these companies, you know, for Amazon to be worth what it was worth post AWS and for people to say, yeah, maybe Facebook could actually be worth money. Like I think people have forgotten, you know, Marc Andreessen wrote that very now famous 'software is eating the world' thesis and I think he wrote it in like '08 maybe. And published it and it was a controversial thesis. It sounds ridiculous in retrospect but even in like 2008 people thought maybe the internet was a fad, right? Because you had this overhang from the 2001 crash where people were not reassessing that assumption and being like wait a second actually these things should be trading at 25 PE and the growth rates when you're growing at 80% a year with real revenue actually maybe these things should be trading at like 60 PE. But that took like a decade before everything rerated.

Host36:40

Yeah. That's funny to think that that was a controversial piece.

Avichal Garg36:43

Yeah. People were like, no, no, this guy's crazy.

Host36:46

So what's the controversial piece to write today?

Avichal Garg36:49

Well, I think this is basically what you're talking about, which is actually tokens are useful. Like tokens as a value capture mechanism for people to capture the fruits of a network's success and pass it back to the users is actually a useful primitive. And if done well, that offers access to really good products and the revenue streams of those products to a whole market of five billion people who don't otherwise have access to good financial products. And so I think like you need three, four, five of these things to really work. And so Hyperliquid might be like Google where all of a sudden people are like wait a second like this is kind of working. Why are we valuing this the way that we are? Should we be valuing this a different way?

Host37:25

Who are the other good ones?

Avichal Garg37:27

And who are the other good ones? And then those get revealed.

Host37:28

So let's answer the question. Okay. So we talked about VVV, talked about Ethena. Does Ethena have a token?

Avichal Garg37:34

Ethena just announced they're going to do a TGE token.

Host37:36

We talked about Hyperliquid, VVV, Zcash. Who, what are a couple others that you guys like? Like who are, either companies with tokens or without tokens, crypto companies where you think the market maybe is sleeping on them.

Avichal Garg37:50

I think basically what I would do rather than maybe calling out specific examples of tokens is I would look at basically any fintech or marketplace. And say, are the users of this thing potentially global from day zero? Are there a bunch of people that understand this in the markets where stablecoins are held? And if that's true, you might want to run the exercise of what would happen if this thing had a token. And I think there are many, many such cases where it's either a fintech or it's a marketplace where actually people all over the world would be willing to buy into that cash flow stream because the product is real. And I think you need a couple examples of that. So, for example, I'll use Ethena as an example. I think if Ethena does well over the next three to four to five years, I don't think it's crazy for a lot of like weird esoteric reinsurance is a kind of a strange thing like the average person does not, that's not something the average person experiences day-to-day. But I think then founders will look at that and say oh wait a second maybe my commercial paper thing or my thing that sits in between all the banks or my private credit tokenization thing, my real estate thing, whatever, these are huge markets, would benefit from having a token and from being on chain and accessing those stablecoin markets and paying 10 or 12 or 14% yield out to those people and all the profits that I make get passed back to the tokens and I have tokens as well but how actually the multiple I'm going to get on my revenue will actually be higher. That would be the thesis. And I think we'll know in the next like three to five years if that plays out. But I think if it plays out then a whole bunch of fintechs and marketplaces say actually this is just, it's kind of like an, you know, I think all these people will be rational and so it's like well do you IPO or do you launch a token on chain and the rational thing to do as a founder would be to pick the place that gives you a better multiple on the revenue that you have.

Host39:43

It's a good take. Let's talk about the majors. Bitcoin, ETH, Sol. We kind of talked about Hyperliquid already. Is Hyperliquid a major? We can skip that. Bitcoin, ETH, Sol. What are your, maybe we can skip Bitcoin. I'm curious to get your take on ETH for Sol today because you know that those were the podcasts that we were doing years ago. You, me, and Santiago. ETH for Sol.

