Coming off of like FTX, right, and Terra and all that stuff,
right? And just the world just couldn't
be worse. There's two sort of ways this
goes. Number one, it was all scam and
it's all going to 0 or #2 If you're actually going to do a
company, now is the best time to do it.
No one's here anymore. So competition is low.
And like there's probably some kind of change that's happened
in the market because usually big events lead to change.
And like I said, that's the job of the founders to find change.
Everyone was trying to take the blockchain, quote UN quote, and
like bring it to Tribefy. Let's do this like JP Morgan
chain, right? Or let's do like a Goldman Sachs
chain or whatever. And I remember thinking like,
and that sounds terrible, you know, why would we do that?
What we really should do is actually bring the real world to
crypto. That's one of the main things
we're focused on a plume is making sure that we build the
pipelines and the rails that bring them in in a manner and in
a in a way that benefits US versus just replicating the same
shit. We have auction today on Shane.
Welcome to Epicenter of the show, which talks about the
technologies, projects and people driving decentralization
in the blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastian Kuchu and I'm here
with Christian, who's CEO at Plume.
They're an asset management platform focus in the RWA space
is an L1 that allows issuers to issue RWA's and they have an
interesting yield product. And so we're going to be talking
about real world assets. Is it overinflated the
institutionalization of crypto? And a whole lot of other things.
But first, here's a word from our sponsors this week.
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AI. Chris, thanks for joining me.
Thanks for coming on the show. I'd love to chat a little bit
about your background cuz I, you know, you were a founder and
then were in VC and went back to being a founder.
That trajectory, it feels like a little bit unnatural, but I do
like it. What was the impetus for going
back in the Founder's seat after having worked in Vt?
Yeah, totally, totally. Thanks for having.
Thanks for having me and looking forward to getting into it all.
So yeah, look, like you said, my background is very simple.
You know, I came out of school and I was mostly just kind of
bouncing around and doing technology stuff, which sort of
manifested in doing like basically doing software
startups and, you know, mostly kind of financial stuff,
meaning, you know, we were doing like invoicing and, you know,
like very exciting, you know, enterprise software.
But it was kind of right on my place, right?
And then from there I went to venture after, right?
So we were managed, you know, sell the company, then take the
public and it was the whole thing and learned a lot about
about that. But then we went to venture and
that's kind of like what you're supposed to do, I guess, right?
Do you sort of like, you know, do do the startup thing?
You get tired and and you're like, hey, look like, let me let
me go do and do the venture thing and and, you know, invest
instead, right, Because it's, you know, seen as like a high
status job. Perhaps, you know, they're sort
of like this, this veneer of like you very like know a lot of
things and you know, and like you get to meet a bunch of
people. What do you think are all true
to some degree, But the truth is like, look, I've been an Angel
best That's how I got to do it. Like I just kind of followed for
great founders. I'm not bold enough thing.
I'm actually like that smarter things.
And so I was voted just like, you know, writing early days
checks into my friends and like founders that I just thought
were like interesting and doing fun stuff.
And from there, like actually, you know, a bunch of them did
really well. And then that's how I sort of
like got sucked into classic ventures and maybe I should go
like learn how to do this properly, right.
And turns out it's, you know, you're selling money and and
then it's the same thing no matter where you go, you know,
And so like, that was my lesson from it all.
But like at the venture side of things, basically, I liked it a
lot. I like many aspects of job a
lot, but I also thought a lot of it was just absolute like mind
numbing stuff, you know, because at the end of the day, you sort
of had this like philosophical veneer around those things.
But the truth of it is that like at the end of the, you're
selling money, that's what it really is, right?
The people that need the money, right, you don't want to give it
to, and people that don't need the money you're trying to give
it to, right? And so you're selling cash.
It's very hard to turn your cash more green, right?
And and then someone else's, right?
Like my money was always less green than sequoias.
And, and, and that were paradigms as an example, right?
And so like, you know, that sort of my think at the time was, you
know, one, it is, it's one of two kinds of people in venture,
right? There's people that sort of
chase people that get chased, right.
And, you know, I, in some categories, you know, people
would come to me because I sort of knew a lot about the market
or whatever. And so that was great.
But it was, it was, it's not quite the same thing as like,
you know, there's certain people I really can suck in all the
deals. And so I was like, look, like
the more fundamental path here is to, you know, basically
improve, improve, like your own, your own ability, right?
And that's how you sort of like you to flip the script and, and,
and, you know, progress back down that path.
And so that was really why I was like, look, let's like come back
and, and you know, 1 is like it. I felt like I'd, I'd sort of
like the juice and energy to run it again and to, to run it back
in so many words. And if there's plenty of time to
like get it, write checks and just sit around and do nothing.
And so let's let's, you know, roll the dice again.
So that's that's where I came up to.
No, that's interesting. I mean, I, I also was a founder
and then started AVC fund. And I think there was also when
I, when I started to fund some, some aspect of this veneer and
this kind of high status, very intellectual sort of job.
But like, you know, we have fairly, fairly small fund.
And I found that although it was really great, it is really great
and really interesting to, to talk to founders.
It's, it's a hard, like it's a much harder job than most, I
think think it is because you have to be like fundraising
constantly and that that takes a huge toll on you.
I mean like the trailing and the meeting investors and, you know,
you have to talk to 1000 investors for, you know, 10 to
possibly invest in your fund. And, and the other thing that
most people don't realize is like running a fund is a lot of
compliance. And and I find that I know, I
think I think there's actually like a really good business
opportunity here for like all of that to get just automated and
AI like automated. Yeah, yeah, just the fuck out of
and for sure. But for the moment it's like not
that well automated and doing that is just a soul sucking work
so. So like you said, running,
running a fund and actually investing are two very different
things. I mean, actually running a fund,
like 90% of the dollar is running the fund.
You know, what would you start a fund versus actually investing?
And so you're not really doing any of it, right?
But but, but like they feed into each other.
So you have like trying to invest to help you run like
fundraise, but you're always doing that instead of investing.
So it just ends up being a shit show.
So yeah, I get it. Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's
certainly resonates with me. And as, as I'm thinking now, you
know, now the funds been deployed and you know, thinking
about what to do next, building something is definitely,
definitely feels more appealing than like starting another fund.
And so at what point did you get in interested in this idea of
putting real world assets? And I'm, I'm, I'm going to, I'm
going to want to deconstruct that term with you later, but
putting real world assets on. Terrible afternoon.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I mean, like it's just assets,
like those are assets and there's rails, you know, like,
you know, we, we didn't reinvent commerce by putting on the
Internet. It's the same products, it's
just different rails. And I and I sort of see real
world assets in the same light where we're just putting assets
on a different, you know, different infrastructure.
I remember it's a buzzword, but yeah.
How how did you get interested in putting treasuries and and
private credit on chain? And what was the genesis story
for Plume? Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it was, it was pretty simple.
I mean, we had a, you know, I was, I was, we're coming off of
like FTX, right, and Terra and all that stuff, right.
