State of The Market, How to Value Hyperliquid & Tempo Launches Mainnet

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Monitoring the situation, to say the least. Why don't we just start there? Polymarket announced it's opening a bar in New York. It looks pretty cool.

It's in DC. There you go. I'm going to DC to monitor the situation next time.

When is it opening, by the way?

I think it's opening either this week or early next week.

When I think about all the things that you could use the cash they've raised for, that is probably one of the better things to do. It looks pretty cool. Have you ever been to a bar—or a restaurant—in New York City, in Times Square, called ESPN Zone? I'm guessing you've never been to it, so I don't know why I asked you that question. You do not look like an ESPN Zone guy to me.

When I was younger, the first time I went to Times Square, I went to ESPN Zone. It had literally a million screens everywhere showing everything, and you could drink and eat. This is that for all of Twitter, and that actually sounds like a lot of fun. I'm in.

I thought you were going to say there's a bar, I think in Germany, that tracks the price of beer in real time based on consumption, so you could see how many people were interested in a particular pint or craft beer. It's basically real-time markets. Again, the name of the game here is customer retention—

Can I just say something to that before you go into that?

Yeah.

There's nothing that highlights the difference between you and me more than me saying, “Hey, have you been to ESPN Zone?” and you saying, “Have you been to this esoteric bar in Germany that tracks the price of different beers?”

1. State of The Market

Yeah. We'll converge on Polymarket. The reason I bring it up is that we have to start with macro. We are not geopolitical experts, but oil is sitting at $116 or $120. It traded up again this morning.

It traded up again this morning. What's the read on macro? What's the house view out there? Did you read Balaji's tweet yesterday? He talked a little bit about what the broader macroeconomic effect of this war might be.

Clearly, the market has been trying to digest what has happened. Originally, when the war started, there was a perspective that maybe this would be like Venezuela. The administration had been saying that this would be over quickly, and that's probably good because we've killed a lot of the leadership that might be looking to destabilize the region.

As time has gone on, it looks very clear that that is not true. We clearly did not foresee that the IRGC would look to harm and attack a lot of the infrastructure in the region. We had a period of time where the market was very shaky and traded down, but it was still clear to me that the equity market expected we were probably going to get a relatively good resolution within 4 to 8 weeks. The administration said 4 weeks at one point and then 8 weeks.

What happened over the last week is that the Strait of Hormuz has been closed. A significant amount of the world's oil supply goes through the Strait of Hormuz. The administration has been trying to get other countries to help open the strait, and that hasn't happened today. There has been a supply shock in oil, which is why we initially saw oil trade up. I think it traded up to about $110.

Then the administration came out and said, “Hey, listen, this will be okay. We're opening it up, and we see that there's potentially going to be a resolution.” Oil came back down to $90 or $95, and the market really traded up at the end of last week. We saw crypto rally on this. Bitcoin went up to about $70,000—maybe it was earlier this week, but it went up to about $75,000—and HYPE went up to over $40. We saw pretty much everything up 10%, 20%, or 30%.

It was clear that there was a bit of relief and an expectation that this was over. Then all that changed yesterday, or I guess over the last 2 days, when the IRGC struck the South Pars field in Qatar. It's part of the same reservoir that Iran also has a piece of, and it accounts for 20% of the world's liquefied natural gas supply. It's estimated to have cost $70 billion or $80 billion to build the infrastructure to take that natural gas out of the ground.

We're denying it, but some version of the U.S. and Israel appears to have then struck the Qatari side of that same reservoir. It now looks like something like 20% of the world's liquefied natural gas supply might go offline for a very extended period of time. That has downstream effects that are inflationary and bad for growth.

The Fed held rates steady yesterday, and the market is now pricing only 1 rate cut this year, which is obviously bad for risk assets. If you looked at the front end of the U.K. Treasury market this morning, it was clear that a lot of macro funds were struggling with what was happening in the market, whether we were going to see more inflation, and how they should react if there were rate hikes.

I say all of that to say that this is really an Iran, inflation, and growth story, and all of it is downstream from what's happening in the energy markets. We just don't know. I do think crypto has a good backdrop more broadly right now, and Bitcoin has traded relatively well. But if there continues to be this macroeconomic shock and we have this downstream effect that is quite impactful, I don't know if we're going to be able to have risk assets really take off in the near to medium term.

Just to give people some context, before Operation Epic Fury, oil had traded up roughly 50%. It started at $70 a barrel, right? When the war broke out—or over the weekend a couple of weeks ago—it traded up to $86 on Hyperliquid. Now it's sitting at $116 or $120. I think it hit a peak of $130. It's been a deteriorating situation.