Avichal Garg40:01

Yeah, we're still very, very optimistic about both. You know, I think it's just the thing with these markets too that I think people don't understand. This is kind of what's happening with the foundational model companies. And I think this is true with, let's say, SpaceX. Again, not financial advice, but it's rare that you just have one thing that wins. There's usually some sort of power law. And so, if the thing that wins, if you think Bitcoin is worth 20 trillion one day, like gold, then like why wouldn't the next best thing be worth three trillion or four trillion? That's like not at all crazy in my opinion. And actually I think these markets are still young enough like how many people today own Bitcoin or own ETH or own Sol relative to the market of people that will, there's actually very little exposure right now. And so I don't think these are at all settled. And you're kind of seeing that with Zcash, right? I think people are sort of saying like wait a second maybe like the early adopters have figured out privacy really matters. And so they should have some ZEC exposure as well and then the mainstream will figure that out, right? And so it's just so early I think in the evolution of these markets that I think people are really underestimating kind of what the TAMs are and what the ceilings are. And I think the other thing people are really underestimating is like I don't think you're going to have, I think the L1 wars are kind of over. Like I don't think you're going to get this like oh there's another like hundred that come in. And especially when you're talking about platforms or when you're talking about money-ness in the case of let's say BTC and ETH. It just like Lindy is a thing and it's going to take a long time for these things to get displaced. And so they'll just continue to compound for a long, long time. Like I think people are short-term bearish on them, but it's because they don't understand how compounding works and I think they don't understand how slowly institutions move. There's a stat that Hunter Horsley told me once so I might be misremembering exactly but it was roughly, you know, after the gold ETF was launched, inflows into the ETF went up every year for about 12 years. So like that's just, it just takes forever for institutions to, like every wealth manager in the world has to reallocate and it's just going to take a while, right? And so like people, and that's if you look at it on a dollar weighted basis that's where all the money is, right? Like that's, you know, wealth managers control something like $2 trillion, the institutions of the United States have another $2 trillion and they're not going to allocate 50 or 100 basis points overnight, it's just going to take years. But like the sheer dollar amounts that you're talking about are like a hundred x bigger than what crypto Twitter has brought to the table thus far. A thousand x bigger. And so I think people are just, it's like it's hard. It's in the moment it's tough, right? It's sort of these things that they kind of go sideways for a while and then the world changes and then everybody, the market re-realizes it and then everything gets rerated.

Host42:46

Do you have thoughts on the brokerage platforms that will win? I don't know if you have skin in this game or if you have a take here like, you know, is Coinbase or Kraken like a crypto-native US exchange the winner? Is it someone like a Robinhood? Is it someone like maybe it's Charles Schwab and E-Trade because they already have the boomer distribution? Is it, you know, we have the Asian exchanges right now, Bybit, OKX, Binance all pushing into the US, is it one of them?

Avichal Garg43:12

Yeah, I mean we're investors in Kraken, so hopefully it's Kraken. I will say Arjun's doing a phenomenal job. Yeah, he's doing really good. I agree. Jesse's another good example like Jesse started that company for the right reasons and sort of held true to their principles for a long time. And then yeah, Arjun I think has really stepped it up to the next level as a business. We actually, well I mean they just acquired one of our portfolio companies, Bitnomial to do all the derivative stuff. And so yeah, we're sizable shareholders there now. So it's like a pretty sizable acquisition, but you know I think it'll be relatively fragmented actually. I don't think it's going to be one winner. I think it's going to be several very large winners. I mean if you look at the banks in the United States for example, you know there's like a thousand banks and there is a power law there and obviously JP is really big but you have like five to 10 actually very sizable businesses. And it's because so much of what those businesses become at scale is a set of similar offerings like every bank gives you a mortgage and a credit card and a savings account and every exchange, not just a crypto exchange, every exchange will give you access to BTC and ETH, they'll give you access to tokenized equities and they'll give you access to some leverage and they'll give you access to the money market account and they'll give you collateralized lending and so the offerings will be the same and then the question is like which group of people do you really tailor your product offering and your customer acquisition channels towards like where does your business learn to acquire customers? How do you speak, what is that brand? How do you speak to those customers? And you can't have a one-size-fits-all. And so you need Amex and you need Capital One and you need Discover Card and you need Ramp. So the markets are so large when you're talking about equities or when you're talking about dollars or when you're talking about these products or lending that I think you probably get like 15 or 20 winners and they just all sort of come.

Host45:10

Yeah. The size of the market is so much bigger than people realize.