And just the world just couldn't be worse.
And it was, I remember I was, I was sort of like it was still a
nudge at the top, that sort of thing to myself.
There's two ways. There's two sort of ways this
goes. Number one, it was all a scam
and it's all going to 0, right. And like we should just.
And it was, it was fun while it lasted, you know, and there's
that or #2 if you're actually into a company, now is the best
time to do it, right? Because like no one's here
anymore. So competition is low.
And like there's probably some kind of change that's happened
in the market because usually big events lead to change.
And like I said, that's the job of the founders to find change,
right? And, and ideally the change is
big and positive and that you capture the right way.
But it was, it was very clear to me, like some change is
happening, whether it's change to the downside, the upside is
unclear, right? But at that point, it's like,
you know, it's, it's sort of like the conditions are right to
do something. And I had, I had sort of been in
around, like I looked at a bunch of things in, in, in, in crypt
at the time. I, I thought we thought of doing
BTC stuff and B5 stuff and blah, blah, blah, right.
And BTC at the time was just like, you know, a grand new
world, right? Of all the things we could do
with BTC and like run back the sort of D5 playbook on, on
Bitcoin. But, you know, you know, Teddy,
my Cofan and I, we just kept getting pulled back to this idea
that, you know, if there's change happening because of all
this stuff, what is that change, right?
And how would it express itself? Number one?
And the number 2 is, you know, we'd always sort of seen that
like, look, you know, I live like the most of my lifestyle
Unchained and like, you know, we were like very like crypto
native people. And, you know, it just felt very
limited. There was only so much you could
do. It was awesome, everything we
could do. But you, you sort of like
contain. There was this the real world
and there was crypto and they're just two separate things at the
time, you know, and you couldn't interact with them very much.
And you know, we just sort of felt like there was a the market
was changing where those two things were coming together,
right eyed Angel. Listen to a bunch of like R to
be with companies of time ahead of time, right?
And you know, they're all, I think Muslim went to zero
because it was just not the right thing at the right time.
But it's sort of like I was interested in this idea of like
onboarding if we get new things that and growing crypto, right?
And Teddy was AB and B at the time, sort of like doing a bunch
of BD where he's AB and B chain. And that was like a big thing
for them as well, right? And so both of us were sort of
like centered around this idea of growing crypto, right?
It's sort of like if, if all we're doing here is like hyper
gambling on shitters, it's not a bad thing, but it seems like an
underutilization of what it should be and what we could do
with it. And you know, if there's change
now, it could be the right moment where these pieces come
together where you could actually bring real things here,
right? And our view at the time, which
I think was different than everyone else's, right?
And everyone was told, everyone told us we were like very stupid
at the time to do to think about this was everyone.
Everyone is super dismissant for RWS at the time, right?
They're sort of like, this is not a real thing.
You know, nobody really cares, you know, blah, blah, blah,
right? And we can't tell you every,
every I've, I've met everyone out there, nobody cares, right?
Except, except a few folks that, that NF backing us.
But there was that. And then #2 is the people that
did get it were hypertrad focused, right?
They were very like, you know, you got to be, you know, Goldman
bankers suit compliance, private chain, blah, blah, blah, right?
And we were the only people at the time to be very like, I
think still crypto, right? Our view was that I don't think
of these as like real world assets and, and, and, and
crypto. These are, like you said to me,
they're all the same thing. They're just assets.
I just want to swap between these things that I don't see a
distinction from these two worlds.
Meaning I used to always say when the world's up, right?
I want to be full port fart coin, right?
Like that's just the reality of things.
And when things go down, I probably rotate the T-bills,
right? But but it's the same, it's the
same type of thing, right? They're both.
You can do both at the same time.
And that was our view, which is like that.
Isn't this like I should only do crypto.
I should only do it. We should have both exist in the
same dimension, right? And that was it.
And we have felt that sort of everyone was trying to take the
blockchain, quote UN quote and like bring it to Tradfi and
bring it to the real world, right?
Let's like, let's do this like JP Morgan chain, right?
Or let's do like a Goldman Sachs chain or whatever.
And I remember thinking like, this is terrible, you know, why
would we do that? And what we really should do is
actually bring the real world to crypto, which is that you And it
felt like to me there was a real demand for that, for real demand
for it. It just wasn't expressed very
well because all the people doing hard was the time were
like trad people who didn't understand crypto.
So they would come to this thing with a heavy KYC stuff for
mission chains. You know, there's no
interoperability, you can't use it, right?
But you could see that like the, the appetite for real world
assets was already there to express itself in different
ways. We always looked at the stable
coin, right, as the inspiration for pulling, which is like the
stable coin is it's not a real world asset, it's just crypto,
right? Even though it is the original
real world asset and the only one that actually matters to
that, right? And it's because the stable
coin, it just disappears into into the fabric of crypto.
You don't need to think about the fact there's anything over
the hood, right? Well, Tether for years we had no
idea there was anything under the hood.
Doesn't even matter. You know, the idea that it could
be possibly backed by a dollar was enough, you know, for us to
like full port Tether, right? And so this idea, everyone
always says, well, we just really want to know what it's
not ownership, it's about the plastic.
It's not about any of those things.
It's about the usability, It's about the experience.
It's about solving a problem for the market that's here today,
which is cryptonatives, right? And starting with that and
building on top of that. And so that was kind of the
focus for us, which is like, you know, to really focus and bring
this like, you know, we call the art of EFI, which is, you know,
you know, admittedly it's not my favorite phrase it either.
But you know, it's this idea that like, you know, you should
be able to kind of move in and around between Rd. assets and
crypto. You should be able to use these
Rd. assets just as you would use crypto, just like the stable
point, right? And there should be no
distinction about what's going on.
And we build the rails, the tool and the infrastructure to
automate all of that stuff, right?
And make that very easy and seamless to use.
And that's kind of where like Plume came to be.
It's where Nest came to be, right?
And and why we are why we do things to what we are today.
So look, looking at the RWA space today, what is the what,
what are the big categories of sort of like yield generating
assets that exist on chain where, where is most of the
liquidity going? Is it like T-bills, a private
credit, you know, and private credit, you know, falls within
like several different categories.
Is it like rare earth metals or you know, other types of
commodities? What what's the, what's the,
well, the kind of, you know, landscape look like.
Yes, so I was doing this question a lot and I think I
always think the, the, the answer actually is less about
the asset itself and it's more about who's here and what the
sentiment and what the, and what is the mood at the time, right.
And the reason I say this because that's going to change
over time as more people come to crypto and the sort of types of
people come and change, the ads will change, right?
Like, you know, in crypto today, it's not like we already have we
just have A1 user. It's not just that the, the,
the, the, the maybe like the, the like serial apron who just
like, you know, apes a bunch of memes and that's, you know, we
have many different profiles of users.
You've got the BTC holders bear buy and hold.
You've got D5 farmers. You've got like payments type
people. You have privacy folks, right?