We're going to continue to monitor the situation, but what's interesting is that we should probably have a commodities expert come on. One of the things I'm monitoring is what the curve looks like for oil. I think it's still very much like WTI futures. They're in massive backwardation, which means the front of the curve is much higher than the back end. That tends to be common when there are these supply shocks.

I think typically the market would have assumed, “Hey, this is going to get resolved. The Strait of Hormuz is going to open up.” This was going to be like a Venezuela-type situation, but it's starting to look like it's probably going to be a bit longer. I don't know if it's going to be like an Iraq- or Afghanistan-type situation, but I think there's uneasiness in the market. Who knows how quickly this gets resolved? Certainly, to your point, things have escalated.

I was a bit shocked by the retaliation. Iran has basically, I think, sent a communication that anyone in these oil fields should probably evacuate, which means that they're going to target them and want to avoid casualties, but they're looking to destroy massive amounts of infrastructure. There are theories of 3D chess about what this means. I don't know if I buy any of them, nor should we necessarily talk about them here.

What's interesting, though, is that Hyperliquid continues to get a ton of traction. That continues to be a strong theme as a result of all of this. Should we briefly touch on S&P perps, which I think just recently launched, and your take on that?

2. S&P Licenses S&P 500 Perps on Hyperliquid

Yeah, it’s super interesting. The S&P has been pretty forward-thinking around this. I actually worked with the team over there to do an announcement for a tokenized index fund they did last year, in 2025. I think it actually launched in September.

We announced that—I helped them do that announcement—with Centrifuge and Janice Anderson around last July or so. That fund sold pretty well. I think it has $500–600 million of AUM right now. Clearly, S&P was already thinking about how they want to be on-chain and what sort of tokenized-asset strategy they should be pursuing.

And to your point, TradeXYZ, with these HIP-3 markets, has just really come to the forefront of everybody thinking through, “How do I get access to the things that are happening over the weekend, 24/7?” There was no centralized-exchange way to do this with real liquidity. It is Hyperliquid today that dominates that market.

We’ve seen it on the front page of The Wall Street Journal and in front of Bloomberg. Everybody’s talking about this right now. Obviously, they would have been working on this for a long period of time; it wouldn’t have started today. But it seems very timely that it’s not just, “Hey, we’re going to launch a HIP-3 market that has some sort of pulled-together oracle that we did from a data feed we’re getting and paying for from one of the exchanges or something.” Now they’re going to work directly with S&P to be able to offer an official product.

That does, to me, signal a world where Hyperliquid is still very much a prosumer product, but maybe in the future we can get institutions trading these markets as well. There are still a bunch of KYC and other concerns that you need for institutions, but this is obviously a really good step in that direction. Congratulations to Shokou and the team there for what they’ve done.

Yeah, no, it’s big. I wonder how much volume they’re going to get. If you were to predict how much volume these guys get versus some of the commodities—like oil, copper, silver, or gold—which have been pretty active, do you think this actually surpasses them fairly quickly?

No, you look at traditional markets, right? FX and commodities trade more. I would think that these markets would mirror traditional markets because they just mirror interest. I do think sometimes you see these volume blowouts on specific equity names because they become meme coins for the retail crowd. For the index, I think it’ll do well, but I wouldn’t expect it to necessarily be outsized relative to other stuff.

Hyperliquid is sitting at $40. That’s a $37 billion FDV and roughly a $9 billion market cap. I’ve heard a lot of chatter on the timeline around, “It’s kind of over for some of the other networks. Hyperliquid has just dominated.” Perps are a killer product. What’s the argument around whether Hyperliquid can become bigger than Solana? Can it become bigger than some of the other networks? Or what’s the argument for it being fairly priced at this point?

If you look at a traditional exchange multiple and decide that fees are entirely just revenue, or that fees and revenue are the same thing—which I think is probably not the right way to think about it, but some people do—both Hyperliquid and Lyra actually trade at discounts to traditional exchanges on a multiple basis. I think the Secret City guys put out some data around this week that I saw. I haven’t looked at it or checked their work, but I’m assuming they’re right based on the data they put out.

I think there’s obviously a world where these markets continue to get bigger. The applications should continue to get bigger. It’s very clear that perps markets on-chain offer a very good product, and they’ll continue to grow. They’ll continue to take market share from centralized-exchange venues over time.