Avichal Garg45:12

Yeah. That's right. And I think now the most interesting question there is like incumbents versus startups. Can Schwab win or can Fidelity win? By and large I think the incumbents will not win. I think Schwab is in a really, really tough spot. And it's because it's sort of the classic, I think it's a Marc Andreessen phrase so credit him for it, but it's will the incumbents figure out innovation before the startups figure out distribution? And I think in the modern world, it's increasingly easy for startups to figure out distribution and acquire all those customers as the world has gotten wired up. And harder for humans to change an organization and change the culture. I think the one exception to that is a founder organization. Where when a founder, you know, like the thing a founder has is moral authority. And so Zuck or Elon, you know, can go into an organization and just say, we're just not doing that anymore. And by the way, we're going to take a short-term revenue hit. We're just going to lose half of our revenue for the next five years in order to reboot the business to get out of this local maximum that we're in. Right? If you're, think about like a 3D surface, right? You're at some local maximum, but in order to get to that higher point in the search space, you might have to go down and then traverse the space and then go back up, right? But an organization is unwilling to do that. Tough to do that if you're a hired CEO. It's very, very difficult. Like is the board going to give you five years to do that? Is your team going to give you five years to do that? But founders tend to have moral authority. So Fidelity is interesting because it's a family-run operation. So you know if you take another domain, take like journalism, it's interesting because, you know, like Bezos bought the Washington Post and he has that founder mentality. So he's just like no we're just going to do that. But you know, you look at who's managed to navigate that transition and you know, like Chicago Tribune and LA Times and Seattle Times, all these things died, but the New York Times survived and actually the New York Times is thriving now. And it's because it's family controlled, right? And so I think there's something to that. And so the category of things I think in the legacy world that might be able to pull that off, I think, are the things where that leader has some sort of moral authority to sort of eat it in the face for five years before you hit the next upswing. And so Fidelity might have a shot.

Host47:24

Fidelity. Franklin Templeton. Another one.

Avichal Garg47:26

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. VanEck, right? Like there are these businesses where it's like the person running it has moral authority. And the organization will therefore, you can retool the organization. But you know, that's why I mean you look at like Walmart, Walmart's had 30 years to try to catch up to Amazon and they just can't. And it's not because the problems are unknown or it's like how do you change the organization? How do you reboot the culture? How do you hire the right people? How do you fire half your people and get a totally different group of people? How do you change the compensation structure, right? How do you like all of a sudden a bunch of people that used to make a bunch of money now need to make half the money and a bunch of people that should make twice the money are probably not the right people? So, you got to get rid of all these people, find a bunch of people that you pay twice as much. Meanwhile, you got to somehow retain these people and cut their comp in half.

Host48:09

Yeah. How do you do that? Yeah. Talking about changing organizations. You'll see the pivot I'm about to make. Tell me your views on Ethereum.

Avichal Garg48:19

Ethereum, I think, is probably, well, we're very optimistic. We still own all our ETH. And I think they're just going through this transition of basically realizing that they, you know, I think what ETH has that is very difficult to reproduce is that credible neutrality. And I think if you think that there's going to be some sort of a global financial system settlement layer and transaction layer, I think that is the critical thing that trust and neutrality is a thing that is basically irreproducible. Bitcoin has it for some reasons, but the technology platform is not really set up to do what the global financial system needs. It's phenomenal as an asset. ETH has that. And I think if you look at what's happening, step back just like outside of the crypto world for a second, like what's happening in the world. You have essentially this proxy war with China and Russia and Iran and the United States. You have tensions in Asia, Southeast Asia. You have tensions in the Gulf. There's the question of like the United States is trying to have influence over Latin America. There's all this. It's like what happens with oil? You have Russia, Ukraine. All these things are happening. And for me the turning point for ETH actually was when the United States decided to seize Russian assets in dollar terms and weaponize the dollar. And there are two forms of weaponization of the dollar. I think one that the market is willing to accept and one that the market is not willing to accept. The one that the market is willing to accept is sanctions which is you did something bad Iran or North Korea and we as a collective global governance body allied with the US think that you are doing something terrible and so we're going to try to freeze you out of the financial system and we can do that because the financial system runs on dollars. There is a different version of this which is we are going to seize your assets and that starts to feel really scary when the United States did that to Russia. And it's because if your allies side with the US, but you're not basically the UK or Australia, which have really historical ties for reasons. If you're Germany, if you're France, if you're India, if you're Turkey, if you're Brazil, you're looking at the world, and this is, by the way, most of the world. You're looking at the world and you're like, okay, I don't think I want to be allied with the Chinese. Like, India certainly doesn't. But now I'm worried that if I ally with the US and then they want me to do something and I don't do it, they're just going to take all my money. And so, what do you really want? What you want is a US dollar denominated system that the US cannot single-handedly decide to boot you from and where the United States cannot just take all your assets. And that's literally what Ethereum is. It's a US dollar denominated system that nobody in the world controls that anybody can mutually agree to transact upon where the United States can't steal your assets. And there are ways to structure dollar synthetic dollar assets that are not sitting in US banks. Just like the Eurodollar system. And I think that's like what is that worth? I think that's worth a lot of money. That's a very different thing than Bitcoin. But I don't see anybody else that can do that. And so I think if you're any bank, I think if you're any country, I think if you're any central bank, like this is the only place you can do that. Now, how does that get valued? How do you, you know, does that mean ETH becomes a store of value? Is the endogenous backing asset for the thing which can be used as collateral, yada yada. We tend to think that those things are true and we've written about this.