You have a lot of types of people.
And So what asset is is popular right now is 100% dependent on
what is in who's here, right? And right now, right?
If you look at the market today, you know, people think and
people talk about the institutions are here like in
trad fights coming. It's all nonsense, right?
The market here right now is 99.9% crypto people still,
right? And so that is so, so that's
like the first thing. So who is here?
And then what is the mood at the time, right?
And what's going on? Because crypto people are still
crypto native. So that's the first thing,
right? And so where do they actually go
into these things right now is, you know, the truth is if you go
around and ask people what are the base, they hold it
guaranteed like 90%. Ninety fives in the room is none
of these things, right, right, because people don't actually
use these things today. And so the market for these
assets, the biggest one is T-bills right now, right?
And T-bills, you know, it's not even a user front, a user facing
product, right? The T bill right now is a
foundation product, right? That's like 90% of what the T
bill is, right? You go to a big foundation and
then they ape like, you know, 10 or 20 or 3050 or whatever into a
set of money into money market fund and they earn on that,
right? But these are inaccessible to
regular people, right? This is not what crypto retail
is using, right? The same goes for private
credit. People talk about private credit
as a thing. I mean, I'll ask you, did you
hold any private credit like on chain?
No. Exactly, exactly right.
And and I guess you don't hold Biddle, you don't hold all USG,
you don't hold any of these things, right.
And it's not even hard to say if you just go to RBDS and look at
this user stats for these things, it's you know, all these
are sub 100 user accounts at products, right?
And so, so like there's sort of this like fixation now and
moving up and away from T-bills into this next category, which
is as people became more comfortable with the on chain T
bill right now, they want to do what you normally do in this
world, right? Which chase more yield And
people sort of see, oh, where's their yield?
Oh, the, the private credit yield is higher than T-bills.
So let's go down the private credit roads, right?
Well, people don't understand this private credit is risky,
right? And, and it's a longer duration
and it doesn't work at D5 very well for many reasons.
But like that's kind of where the direction energy is going
right now. But I would say there's two,
there's two layers to it. 1 is what people are saying and what
have been what like a sort of thin veneer of liquidity appears
to be doing. No, people are actually doing
right. And the reality is people are
not doing any of this stuff, right.
People are not really doing anything.
If you want to talk about like what's the real world actually
using, I think the only two things that actually sort of
have real usage right now is still Usde, right and Athena,
right? That to me is still like a very
clear, a clear sort of like RWA that has real adoption, real
usage. I think Maple and syrup is
another one, right? You know, that's our CWCCO like
this. That's another one that like
people actually can use them by hold because integrate Pendle,
it's loot and like it's actually backed by real things.
There's a lot of other ones that sort of like claim to be RWA
that have nothing back in it right now that are sort of like,
you know, that are promises for the future.
Many of them may work with them on who knows, but that's kind of
what that's what's really going on right now, right.
So when people talk about tebos and private retinol, they point
to these numbers. It's it's great and I'm glad
it's happening. I think it is is happening, but
like where's there any and what is the energy actually going?
It's actually in none of those places.
And so beyond T-bills like you know, if you project out now
that we have like this falls of institutional push for crypto or
cryptos going institution institutions want to come on
chain. What what do you think is the
part of sort of like the Tradfi, you know, if we stick within
this framework that it's just like assets on like on rails and
we're just switching out the rails.
Which types of trad FI assets are best suited for sort of
crypto rails or could benefit the most from crypto rails in
terms of in probability, you know sort of transfer it, sort
of swapping times, access to markets, etcetera.
Like where is the biggest innovation coming from in the
future? So there's two ways to look at
this question. Number one is which assets going
to like what things are going to benefit most by like getting
swapped on like basically moving from like sort of tribe rails to
crypto rails, right. And the, and the answer is like
almost all of them, right? Like a lot of these assets are
going to be materially better on shame than not, right?
I talked to the biggest institution going all the time,
right? And I was on with one of the
biggest asset managers yesterday and they're sort of explained to
me what they do and how they run this thing today.
And just purely the forget the efficiency and like the process
type stuff. Just that pure cost of doing
things the way it is is 10's and hundreds of millions of dollars
for just like 'cause somebody just automated in two seconds on
share, right? And and with sort of the same
level of, of like, you know, of, of trust rabbits, right?
So I think the, a lot of these assets are going to be great on
chain and most of them are going to benefit.
Now, the reality though, is that just because it's better on
chain doesn't mean the work on chain, right?
We've run this sort of STORWA story many times in crypto,
right? And the reason why hasn't taken
off before is because, you know, people were a little bit too
fixated on which asset is going to improve by being on chain
without thinking about the other side, right?
You know, Plume, we've always been mostly focused on the
demand side of things, which I actually don't care about the
asset. The asset will change over time.
What matters is demand. What do people actually want
right now, right? And if we go back to that
question, the question is what ass is going to do on chain
right now? You know, you have to look at
like, what is the what is the comp set on chain, right?
What, what, what, what do people doing right now on chain?
And like, what is going to be better than that?
Right on chain today, right. You're, you know, you can guess
sort of like 6 to 8% APY, right, in a pretty Safeway without a
bunch of looping, just running some basic stuff, right.
And even when USD was hot, you could get twenty 30s, right?
And that's before looping and before a bunch of stuff before
you Pendle it up and blah, blah, blah, right.
And so you could really get to, you know, really meaningful AP
wise 30-40 fifties right now. Were they real?
What they stable and all that, that's a different question,
right, But that's sort of the comparison set.
And so then you compare to that. The question is what triad
assets actually compete with that, right.
And the question and the answer is not very many, right.
Where you mean is that though? Because is, is is that though,
because it's harder to like to do composability with Triadfi
than it is in crypto. Like in crypto, you can create a
contract loop stuff. I mean, there's infrastructure
to do this. Whereas like, if you want to do
that in Triadfi, you got to like, you go to your broker or
get the asset and then, you know, borrow against it.
And it's it's, it's a lot of pushing paper probably and
rather than just pushing contract code.
Yes and no, that is part of the problem.
It's actually not the real bottleneck.
The real bottleneck is the assets in Shradfight are not
suitable for looping and not suitable for composability.
So just the idea that you can move them around doesn't do
anything, right? Because the end of the day, if
you think, if you look at like composability, composability, it
means a lot of things. But really at this point in the
market, composability means looping, right?
That's like that's like what everyone does in D5 this point,
right? And if you look at looping,
right, looping has a couple key attributes that really matter.
But number one is you have to have an APY that is above the
borrow rate, right? Like that's the first thing that
matters, right? If you are borrowing money.
And that's why when everyone talks to RW looping and
borrowing and looping T-bills, it drives me nuts because the
borrow rate is 8%, right? So you have to pay 8% to borrow
money and they and to so then borrow money 8% to buy something
that yields 5% doesn't make sense.
It doesn't work, right? 8 is more than five very simple,
right? And so that's one thing, right?