The real headwind, or the real risk right now, is definitely regulatory and what that means over time. But with these regulators who definitely want to be pro-innovation, I think that’s less of a risk than it might have been at another time. They’re going to continue to grow, and obviously, as they grow, revenue will grow. There hasn’t been any fee compression or anything yet at this point.

But then your question is, “Okay, well, what does that mean in terms of a broader network?” On the broader-network side, it’s interesting because applications can definitely be more valuable than some of the networks. There’s no doubt that Polymarket, and maybe Hyperliquid and some of these big guys, will be more valuable. Polymarket is worth more than Polygon today, and yet all of its volume is on Polygon.

I think that type of flip will continue to happen, where the best applications accrue more of the value. Do I think Hyperliquid, or HyperEVM, is going to become a huge Solana competitor for everything else that happens on-chain? Probably not. But they’re going to continue to build this incredibly robust and really great application and ecosystem around trading.

Yeah, just to give folks some perspective, over the last 90 days, Hyperliquid is at the top of the leaderboard in terms of REV. In total revenue, they’ve pulled in $140 million over the last 90 days. Second to that is Tron at $82 million, then Solana at $90 million, and then Ethereum at $60 million. They all won.

My estimation is that it likely dominates over the next 12 months in terms of fees, given that I’m continuing to be very encouraged by HIP-3 and the activity you’re seeing there. I don’t necessarily attach that much value to HyperEVM. I don’t necessarily care that much about that, other than whether you continue to believe that people are going to trade these things. If so, they’re likely going to trade on Hyperliquid.

I know you know me—I’m a mid-curve, revenue-sort-of-basis investor—but it’s pretty impressive what they’ve done.

Yeah, literally, their ability to launch markets quickly, bootstrap liquidity quickly, and build what is a really great product from a technical perspective—in the way they think through how fees work, how trades are ordered, and how people are able to trade and how the matching works—very clearly, they’ve done an incredible job. It’s a great product, and it’ll continue to grow.

There are definitely headwinds around the regulatory side, but there are people like S&P who are willing to put their institutional stamp on it, which is awesome.

I do still continue to believe that you’re wrong about how these broader networks get valued. What do you think HTTP is worth today? Tell me what that is worth.

It’s an irrelevant question because the value accrual just wasn’t there or wasn’t designed to do that, right?

But I would argue that Solana wasn’t really designed to accrue value either, with how low its fees are. When you look at the composition, when I invest in these things, I don’t assume fees are going to be the bulk of the revenue. It’s actually MEV, right?

So, REV collectively—if you’re creating heterogeneous markets, it will always allow for MEV. There’s always going to be someone who wants to pay for block inclusion, and that allows for higher-margin products. In this case, I’m never going to bake my assumption around fees being dominant. In fact, over the long term, fees should encompass less and less of the share of how much value gets captured by the L1.

I also agree with your point that the apps sitting on top of the L1 should collectively be worth more than the L1 itself. But that doesn’t mean the L1 itself should be directly compared to its revenue in terms of value, or how you think about the value of what that token is worth or what the L1 itself is worth.

You could argue that a lot of it is—clearly, the market sees value in some sort of mimetic component, wealth creation, brand, and goodwill. I just don’t like underwriting that.

But if you look at this chart, for instance, I am encouraged by Hyperliquid. Revenue continues to grow quite a bit. You have a reasonable price-to-sales ratio here that is not totally disconnected from reality, right? When I look at whether I should actually put a position on this thing or go buy something in the real world, like Figure at a $7 billion market cap and growing and pretty interesting, that’s what I’m saying. I want to bring on the Frictionless guys who’ve done a lot of thinking around valuing these things.

I’m not saying you strictly should look at it through this lens, but I do think that it is a forcing function of saying, “Okay, what do I need to believe for this thing to actually eventually show up in revenue?” If you’re not capturing that much revenue, all this hypothetical discussion around moats—and if you can’t accrue value, then that is representative of the quality of the product, the community, all this stuff that people talk about.

There are a lot of technologies that are sold for very high valuations or are worth very high amounts of money that don’t accrue a lot of value, right? But they enable a lot of value. What’s a good example of that? I mean, obviously, we talked about HTTP, right? There’s a significant amount of value in HTTP, but no one ever attached value to that. It provides a useful service. It’s a common good. There are a lot of common goods that are worth something.