Host51:52

But for that to happen, don't you need a leader who wants that to happen? And hasn't like the EF shown folks and Vitalik has shown folks that making ETH the asset the priority is not ETH the network. Agree. Yeah. Great network, but ETH the asset I feel like they've shown you with their actions that it's not important.

Avichal Garg52:10

Well, so I think there's a couple things there. So, specifically on the EF, it was I thought it was interesting just this week with Vitalik's tweet where he said he basically said like ETH is a financial platform and it secures, it's a credible neutral financial platform and the most important asset that it secures is ETH was like the killer line in there. I was like finally like 10 years later like this is what we wrote about in 2018. I was like it's a financial platform and that's the most important asset. And so I think actually there's now a tacit acknowledgement that that is the case. Then the question is, well, do you need an organization, a central organization to evangelize that? Maybe, I mean, Bitcoin didn't have one and they managed to have a bunch of people that were economically aligned that pulled that off. And I think our opinion is at this point between, let's say, Bitwise and the ETH Foundation and early ETH holders and people in the ICO and all the VCs that have invested in the space, us and Andreessen and Paradigm and Dragonfly, that there's enough people who can evangelize that. And so I don't think you necessarily need a single person to do it. And I think the fact that you have gotten to the kind of scale that you have, you have ETFs, you have, you go talk to anybody on Wall Street, like where are they building, right? They're, everybody's trying to build on Ethereum. Where's Coinbase building, where's Robinhood building, where's SoFi building? Like I think that all signs point towards like that's where actually underneath it all, I'm not talking like price action, I'm not talking crypto Twitter energy, underneath it all all of the activity for that sort of behavior which is critically geopolitically central bank level important behavior that's happening right now in this space. And I think it'll take some time for people to sort of appreciate and underwrite that and reassess that. Does that happen in a year? I don't know. Does it happen in five years? I don't know. But I think probably in 10 years people will look around and be like, oh, wow. Like that's really important. And I should own a piece of that. And so, you know, I think people are, yeah. Like I said, I don't know when it rerates. But I think at some point people will get their heads around that there is something unique to this thing that nobody else will be able to reproduce. And that thing is valuable.

Host54:16

How do you think, so the thing that ETH is winning by far is both DeFi and institutions I'd say. So on the DeFi side the scary thing about DeFi right now is AI and, you know, Anthropic is coming out with Mythos soon and how do you think about, is how do we make DeFi safe again?

Avichal Garg54:40

Yeah. Well, it's interesting because I think DeFi is going to be in the short term scarier, but in the long term much more robust and secure than TradFi. And it's because it's open source. And this is the way open source systems work. Which is that because they're open source, they're easy to attack. But the more that they get attacked, the more you patch all the holes. And once you patch all the holes, then there's no more holes. Now, if you compare that to like the legacy banking system, short-term pain, long-term gain. Yeah. I think you actually build like openness and transparency are painful short term but long term are actually much more resilient, right? And so they're less efficient but more resilient and I think for a financial system where actually you more or less understand the primitives, there's trading and lending and equities like we kind of understand the building blocks that you need and the instruments that you need, building them in an open source way where you can formally verify them and you can find all the bugs and then you can prove that those things are fixed produces a system that's much more resilient. So I think if you play this out five years, I think DeFi is going to be far more secure than any of the traditional financial systems. And I think even the way that people will think about AI level, not just like the hacker risk of something like a Mythos, but like think about voice models are getting really, really good. So like real-time voice generation and synthesizing somebody's voice off of a one minute clip of them. Can somebody call the bank and pretend to be you? And can they convince the teller, you know, on the phone, the rep to do a thing? And I think like rebuilding all of that infrastructure from the perspective of, hey, today we know that AI exists. So, how should we do customer support around DeFi? Like, how should Coinbase do that or how should Robinhood do that? I think they're actually going to build those systems in the right way. Whereas, like it's not clear to me that Schwab is going to be resilient to attack. Right. And so like I think over the next 5 years or so the code gets audited, the code gets formally verified, the DeFi open ecosystem is going to move way faster and so in five years I think these systems are way more secure and then the dollars will sort of follow.