The second piece run looping is you need, you need rapid pricing
updates because you're always trying to figure, are you in the
money? Are you not in the money, right?
You need the yield to come back very quickly, right?
Because you will need to unwind up and down very fast.
Private credit, most of these assets are like we work with a
bunch that are custom made. So I have assets on Plume that
are down to seven day duration, right?
Very short. But your average private credit
asset is 3 months at the minimum, right?
Most of these things are one to two to three years, right?
And so you can't loop an asset where you put money in and it
just doesn't come out for a year because there's no unwinding,
right? And so that's the thing around
these assets. It's like the reason why there's
like a, a lack of like, you know, real adoption is not the
fact that it's inefficient from a, from a, from like a
processing standpoint. It's the fact the asset at a
fundamental level does not fit into the use case that the
market today wants on chain. That makes sense.
Yeah. No, I think that makes sense.
I mean, I yeah, I think, you know, if you have an asset, I
hadn't consider that reason. If you have an asset where time
to liquidity is super long right like like press spread of debt,
that's very hard to loop. It's not possible.
It's, I mean, yeah, it's not possible.
You, you, yeah, you can't. I mean, you, you can, but you're
like your, your risk. You'd have to be like very over
collateralized right to make sure that you you don't get
liquidated. So, you know, in the case of,
you know, just to kind of like look at I'm looking at Nest
here. You know, there's like, you
know, you have Nest Alpha here that has a seven day redemption.
How do you make that possible? Like how do you take credit card
receivable financing and get that time to redemption down to
seven days? Totally, Yeah, I mean, and This
is why I I think less about assets and more about the like
the the API and like what the dimensions of the asset are,
right. You have to do a composite
vault. That's what Nest Alpha is.
So right, So Nest today is one of our fault is is our like
yield distribution product. So through Nest we make it.
This is the easiest place in crypto to take stable coins and
turn them into real yield, right?
That's the whole point. And so whereas most things in
crypto that that come to RW as have heavy things like minimum
time, minimum like deposit amounts, right?
Like there's a bunch of funds out there, T bill funds
$5,000,000 minimums. So that's inaccessible to 99% of
people right there, right? You have to be KYCTYB dot wazoo,
right? And like, you know, your
redemption is, you know, even for T bill, sometimes it's
quarterly or monthly. It's it should be fast.
It's not right. And so Nest is a place where you
can come and take your staples, deposit into these balls and
immediately get RDB yield. And from there, the way we do
that and, and we make those receipt tokens composable and
loopholes, you can go into Morpho and loop again, these
things get extra exposure and all that stuff.
The way to do that though, is through a composite vault where
you're blending many things together to improve the contours
of that asset at the end of the day, right?
And so that's why we can get higher, higher, higher
liquidity, right? Because you have a bunch of
short duration assets in there, right?
But also you have a bunch of longer duration to have higher
yield that bounces things out and also mitigate the risk.
So this way your profile is done a certain way and we also have
to balance out which assets can price fast enough.
So you can real time adjust that so you can loop against these
things, right? And so that's where it is today.
So Nest Alpha today is a collection of many things.
We have, we have credit card receivables, right, Brazil ones,
we have oil in there, right? So we have a fund that does oil,
right. The great thing about oil is
very simple, right? You, you dig a hole in the
ground and, and money comes out, right?
And, and, and it's as simple as that, right?
And so being able to use that in commercial credit card
receivables, having some tables, we have some yield bearing ETFs
in there, right? They're also super liquid,
right? And so balancing all these
things out, you get a nice blended APY that's above the
hurdle rate, right, of 8%. You have good liquidity against
it and you have good exposure. So you risk time to one thing is
also much more diminished, right?
And so that's like how we do it with, with, with, with oil with
Nest offer today. So I think like one of the
things that we're touching at here is that like, you know,
crypto is a highly leveraged, it'll highly leverage ecosystem.
Like a lot of the yield in crypto comes from leverage, but
also carries like a ton of risk. And, you know, in in recent
months, there's been like yet another on your major
unleveraging event. Yeah, in, in October.
And before that there was like another big one like, you know,
in in August of the year before there's like there's these
unleveraging crises that happen in crypto like every 12 to 18
months. Yeah.
And the effects of that is like it concentrates the quid within,
you know, like very large institutions that are like
crypto native institutions. It also, I think has the effect
of creating a lot of bad press for the, for the crypto space
and sort of make people sort of anxious because people don't
understand, right, that they just think like, oh, crypto's
down, like it must be shit, right?
It's just that, you know, people were over leveraged and they got
liquidated. So, you know, there's a couple
of things here that I want to touch on, but like 1 is, you
know, is that sustainable? Is it sustainable for crypto if
it wants to become, you know, sort of like an institutional, a
place where institutions can come?
Can, you know, can crypto native institutions continue to operate
with this like high leverage mindset of, of generating more
yield with more and more risk and and attract those
institutions? And the other thing, and maybe
we can talk about this sort of in the second part, is that, you
know, does the curator model work long term?
Because I think the question of curators in, in, in, in the last
six months have suffered huge reputational damage for having
had assets in their portfolios in their in their strategies
that were not high quality assets.
And there there's a lot of true transparency issues there that I
think have not been properly sort of addressed.
And you know, hopefully really get dressed over time.
But yeah, just your your thoughts on like over leveraging
and like, are we putting too much trust in curators?
And you know, do they deserve our trust, especially when AI
right, I think, especially when AI, I think can probably do a
lot better job long term than, you know, individuals for sure.
It is. Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean a lot to
talk about curators because I do think that it's like it's
insane. Some of the stuff's going on
there. But you know, going into maybe
starting off the first point leverage, I I think maybe just
maybe to make sure I'm like answer the question is like the
question is like, is leverage good or bad basically right.
And and does it basically, you know, by engaging in too much
because to scare away some of the new stuff coming in that
could be beneficial to us? All right, the institutional
stuff in so many words, kind of yes and no, right.
And I don't mean to give sort of like in between answer in the
sense that, you know, you can't stop people from doing what they
want to do, right at the end of the day, right?
And so the is the leverage good or bad is almost, in my opinion,
like, you know, a question without an answer because it's
going to happen no matter what at this point.
Like the cat's out the bag. You know, you can't unring that
bell, right? And, and it's a thing, right?
And, and, and to be honest, it's great when it's done correctly,
right? And that's the nature of an open
market. That shit's nuts, you know, And
like, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but things
move. The ball continues to move
forward, right? And, and that's just the, the,
the sort of nature of, of innovation change.
So I, I'm like positive all that.
I think leverage is, is generally a good thing.
It just like it can manifest in strange ways.
Sometimes it do hurt us here and there, right?
So there's that. I, the second question is that
is it like good and bad for this?
Just scare them away? It certainly does to some
degree, right? Like it's, it's impossible to
look at like FTX and maybe like the terrorist stuff, right?
Or even 1010 or stream or whatever, right.