There are a lot of businesses—I don’t want to name specific businesses, but you and I both know there are a lot of businesses that have sold at 300 times revenue because of the value that they allow someone else to accrue, or the synergies that they allow for somebody else, right? By themselves—I mean, we’ve seen this in crypto, we’ve seen this in AI—they actually don’t capture a lot of value. There are a lot of companies in our space, in AI right now, and in some of the deep-tech spaces, that are not by themselves good businesses, but they are really good technologies that enable other businesses to be built on top of. And that is worth something.

What is that worth? Is it Moore’s law? Is there network value and some multiple of the amount of value that exists, the amount of nodes, or the amount of value that is built there? I don’t know if that’s true, and exactly how to value them is still very much up in the air, but I think what is true is that assigning a revenue multiple to an L1 is the wrong way to think about it.

Sure. I mean, look, you and I can have different opinions on that. I think about railroads.

We don’t have to agree on everything.

No, no, definitely. I mean, railroads are a good example of this. Historically, you can look at that and ask who actually accrued the most amount of value? It wasn’t railroads; it was the cities that were connected and all the value and services that were built on top of that.

I do think that this is one of the things where I’m not going to go out and short L1s, because crypto markets defy rationality by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t think it’s a useful exercise to go out and short these things. But I’m not going to put in a position on them. I’d rather invest in applications sitting on top of these networks that are reaping the value of that.

Going back to fees, the average transaction price has gone dramatically down, even at the Ethereum L1. If you were to have built your analysis around, “Oh, those fees being high,” there is actually Jevons’ paradox, right? Fees should continue to go down to allow for more transactions and what have you. But over the next 5 to 10 years, I don’t think a lot of value will accrue to L1s unless they diversify and there is growing MEV.

3. Tempo & Agentic Payments

Let’s talk about Tempo, because I think that’s something where we should not have this theoretical discussion on price-to-sales or price-to-revenue. Who cares, right? Ultimately, the market believes there’s a willing buyer and seller at that price, so we’re not here to fight that. But Tempo’s interesting because I’ve heard a lot of folks converge on this idea that stablecoin transfers in and of themselves don’t accrue much value. It’s the value—the other things that are enabled by having stablecoin, instant settlement, and instant payouts.

So, yeah, do you want to touch on Tempo? If you want to give us a rundown, then—

Yeah, I mean, I think everyone at this point knows about Tempo. Obviously, it’s the Paradigm-plus-Stripe collaboration for really trying to build a payments-focused, or payments-first, blockchain. The ways they do that are a couple of different things, and there are some technical nuances to how they have built certain products that are embedded into the chain. The main thing that I think matters is that they basically preserve the majority of the block for stablecoin transfers. They basically deprioritize any non-stablecoin transfers. They also provide a fee schedule, and they do dynamic fees, so it’s very much trying to incentivize stablecoin transfers.

The idea is that instead of being permissioned, you’re just putting the right economic incentives in place so that the only thing people actually want to do on the chain—or the thing that people hopefully want to do on the chain—is payments, essentially.

It launched yesterday. Mainnet launched, and I think within 10 minutes there was an Epstein-related memecoin on Tempo, but maybe that’s just crypto. Clearly, what they’ve done is build it in such a way that it’s supposed to be, “This is for payments,” right? All of their business development around what they’re doing with Stripe, Bridge, Privy—the entire ecosystem there—has been about, “How do we bring people a package for doing on-chain payments inclusive of this thing?”

They also announced MPP—I forget exactly what MPP stands for now—Machine Payments Protocol, an open standard. That’s an agent payments protocol that you can use with stablecoins or cards or a bunch of different types of payment mechanisms, trying to be an open standard for agent payments and agentic economic activity. Anybody could technically extend it, but most of the governance—basically all the governance right now—is done at the Tempo level.

So it’s not quite an open-source project yet in terms of actually being able to have other people impact the way it works, but I expect they’ll do that over time. It competes pretty directly with some of these other protocols or standards. It’s really a standard for agentic economic commerce, with things like x402, which Coinbase is obviously behind. OpenAI and the foundation model companies all launched their own; Google launched its own. There are a lot of these people who have standards out there. That’s also somewhat interesting at a time when everyone’s thinking about agentic activity.

But all of that being said, it brings it back to your original question: this is an interesting piece of the Stripe pie, right? But does Tempo itself accrue value? That was kind of what you were asking, because it raised at a $5 billion valuation, but will the fees and all of the economic value accrual be done by other Stripe products or other Bridge products or Privy, and not Tempo itself unless maybe it launches a token? I don’t know. What’s your perspective there?