Host56:46

And do you think we'll figure out some way to prevent North Korea from hacking these things?

Avichal Garg56:49

I think so. Yeah. Short answer is yes. Now I think that the biggest challenge in getting to that end state is who's putting the money in today, right? And are you being properly compensated for the risk? And I think that there is a very strong argument that you are not being compensated for the risk that you're taking today in these DeFi ecosystems. But it turns out you don't need that many people to take that risk. You know, a couple billion dollars is enough of a honeypot for North Korea. And then you just sort of patch the system. So I think it might be one of these things that's like I actually think if you look at DeFi TVL, if you look at transaction volumes, there's actually a lot of things are trending in the right direction. And those systems are actually way stronger than they were in '21 for all sorts of reasons. But even so, if you didn't see like parabolic growth for two or three years, as long as there's enough assets in there, I think you'll actually make these systems very, very, very resilient and then when the assets come, like it'll just go vertical.

Host57:46

Yeah. All right. That's the security optimism that we needed. Yeah. Avichal, this is great. Anything that we haven't talked about that you think we should talk about or anything that's, as you look out you have a unique place in the industry, anything that feels very obvious to you that you think maybe crypto Twitter and the general public is not seeing yet?

Avichal Garg58:07

Yeah, I just think as a, I think probably the biggest thing is kind of it's this recurring theme that we've talked about which is there's a really, really big disconnect between the sentiment on a place like crypto Twitter or in Telegram groups versus when you go and talk to founders and they're like yeah the stuff that was really hard five years ago is trivial now or you go talk to people in developing markets and they're like, I can finally get dollars and I want to put them to work. Like where can I, what can I do to put them to work? Or you look at the aggregate metrics of the things that are working like Hyperliquid. And so I think people are too caught up in the sentiment of it and they're not looking at the fundamentals. But I mean that's frankly that's why we have a business, right? It's just like that's hard to do. But I think if people actually started looking at the fundamentals and looked at where the founders are and what's getting built and went and talked to people on Wall Street and went and talked to people in Indonesia or India, the perception is just so discordant with reality. It's just like, and perception and reality tend to converge and it's perception that collapses to reality usually. And so I think people will figure this out, but I think it might take another two years, which it's funny, right? It's just like the people that draw the lines and triangles on the charts and like, oh, it's a four-year cycle, yada yada. There is a cycle. And I tend to believe it, but I don't think it's for technical reasons. I think it's for human psychology reasons because that's approximately the amount of time that it takes for everybody to have forgotten the pain and the lessons of the last bull cycle and for humans to emotionally process everything that's happening takes like two years. And then at the end of that two years, we've processed the emotions and you stop. You know, everybody that felt bad enough and depressed enough to leave is gone. And anybody that's left is they're here for some reason. And then you kind of look around and everybody that believed in something is just building. And then everybody kind of looks around like, wait a second, this is actually all real now. Still here. And the products got better and the tech got better and then it just sort of kicks off again. So I think it's not for technical reasons. I think it's purely a downstream human psychology thing that we're seeing playing out yet again. Like it's just the same human psychology every four years. People sometimes question crypto VCs, right? But I think professional investors tend to make their money in bear markets. Anyone can make money in the bull market, right? You look at all of our friends, I'm sure your friends too, making gobs of money and, you know, with AI and everyone thinks they're a genius right now. They're buying Micron and it's up 20% day over day, right? So, yeah. But it's in the bear markets when the human psychology can get in the way. And when retail oftentimes pulls out and that's actually the best time to invest. And that's how I feel about the token markets today. 100 percent. Yeah. It's the difference between trading and investing. Like bull markets are great for trading. Bear markets are great for investing. If you can find those founders that are going to have a 10-year vision. Yeah. I just think the world is going to look so, so different in the next five years. And a lot of the things that are going to make it really interesting and different are the things that people are essentially creating right now.

Host1:01:08

Yeah, I agree. Avichal, thank you. Good to see you.