And think that was good for us, you know, like it was definitely
looking that negative, you know, like it definitely scared people
off and like even reputationally small things like it just
there's, there's still a bad taste in people's mouth in FTX
right today, even though it's almost nothing to do that we're
talking anymore. But the IT doesn't really affect
us. I don't think it does at all
from what's happening at this point.
The institutional side of things is not really they don't they
don't, they don't see crypto the same what we do at all, right?
And I think that's also one of the sort of fouls is the RWA
stuff right now is people think that the institutions are coming
and it's going to interact with us, right.
And it has something to do with crypto names.
It has nothing to do with us is the real answer, right?
That's one of the main things we are focused on a plume is making
sure that we build the the sort of like pipelines and the rails
that bring them in, in a manner and in a in a way that benefits
US, right, versus just replicating the same shit we
have off chain today on chain, right, which is exactly what's
happening right now in many places, right?
And I don't think it's the worst thing in the world, right?
But it's also not amazing, right, to very literally do the
exact same name before, right and bring it here.
What's the what's the point, right?
And permissions that private this thing up like there's the
it's it's the same thing. And all the benefits of the
officially accrue back to the red seekers, right?
Not to us and not to the, not to an open ecosystem.
That's most of what's going on today.
And so it, you know, that means what that does mean, I guess is
like all of a sudden it's happening in crypto land, right?
They just don't even see, don't care.
It doesn't matter, right? They're they're coming and doing
the thing regardless. The only thing they see around
crypto is a stable coin. That's like, that's like the
main thing to think about. Everything else that we deal
with is irrelevant for the most part.
And so they don't in actuality, I don't think it has any
negative effect towards us. And I think that the bigger
negative effect is can we, can we get our shit together in so
many words, right as an industry to make sure that we have we
maintain ball control right as we move forward, right?
I do think decentralization, permission, less open
composability are all important principles of being in crypto
and like ease, I think we were talking about earlier, you can
see those things beginning to beginning to fade a little bit,
right and beginning to take a backseat to some of the things
that we were the riding before centralization, right?
And, and intermediaries and all these things right.
And it's because everyone's down bat and we're in search of a new
search of like a new daddy. Basically, we need someone to
come save us. And so you know, we're willing
to take anyone, but we're sort of letting the fox in into the
hen house, I guess is the is the is the is the is the way I would
say it. And so I think it's on us to
make sure we do it right, because is, is genuinely better,
right? And, and more importantly, it
would just be a massively missed opportunity to like go down this
way and just, and just blow it. Basically, we have an
opportunity to change the entire nature of the financial
ecosystem, right? And, and build a singular global
market around the world that's open, composable to anyone,
anytime, right? It's incredibly powerful stuff.
And, and we have a chance to do it now.
And if we just literally do the same thing as last time we've
got it, we're going to have blown it, right?
And, and so that to me is like the, the, the comment there.
And so I guess, you know, as it relates to like maybe the
curator side of things, I, I think the curator stuff, like
overall, I think I'm still very positive on curators and I think
the curator model is essential and critical, right?
I think it's the same thing as leverage.
People can do what they don't want to do, right?
And like, you know, unfortunately, like the nature
of it being an open world is you're going to have some
curators that are, that are just terrible, right?
I know some that are great and over time the best ones will
survive and do their thing and, and they'll, they'll deserve our
trust. The other ones won't.
But you know, as much as you want to blame the curators and
as much as I've let the cures for a lot of things that
happened, it's also on us, right?
At the end of the day, right? The curator to me is almost
just, it's a mirror, right? People didn't care about risk.
People just wanted the highest number, right?
And so the cure delivered what people wanted, which is here's
the highest API number and that and it came right back to them,
you know, and so. While you're the drug pusher,
man. Exactly.
You know like, you know you. Want the yield?
You want that good yield? Here it is.
Exactly.
At the end of the day, you know, they might be dealing, but like
we're buying it still, you know, And that's the reality, you
know, and so, you know, I, I think it'll all get sort of
look, in the real world, we have curators, they're called,
they're called financial advisors and asset managers, you
know, like, and like, you know, they're the same thing, you
know, and so I think there's just, there's precedent that it
works today and it's required and we need it right now.
Whether those cures are humans or AI, that's a different
question. And I do think they, I think
it's very I we're working on a bunch of stuff out there too,
right, where you can just have a machine, right, to be your
curator, quote UN quote, right, and, and be your asset manager.
I think there's a lot to that as well.
So, you know, I think we're pretty far off today, you know,
from from that in reality. But I think it's like almost
certainly going to happen very soon.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I think like, yeah, yeah, I
think you're right that, you know, people are going to do
what they want to do. I guess.
What did 1010 reveal about curators that moving forward,
you know, sensible curators, may you know, the industry is all
about sort of, you know, there's a lot of self regulation and
standards that build over time and we always like learn from
mistakes and then, you know, and.
Then repeat them. Most they repeat them, but we
make different mistakes. But I think I think there is
possibly like some lessons, but were there any sort of tangible
lessons you think that at least from from the perspective of
like new curators coming in sort of integrated now and are
popping the bar, you know, raising the standards for for
how they how they how they do their work.
You know the honest answer. Or or is it just nothing's
changed? The honest answer I will tell
you is no, right now I'm still hopeful.
Look, I think you'll find that I'm like hyper cynical about
everything, but I'm also like very hopeful and optimistic for
everything. I think the real on the ground
is, no, I have not seen any material change, right?
And, you know, I think you'd be surprised.
I mean, we talked to everybody out there.
We know them all. I'm like, you know, some of the
quote UN quote biggest, like best curators out there have
like, you know, are curating assets they really don't know
anything about and, and doing very dangerous things with them.
You know, and, and that's that's a thing today.
And like I've, I've we've gone and explained it to them and
they come back. Wow, you're right.
Like how do we get out of this or what we do?
I'm going to do this. I don't know, I told you all to
do with. And so like, and that was before
all the 1010 stuff. I mean, I tweeted about this
months ago, like before I was like, look, the the primary
thing right now is everyone is calling things stable from it's
not right. And people are creating these
like levered vaults that they, they, they are claiming you risk
free 1 than not, you know, and just by packaging everything
into a stable point, people begin to think that, oh, you can
just do anything. It's all stable and save and
it's not and it's fine. It's that it's not, you just
can't sell it as a stable asset. So you can't sell it as, as a
risk free thing, you know, And so that, that that has happened,
that it's cooled off a little bit, mostly because the quitter
is just dried up and the ecosystem sucks and everyone's
mad right now and everything just is awful, right.
So it's more reflection of that versus what I think of versus
like fundamental change, right? And like an improvement, right.
So I see less of the nonsense now.
But I don't think it's a reflection of learnings.
It's a reflection of everyone's. Everyone's like down bad.
There's nothing to do. So we're not doing anything.