Yeah, I don’t think stablecoins alone carry the boat to justify that valuation. It’s what they allow, like value-added services on top. Is it worth $5 billion today? Probably not. Is it going to be useful in the aggregate for Stripe? Yes, providing better services to their customer base.

What’s interesting is that part of the benefit here is the muscle that they have. Out of the gate, they have Visa collaborating with them. We have a bunch of other ecosystem partners. I quote, “For example, our design partner, Visa, has already extended MPP to support card-based payments on their network. Stripe has extended it to support cards, wallets, and other payment methods through their platform.” Lightspark has also extended it for Bitcoin payments over the Lightning Network.

I think we’ve talked about it here at length: this is kind of like when Libra launched with a very impressive set of partners and never got off the ground. Obviously, I am very curious about how much traction they get. I forget, but I saw a chart around—was it x402 payments or the activity there?—that has kind of been declining. It was all the rage a couple of months back, and now there hasn’t been that much activity. I am curious—

I mean, there’s been basically no organic x402 activity ever. There were some people who were launching on top of x402 that, if you look at it, looks like wash trading, and people thought maybe there would be some Base or x402 value, token value accrual to it at some point.

But there’s basically never been any real activity on x402. Anyway, I’m looking here at the cumulative stats: 75.4 million transactions, 24.2 in total volume, and fewer than 100,000 buyers.

When you look at that, does that—I don’t know if you guys made investments in agentic commerce—seem significant? It’s a key narrative right now. The common thread I’m hearing is that blockchains weren’t built for humans; they were built for robots. This is crypto trying to be reborn in an age of AI.

I do think it makes sense to spin up an agent and give it stablecoins to use when it can’t KYC and whatnot. I buy into that narrative; I think it’s quite real. But what would you attribute this to? Is it just x402? Is there not enough use case? Are people not thinking about it? Is there not enough—

There is no agentic commerce today. There’s no agentic commerce at all. We’re all talking about agentic commerce, but it does not exist right now. That doesn’t mean it’s literally zero, obviously, but it’s de minimis.

All of the agentic commerce that’s happening today is happening through traditional rails, using Stripe’s APIs for the most part. Does that mean it won’t exist in the future? No, that’s not what that means.

x402, Google’s, OpenAI’s, Anthropic’s, and now MPP’s standards all exist, but nobody has agreed on a standard yet. There needs to be some agreement on a standard in the future for us to continue building more economic value and products around it. We’re going to have to see one of these things win over time.

We’re also going to have to see agents get better. Agents are great in a lot of ways today, but the near-term activity we’re seeing is enterprise use cases, which are really advanced RPA—automation work—or helpers for you and me with research and maybe some of our workflows.

There are a lot of people who have launched products around the idea of paying with an agent to do something. Perplexity launched a product, and other people have launched products around that. But those products are still very clunky today.

The reality is that, because of the number of approvals you have to do in those products today, it would take me longer to buy toilet paper through Perplexity than it would to do it myself and click into my Amazon app. It’s not a great user experience yet.

For a lot of things humans want to buy, they want to be buying things. I think the story you were referencing earlier—the better story—isn’t about merchant acceptance from agents. It’s more about whether there’s an economy that exists outside of human-to-merchant payments or business-to-merchant payments that is net new and that agents are driving.

I think that’s the story. That market is very far away from actually existing. There are a lot of people building around it today, but we haven’t done a deal there yet because it feels so far out in the future, and it’s so unclear how that market will exist.

We’re having the conversations, meeting the entrepreneurs, and trying to be smart about it, but it hasn’t yet felt like the risk-reward is there relative to how hot the market is and the valuations these companies are getting when the market doesn’t exist yet.

I had an early look at a deal where an individual was leaving one of the larger card networks and said, “I feel like this is going to be a big thing. I want to launch my own.” I didn’t end up investing in that because I do think distribution is king here.

What Tempo has gotten very good at is building an impressive BD muscle and having distribution partners out of the gate. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity for other people to thrive, but it’s hard to compete against a super-well-resourced, very human-capital-dense organization that has a lot of partners out of the gate.

But we’ll see. Have there been projects that have come to you at the early stage and said, “We’re going to build on top of Tempo”? That’s an interesting stat. There was a time when 99% of projects were purely on Ethereum, and then that pendulum swung more toward Solana. Now you’re seeing activity and hype around the HyperEVM ecosystem being built out of it.

Have you seen major changes, or people come to you and say, “I want to build on top of Tempo”? Is that even a thing, or is it mostly closed-source and people just aren’t building on top of it?