So we'll see when the mark comes back is does it, does it change
or not? Yeah, let's talk about like
Plume a little bit and why did you build an L1 to do RW as when
there's like lots of perfectly good L ones out there?
What was the the thesis around building essentially like an app
chain to do RWA's? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's
definitely. But also from a product
perspective, yeah. Totally, totally.
And and it's been evolving thing and I don't think we did the
best job of explaining it like we had never set out to build a
chain. Maybe I'll start with that,
right. The the job was always to grow
crypto and that's what we wanted to do.
And originally we had started off building just a classic
tokenization engine, right? Let's just do tokenization.
We'll take assets, we'll bring them on chain and we'll we'll
we'll send them anywhere. Don't I don't care, right?
You go to base and Seoul ETH may that doesn't matter, right?
We'll send them to wherever they got to be And like we'll just be
a modern new version of this thing that's easy to use, right?
Because we've gone through the tokenization browser ourselves
and we're like doing research and realized, wow, it can take
like 2 years to do this to do it right, right.
And it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So immediately 90 was in the market is priced out of doing
any tokenization. So we got to 1st fix that thing,
right. What we realized very quickly
though, was that, you know, basically if you tokenizing
things wasn't an actual problem, meaning it sucked, but it wasn't
a bottleneck. The problem was once you
tokenized an asset on the other side, there was no one to buy it
and no one to use. There's nothing to do with it,
right? And so, you know, as we began
pulling that third to realize there's a two things you had to
not only figure out how to tokenize the asset, you had to
deliver it in a, in a mechanism which someone could take it and
use it. And the only way to do that is
you had to then build a community around this thing.
So there are people on the other side.
And then #2 is you had to build an ecosystem where then once the
asset came on chain, it improved from what it was off chain.
Because the truth is, almost every asset that utopianized
today becomes worse on chain than off chain, right?
And it's not because the rails are different.
It's because you're now like, even if you go to Fidelity today
and buy T-bills, right? And like that's a very safe,
straightforward thing. Like it doesn't really get
better than that, right? And when you bring that on
chain, now you're taking counterparty risk, you're taking
smart contract risk, right? You're, you're having multiple
middle men to kind of figure out what's going on.
You're taking you're, you're also almost certainly getting
less guilt because there's fees are going on all these people in
the middle, right? So it's just it's functionally
worse in almost every dimension when you bring this asset on
chain, if it does nothing like it does in the off chain world,
which is what all these assets were at the time, right?
And so how do you actually improve it?
You have to lean into what makes it great to be on Shane, which
it has to be able to move. It has to be able to get lugged
into an ecosystem and actually do things with it.
And so that's why we got ulled over from OK, let's just do a
tokenization engine to then, OK, God, we have to like has to, has
to, we have to demand to do the side.
So how to do that? Let's build this community,
right? And, and that's what we have the
plume dunes today with the sort of like rabid group of folks
that are that irradiate plume. And then at the end, it's like,
well, now you have to build a bunch of applications that want
to actually take these things and do it use it.
When we have to build equity pools against you have a
secondary market, you need to be able to lend against these
things, right? You need to do all this stuff.
And so that's what ended up becoming this like, you know,
chain story where he said, OK, everyone here, we have to bring
together we could do it all another chain.
We have to solve a bunch of the same problems, right?
AML the sequencer level doing privacy stuff, you know, having
even like like, you know, focused integrations, it turns
out like, you know, taking classic defy applications and
like making them RW ready is not really a thing.
You know, we our vault product nest, right, We use we we've
used every off the shelf thing you can find, right, And we've
used all the sort of like just, you know, classic defect
products to do things. They, they don't really work
that well, so you have to customize every single thing.
So that's what came out of this. You had to just constantly
customize the chain, some of the dynamics around these things,
the applications, the products in here to make this whole thing
work together. And that's how like sort of, you
know, many steps later from starting off with just pure
totalization engine, we ended up with here's our own chain,
here's our own ecosystem, here's our application.
Now on the other side of that, where I think a lot of people
get sort of caught up with us and it's like people say, well,
you know, most chains are just optimized to like growing their
own chain, right? And they're very like only
working with themselves. We are just not like that right?
Like, you know, going. Come back to it, the whole point
of starting Plume was to grow crypto and we thought that
bringing real world assets, a new use case and time the world
together would be how we broke and be a net positive for
everybody. If we can grow articles, we all
would, right versus just growing plume, right.
And so for us, it was like meant to be a place as born a
necessity to bootstrap this ecosystem, bootstrap this use
case and do and that's why we were the first ones to do all
the stuff. You know, that's what we have.
You know, we had them, you know, one of the largest holder bases
in all of Artibase and crypto, you know, you know, more than
the next tensions combined, you know, and hundreds of millions
of dollars. You know, it's why we have these
things, because we had to build all this stuff together.
Now, now that it's like kind of in place, you know, across other
places and there's more adoption elsewhere, we can begin to take
the things that we've sort of like perfected here and bring
them elsewhere, right? And that's why, you know, we we
took nest and we put it on and we put it on the slaughter,
Isn't it? Right.
And and like, you know, people sort of like don't understand
about what that is. But you know, again, our whole
focus is to grow, grow RWA and grow crypto and that's by going
to where the user is does. That make sense and yeah, yeah,
totally. So, so there's, you know,
there's two products, there's Plume, which is the RWA issuance
platform. And then Nest is a, a vault
protocol or like a vault product that allows users to kind of
generate yield on, on some of the, I guess may perhaps like
flagship assets that you guys have on, on Plume.
Is that like a right way to look at it?
Like I would say this Plume is a chain, like just straight up a
chain. You know, we have an actuation
product on top that's basically the other half of Nest, right?
So Nest is two sides. There's an asset issuer side
where you can issue the assets and tokenized things.
We have a transfer agent that from the SEC right, that were
granted in the fall. And we have, you know, many
other licenses that are there pending right now.
So it allows you to work with like regulated funds and bring
these assets on chain. And then Nest on the other side
is the end user facing side of things.
And it's this sort of distribution part and that lives
on as one of the applications on chain.
We have, you know, dozens and dozens of outfits that are chain
and that's one of them. But we highlight that just that
it ends up being the the sort of central point that a lot of the
activity stem from. So what?
How, how, how significant is this transfer agent license that
you received from the SEC? Can you explain what that is
and? Yeah, total, total.
Yeah. So it's, it's a, it's one piece
of a bigger story for us, right. Meaning we have many other
things with both a broke a deal license and ATS license, you
know all these things as well. The, the transfer agent,
basically it is a simple license from the SEC that allows you to
update the cap table, right? And so you know, if, if there's
a fund as an example, take the BlackRock money market fund or
any fund, right? Or the private Apollo private
credit fund, right? Like what that is, is you just
say here's the $10 million slug with this asset, right?
And here's a list of people that own it, right?
And like how much they own basically, right.
And the transfer agent allows us to update that list, right?
That file sits in a desk somewhere, right?