We haven’t seen a lot in the way of net-new entrepreneurs yet. There are obviously people building there. I was sitting next to the founders of one of the largest DeFi protocols at a dinner last night. I don’t think they’ve publicly announced it, but they’ve already been deployed there for a little while, and they’ll do some work there.

There are obviously a lot of people deploying there.

On Tempo?

Yes, on Tempo. They just haven’t announced it.

The thing they did do is enshrine their own DEX. In the same way that some of the other more commercially minded L1s have done, they’ll create winners, because if they create winners, liquidity will aggregate, and if liquidity aggregates, it’s a better product.

We haven’t seen much in the way of what I would call developer, net-new projects building there that are trying to raise capital. I’m sure it’ll happen over time.

But the way the business is built, which is really around payments, they do not care. They’re very opinionated about what they want to be, and they don’t care if the latest DeFi person or the latest DeFi entrepreneur wants to build there. That is not their business, and they’ve explicitly said that. They’ve made design decisions to do that.

If that’s the case, you’re going to see fewer net-new entrepreneurs. What it is going to be, though, is focused on this one use case—really focused on this one use case—and, at least in the near term, it’s probably going to live or die based on Stripe’s BD motion.

Eventually, maybe it’ll be broader. Maybe there will be referrals and liquidity, because liquidity and being on the same chain as a partner is a good thing. But today, it’s going to live or die based on Stripe.

Who stands to benefit, other than Stripe equity holders, and who stands to lose the most in a world where Tempo is successful? I can think of who loses, but I’m curious.

You always do this on the podcast, Rob. Since you’re the newest member here, you just want me to say the spicy things.

Well, I stopped competing over who’s going to get the first 10-second clip. That’s your role, Rob. I’m happy in my lane; I just don’t deliver that. I’m like an old dog, man. My takes are washed down.

You’re like that meme of the guy in the hot tub: unbothered, moisturizing, in my lane, as a world boss.

But, yeah, who—I mean, you and I share an investment in Codex. I’ll maybe start there. It’s top of mind. They’re very sharp guys and very opinionated as well. I think they have really unique insights.

They’ve been super specific on this. You could argue they’re now going to compete against Tempo, right? I can think of others, but how do you think about the Codex guys?

The Codex guys—obviously, there’s more to that story in terms of the partnerships. They actually pivoted; they announced it today. You probably haven’t seen it, but they’re now entirely focused on the FX business. They launched their rebrand today, and they’re doing a few hundred million dollars a month in FX right now. That’s growing quickly, so it’s kind of a different business.

To your point, I’m a big fan of Nan and Momo.

On the L1 side, who’s competing the most? Who has a dedicated payments team that’s competing on payments? Solana has a big, dedicated payments team. Monad has a big, dedicated payments team, and they have very good people there. Raj came from Visa, and Portal runs that business for them.

Then there’s Circle’s Arc, which hasn’t launched yet. There’s also Stable. You can debate whether Plasma or any of these other projects actually wanted to be payments networks. They may have just wanted places for Tether to sit.

People have definitely pitched the stablecoin chain before. The other 2 that people talk about less, but that have done more of the work there, have been Polygon and Tron. With Tron, yeah.

And then there’s the first one that Stripe invested in. I know I’ll remember the name later, but the ex-PayPal head of crypto is there now.

That’s Polygon.

No, no, no. Polygon took somebody from Stripe, a guy named John Egan.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, PayPal, you mean.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But listen, Polygon’s actually doing a lot of payments volume today, and they have a bunch of institutional payments partners. They are now directly ahead, and they did that acquisition—or 2 acquisitions, I guess. It was in early January or December that made them kind of a fully verticalized payment stack, right? And that’s essentially what’s happening here with Tempo and Stripe and Bridge. So they’re going to be a real competitor, right?

Solana is obviously taking a little bit of a different approach because they started, I think, leading some VC deals. So they’re definitely trying to continue to put money into and work to get the right people building on top of them. But they haven’t necessarily owned all of the fully verticalized stack today. And so that’s the competitive set, right? And those are the people who obviously are going to be worried about Tempo.

I think, to your point around, okay, what happens in a world where they’re really successful? Who accrues value? Well, yeah, clearly the Stripe equity holders accrue value. Theoretically, the Tempo equity holders accrue value, or if they launch a token.