Or sits, sits, sits in a file box somewhere like in DC or
whatever, right? And that allows us to go then
update this thing. So this way now it allows us to
then take the asset as we bring it on chain and as we move it
around, right, we can update that record, right?
And update things. In this way, you can actually
have a closer tie in ownership of the asset on chain, right?
And allows us to, to have the asset issuer also get more
comfortable because they need to, they need this information,
right, in order to actually feel conflation with these assets.
And so it's both sides. It allows movement but also
opens the funnel for more assets to come in.
OK. No, that makes sense.
Yeah. So I'm actually like pretty
curious about these nest faults. So can you talk about some of
these faults? And I mean, because like the
yields are like on paper pretty attractive.
Some of the top faults here as as I'm recording this today are
around 12%. And then there's, of course,
like some boost, but, you know, redemption period up to seven
days. You know why?
Like I guess like. Where are these yields coming
from primarily, and it's what's? The kind of like risk.
Profile for some of these vaults is like principal capital at
risk. Is it just smart contract risk?
Like, yeah, Yep, Yep, for sure. There's no such thing.
As risk for yield, right. So that's probably the starting
point, but like the like Nest today, right, Is it's, it's
classic vaults, right? That's like the way they went.
There's a lot of stuff under the hood that customized for RTPS.
But basically like for the for the user, it's vaults, which
means you come and you put stable coins, you get a receipt
token against it. And then it's a value accruing
receipt token, right? So we call them N token.
And then so if you were to take $10, right, A10 USDC, right, and
put it into N alpha or, or excuse me, our Nest alpha vault,
you get an N alpha token. That N alpha token is an LP
token you can then go around doing things with and primarily
like, you know, loop on more for whatever or swap in and out on
our, on our decks or whatever, right?
And so that that's what nest is today, right now, what is
underlying Nest? Nest really is, right.
Like I said, the other half of Nest is the asset issuance
platform, right? Which means there's a, there's a
redesign in it. And like there's a bunch of new
UI stuff and a bunch of new like vaults that are not exposed
today to the public that we're also going to expose because we
have a permission side of nest too.
So for example, we have the, you know, a, a cred X, so Apollo's
acred private credit fund, right, that everyone talks about
the the largest deployment of that on any, in any chain is on
Plume today, right? And it's there just not showing
up right now because it's a it's a permission thing.
It's a it's done in a more classic KYB way and you have the
assets in there and it's the whole thing, right?
So there's a lot of that. But what is under the Neath of
under the hood of Nest, it's just a list of assets.
We've tokenized a bunch of stuff from some of the best aster
issues in the world, right? And it's sitting there and these
we we've like plugged in, integrated all these things.
And so you have the legal setup, the entity setup, the tie in the
pricing setups, right? So then you could do buying
redemption, pricing updates, withdrawals, rebalancing, all of
that, right? And so when you go into a Nest
alcohol as a simple example, right, what we have is a set of
curators that assemble these vaults today, right?
That they basically say for Nest Alpha, it's a collection of
these things that sort of give you this target risk profile,
this target duration, this target APY, right?
But you also single asset vaults that are just one thing, right?
You know, we have N basis today, right, which is our basis trade
vault, which is like primarily just USCC.
There's some other stuff in it too, but it's like primarily
just USCC, right, basis trade stuff, right?
And that's like almost a single asset vault, right?
We, we, I think with an Opal, right?
An Opal is our Brazilian credit card receivables vault, right?
That's just one asset, just Brazil credit card receivables.
And then we have these collective vaults, like an alpha
where you take many of these vaults and assemble them into
one thing, right? So that's what this is today,
right? Nest today has some of the
biggest aspects in the world. We have things like Apollo on
there. We have Wisdom Tree, we have,
you know, some of the Janice Henderson funds.
We've got, you know, Hamilton Lynscope that's coming in there
as well, right? We have, you know, there's also
you get, so this is art exposing us a crunch stuff.
And there we have Taikong, which is one of the big insurance
companies in China. We have the CMI China Merchant
National Bank in there, right? And so that's what this is right
now for, for most people today. We deal a lot with like more
institutional folks as well. The, the, the platform is a
simple way to say I can plug into Nest and just through a
menu, get every major asset in the world that's that's into
that's encrypted today. And either Dura deploy directed
to that one thing, right? Or I can assemble a basket of my
own that gives me the proper exposure that I want, right.
And we have some out-of-the-box ones that have been assembled
kind of small, medium, large, That's what you see in the
interface, right? And then behind the scenes you
have, you know, things that have been custom built, right, for
individual users. Does that make sense?
Yeah, that makes sense. And so you.
You know, I'm looking at, for instance, like the, you know,
the nest Alpha fault, you know, we have like credit card
receivables and here you can click and you can go and see
like the data, the data room for that, for that vault.
So there's a there's some curator or like some asset
manager that is managing that position and and delivering the
the yield. That's right.
And instead of vaults are sort of like essentially sort of
allocations in different in different weights of of these.
That's exactly right position. That's exactly right.
Right and just the function like you know it, it sounds easier
because the vaults actually sound like a very simple thing
and I that's why I thought they were too, to be honest.
And it turns out there's a lot of there's a lot under the hood
of the vault, which is you have to like, you know, especially
for RW as in which these things are not fully liquid, right?
These things are not fully that you know a lot of these things
are just Monday through Friday. You can't do on the weekends,
right? So you know, you have to and
then also getting the yield back at the right time and getting
pricing updates. So like, you know, Nest Alpha,
when you deposit to that, as a simple example, and maybe like
four or five assets in there, it's then breaking up your,
your, your, your USCC or whatever into multiple into
multiple tranches and sending it to the 10 different places,
right? And then keeping track of that
position and bouncing magic and bringing the yield back at the
right of time. So when you withdraw, it's the
exact same thing. You have to go paying five
people withdraw and then collect it, bring it back and offer it
and put it into profit. So it's a lot of coordination, a
lot of OPS, a lot of work under the hood to do this in a way
that like normal about crypto native vaults don't have to do
because all the smart contracts, you just do it instantly, right.
But for us to do it in real world assets, it's a lot of
integration work. It's a lot of like pricing work.
It's a lot of like, you know, OPS work to make it, to make it
all the same. But that's what it is today.
Yeah. OK, that's cool.
And. I want to.
Take a step back here a little bit and.
Then come back to the institutional conversation we
were having a little bit of sure.
And you know, one of the things that I've been thinking about a
lot lately and it's been on my mind is, yeah, I've been in the
space for well, over, well over a decade.
And it really feels right now like there's a big inflection
point where all this stuff that we all wanted, right, we wanted
like Treadfy to get in crypto. And that was the whole kind of
part, partly the whole point. But it does feel to me and a lot
of people I talked to that I've been in the space for a while
that folks that have been in crypto and have been on the more
like the D Gen. Side are not so excited.
About what's happening, right? There's not a lot of it.
There's like innovation is kind of drying up.