I do think that a lot of economic activity happening on an EVM chain is probably just good for all of crypto. In some sense, it is a rising tide, but it’s probably less good for Ethereum than it is good for Tempo. It’s not bad for Ethereum if more economic activity from corporations is happening on Tempo, in my mind, right? Maybe it’s bad for the payments-focused guys or the L2s. I don’t think it’s bad for Ethereum mainnet, right? Because that was never going to be a place where you did a large-scale amount of traditional payments, right? And so I actually think there’s a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats thing that’s happening here with the payments—

That’s always been the rosy kind of view: more activity lifts all boats. And so, if someone wins in some part of the ecosystem, it benefits everything. I actually think my stance is a bit more cutthroat now. That’s always the position of a weak player, right? But the reality is, I think, probably more concentrated volume.

Even though there’s interoperability, even though the user that enters via Tempo could maybe go to Ethereum, I’m not sure. But we’ll see. I think the tendency for companies, whether you’re Solana or LayerZero or Stripe, is to own that user and not share with anyone else if you don’t have to.

I just have a perspective. And by the way, it was Stellar I was talking about earlier, because today Stellar and Polygon are definitely doing probably the most payments in terms of actual payments. Solana is there as well, but they’ve started to get a lot of partnerships on board, and a lot of those partnerships haven’t really scaled yet.

But if more and more of what you and I do on a daily basis happens to be on-chain, more businesses will build on-chain, and there’ll be more RWAs, more tokenized assets, and more stablecoins. There will be more net-new novel products that will exist because blockchains enable that, right?

And I think it’s very clear that there is no one chain that will win all activity. All right? I think that’s a very myopic view that doesn’t really make a lot of sense. We will probably eventually have a fully abstracted routing system at some point that all of these guys will plug into, that will give you the best price, essentially, across all of these different chains.

And the fact that Tempo might—let’s say Tempo is really successful and they own all of the cross-border payments, right? After that cross-border payment happens, it’s being delivered to somebody. If it’s going to an end user, that end user will have a wallet. That end user with that wallet will figure out ways to spend and save and do all of these other things. And the design decision Tempo has made today is not to serve that ecosystem. It’s to serve the cross-border payments ecosystem.

Yeah, I think this goes back to what I was saying earlier. You probably heard me say this a year ago when I was starting off at Veridian, which is that more value accrues to the applications—the Klarnas of the world, the Nubanks of the world. They can choose the infrastructure beneath them, right, to lower the cost to serve.

I think time and time again in crypto, once a new player comes in, it just introduces more competition at that infrastructure layer, and that’s always been beneficial for the end customer. Above anything else, right? When Solana came in and sucked in a lot of DeFi activity from Ethereum, that galvanized the Ethereum community to say, “Okay, we’ve got to get our shit together because we’re getting our ass kicked here.”

And I think Tempo coming into the fold, in the same way as Hyperliquid, made it abundantly clear to the Solana leadership that they missed—they dropped the ball on perps. Now you have Bulk, a response to Hyperliquid, and it launched this week, and so that’s something that I’m paying attention to.

But I think that competition at the infra layer is good for the apps sitting on top and ultimately the consumer that’s seeing that, because they just have access to more products. They don’t really care what that gets routed to, to your point, right? Going back to HTTPS, all you cared about was, “Oh gosh, I can have access to Gmail, not just Hotmail,” and that’s good for me. Commerce online just became safer.

So I think that’s where I sort of mean: I’d rather be investing in companies sitting a layer on top, because it is just fiercely competitive at the infrastructure layer. But net-net, it’s good for apps, it’s good for developers, it’s good for end customers that are just going to benefit from greater ease and convenience when they’re trying to use any sort of stablecoin or crypto-enabled product, for that matter.

4. Kraken’s IPO Delay

Yeah, I mean, there’s no doubt being on-chain is better for consumers, right? Consumers are the ones who are going to win in the end.

I got 5 minutes, Rob, because I have an expensive call with a lawyer here that I don’t want to be late for, but there’s just a couple things where we get the content of the week, my favorite part. Kraken, we’ve talked about it a lot. They just came out saying that they’re delaying IPO plans.

They didn’t say it. There was a CoinDesk article that said it. I don’t know if that’s actually true or not, and I will say that I know the team there pretty well, and I don’t expect this to be a material bump in the road for them.

When they were raising the last round, there were certainly a lot of SPVs and a lot of people that came in; it was a big round. A lot of them were kind of looking at, “Hey, there’s likely going to be an IPO event.” I don’t think anyone underwrote this year. I think most people assumed it was going to be within the next 3 years kind of thing, and I would probably think that continues to be on track, irrespective of macro conditions and whatnot.