You know, we tried Defy, we tried like NFTS and like mean
coins. Like there's been all these
waves of like really interesting times in crypto where stuff is
happening, things are frothy, people are making money, there's
innovative new things. And I'm not talking even about,
you know, all the kind of innovative consensus mechanism
and governance mechanisms and Dows and all that kind of stuff,
right? Like all the stuff that we all
kind of got in the space for seems to be drying up as things
become more institutional. And I think there's going to be
somewhat of an exodus of a lot of folks that have been in the
space for a while. Like, you know, Haseeb talks
about this recently. He was on some podcast and was
like, you just have to stay in the space long enough.
And like a lot of people that were in the beginning, were
there in the beginning are going to leave and you're going to be
sort of like in a good position. And, and I, I agree, I think, I
think that's kind of happening. And, and so I guess the question
is like, where, where do you think the space goes from here?
When decentralization, decentralized governance, you
know, not with the consensus mechanisms, all these things
cease to be that important, right?
Where? Self custody ceases to be that
important, right where you, you buy some asset, it's using some
crypto rail, it's in your revolute account, but you never
hold your own keys. You, you know, all of these
ideas that have been pushed by the crypto industry and sort of
proponents of the space for the last, you know, decade and a
half kind of go away, right? So what's left basically like
what's left? Is it just total rails?
Yep, totally. I think it the ends a pivotal
moment in that it could go one way or the other and one way to
me is more bleak and more a little bit more depressing.
And the other one is like temporary pain will make it type
of situation, right. And I think that, you know, at
the end of the day, like. What people were here?
For was very simple. They're sort of at split between
the original people came into crypto who were really focused
on decentralization and this new this new architecture and all
these types of things, right. There's sort of a second wave of
people that came in that really was here for nothing more than
just making money, right. And I don't say that shortly
like I I would, I would like, you know, I I would count myself
in that in that group as well. You know, like I know that it's
not it's like I did. It's, it's like not possible to
pretend that's not like a huge part of crypto culture as well,
right? And, and so both those things I
think are, are real now. Where does that take us now,
right? I think the reason it's kind of
gone sideways a little bit sentiment wise is because both
of those things have dried up, right?
Like the idea that this sort of like new, this new architecture
that would upgrade the financial ecosystem and, and all the
stuff. And you have self custody and
privacy and self sovereignty and all these things, right?
And, and trustlessness. Like it's kind of not really let
us anywhere so far, right from an adoption standpoint and #2 is
the, the other side of things. So just the hybrid gambling and,
and the yield in the end. And you know, the Hunter X type
of nonsense is also not really panned out.
You know, it's mostly been done only and it's just massive
extraction from, from, from a bunch of stuff, right?
So both those things have gone the wrong way right now, if we
go back to it, right, Crypto the the, the problem with crypto has
always been that the benefits of these principles don't really
show up until Step 2 or Step 3, right?
Meaning in the beginning, it actually looks and feels worse,
right? That's why it's that's why we
talk the onboarding stunt. It's like actually pretty hard
for to understand why it's valuable until much later.
Once you're deep in it, it's actually awesome.
You told to get right, like, you know, have be able to hold your
own stables, right, have all your money build, move around to
whatever you want and like, it's like incredibly useful, right?
And it's impossible to like, it's possible to go.
It's impossible to go backwards once you really see that right?
But the problem is it take you have to get to step two or three
for that to happen, right? And so that's what's going on
right now. It's like, you know, we've been
unable to kind of bring that thing forward.
All the new stuff coming in is very it feels like the same
thing as before, right? It feels like, you know, it's
Ventechi, it's very like trad. It's very, you know, again,
we're throwing away a lot of these principles, but I think we
do it right. It's the same thing by
onboarding a lot of these things.
If we set the frame correctly that phase two, phase 3, when
all these assets and people and use cases are here, well then
manifest in different ways, right?
And we'll all the things that matter, which self sovereignty,
right being able to take, you know, be having self custody and
all those things will apply, but instead of just to a very notice
to everything. And then that will massively
change everything again, right. And then so, so so that to me is
like to be the upside case here and where it gets really
exciting and where I think it's, it's a little bit of like a
temporary a moment in time where it just feels bad.
But if we set this thing correctly, this massive event of
bringing all these like, you know, people have been scared of
regulation, but like, you know, we're deep in it as an example,
like we, we, we spend a lot of time in Hong Kong and a lot of
time in UAA, lot of time in DC to like talk to regulators,
right, and get our licensing work with them.
And the reason is because unlocking a massive amount of
dollars, assets and use cases and people right into all this
stuff, right, is going to there's no way it's bad for
crypto, right? But we have to maintain our
stance and make sure that it's done in a way that if once it's
here, we still ball control, right?
And in two or three years, what it when, when, when you have the
opportunity to now, you know, treat these assets and, and as
your own and still have hold the keys into all that.
Like that way it's still possible to do all that, you
know, and it hasn't been Co opted by someone else.
And so that to me is like where we're at.
It is, it is a pivotal moment. It's like a it's a it's a
pivotal moment to which you can go the wrong way.
And I think we're I think we're still tracking tracking, but
it's it's like, you know, it's pretty it's up in the air,
honestly, right. And you have two sides of it.
Like, you know, maybe like take the, you know, the new
channeling maybe takes the RO right or 0 right.
That's sort of like very, you know, in my opinion, they're
talking about privacy. Tell me decentralization and
talking about, you know, open information list, which I think
are all the right words. And then you look at something
more aligned to like, I don't take Canton as an example,
right? And like, you know, I think both
are doing great things for it's worth, right?
But it's clearly two different viewpoints, right?
You know, we are crypto was meant to sort of get rid of the
middle man, right, and you know, now you have one one money.
So that's like very that's literally the middle man right.
I'm trying to do the thing right and and and the assets to live
on change right. You can't move them around.
You can't take all of them. You know, there is no custody.
So it's just two different two different worlds and I think
they both can win for its worth. But I do think we need to
preserve at least the original one that we were here for.
Yes, I agree. Chris, thank you so much for
joining me on Epicenter today. It's been great chatting,
learning about Plume and yeah, excited to see where things go
next with regards to RW as I mean, I think you know, there
there is sort of a inflection point right now in a space and
whether or not. Enough people with.
Sort of crypto values and principles and ethos stick
around I think is an open question.
But yes, definitely hoping they do.
Yes, definitely, definitely. I mean, I think they go back to
it. Right.
I've been, you know, money is made and not even that, but
like, you know, I think the job of anyone is to find change,
right, in my opinion, and, and the clearly is change happening
right now in crypto and and finance and and technology.
And so the question is, you know, what direction it goes in.
But at the minimum, it's an exciting time to kind of be
evolved and then to, you know, there are a few moments where
things actually get shaped and this is one of them.
So, you know, glad to to be far of it.
Hope everyone else is like also, you know, you know, pitching in
so we can hopefully make it work the right way.
Thanks, Chris. Cheers.
Cool. Thanks man.