They’ve been in this IPO-readiness track for quite a bit of time, and they continue to ship really good products. So I think it happens within probably next year. Unless there’s some major catastrophic market event, I think they could probably be ready to IPO next year.

Yeah, I still think this year’s possible.

Really?

Yeah.

Are there other ones in the docket? I think we saw just a huge wave. The last one was BitGo. Is there anything else that’s coming on?

There’s a bunch of people who might come this year. I think nobody has decided for sure. I think it depends a little bit. The markets probably need to stabilize. The IPO market all of a sudden kind of shut again with the war in Iran, right? And so, until the risk markets are back, you’re not going to see any good IPOs, let alone the crypto ones.

You also probably don’t want to be going at the same time that OpenAI and SpaceX are going. And so you probably want to avoid that. Your window is probably the next 3 to 6 months, or else you want to push it to next year.

But there's a lot of people—I will say that I do think a lot of people want to get out before the next election.

Yeah, yeah. We should ask Yano, our resident in-house political expert. We'll save that discussion for next week at DAS, which I'm really excited about. And we should talk about what it means for crypto if the war continues and approval ratings go down, if you have a different shake-up in the House, and what that means for the CLARITY Act and a bunch of other things, but—

If you look at Polymarket right now, it's flashing to you clearly what they think is going to happen in the midterms.

Yeah, yeah. Does that worry you?

No. It's also typical in the midterms, right? The House is almost certainly going to flip. The Senate is in play. I don't think anybody thought the Senate would be in play, but now it is. We'll see. I think the number one thing will be the downstream effects from the Iran war and how long the Iran war goes, to be honest.

Yeah, yeah. As an aside, before we get to the content of the week, Token got canceled. I think Token Singapore is still going to happen, but you can expect airfare to be dramatically more expensive going forward. It's just wild how that's spiked. I hope you booked your travel in advance for some of these conferences. I know you and I are going to go to an event that you guys are doing in an undisclosed location.

I've already got my airfare booked to come see you.

5. Content of The Week

Yeah, don't worry. You have a couch, man. All right. Well, at the risk of going down the geopolitical route yet again, I think we've maintained ourselves pretty well here, not delving too much into that. What's the content of the week here?

Two things. One, the most obvious thing: it's March Madness. College basketball is one of the most fun times of the year.

What's March Madness?

No, you're not serious. You're not serious. I'm not that bad. I won't let you have that.

Are you a Buckeye?

Yeah, I'm an Ohio State Buckeye fan. They have an 8 seed, so we'll see. It's a football school, not a basketball school, but we'll see how it goes.

I have to get back to my horror movie roots. There was a movie called “Ready or Not,” which was a very fun movie about a woman who got married into a family, and it turns out the family has a very odd tradition of sacrificing the new bride. She ends up beating the family and not being sacrificed. The sequel to that comes out tomorrow. It's a very fun, cool action-horror movie. I'll be seeing that on opening day.

So you're going to go to the movie theater with popcorn and all that stuff?

Oh, yeah. The one you go to serves Old Fashioneds and this stuff.

I'll have an Old Fashioned, and maybe I'll have popcorn, or maybe I'll have a burger. If you ever want to raise a round from Dragonfly, you've basically gotten a blueprint as to how to approach us: talk about horror, have an opinion on Old Fashioneds—

Old Fashioned connoisseur. You should know that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that now. I think the market knows that now, too, so we can use this podcast. If you ever want to raise a round from Dragonfly, there's a lot of primary alpha here, breadcrumbs that you can just pick up and show that you're prepared.

My content of the week is always more boring. I started reading Carl Malone's book, Born to Be Wired. It's just a really fantastic book. I've always had it on my list. I read Ted Turner's book a while back, and that's obviously intertwined, but this one is phenomenal. It's a fascinating story of how they did roll-ups of the cable industry.

Of course, they now have Liberty Media. I know how much you like F1. They bought F1, which is probably a phenomenal investment, in my mind. It tells you everything: they laid the cable—first the cable, then the fiber—which obviously allowed for the internet and whatnot. It's a really fascinating story. It's called Born to Be Wired. I'm halfway through it. I started a couple of days ago, and it's a really good book. I highly recommend it.

Cool. I'll check it out.

All right. So next week at DAS, we're going to be recording live in person.

Yeah, that's going to be fun. Big time.

And it'll be Yano's big comeback.

Comeback. Yes, that's right. That's right. That's going to be fun, man. I'm excited for that. I'm excited to hang out with you guys in person.

Cool. See you next week.

See you next week, guys.