What’s Circle’s End Game, Robinhood Launches A Chain & Venice Raises $65M

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

All right, folks. Welcome back. Happy 4th. Rob, what’s happening? How are you doing?

No, I’m just trying to relax a little bit before the 4th, and this market is not allowing it.

It’s not allowing it.

No.

It’s not allowing it.

It just keeps going. It keeps getting worse. Although, we’ve got a little bit of a reprieve today.

I don’t know. I think that we bottomed. I think it’s up only from here.

I actually don’t think that.

You think it’s up? Okay.

I actually don’t think that, but Santiago is not with us today, so I feel the need to make this a very bullish episode.

Can I tell you? I was talking to a very well-known founder in the space. I had drinks with him over the weekend, and he was saying, “Hey, I listen to the podcast sometimes.” I was like, “Oh, that’s great.” He was saying, “I just have a little piece of feedback for people who run a crypto podcast. Santi is so negative all the time. It sort of makes me not want to listen to it.”

Maybe he was saying you guys could be a little bit more positive sometimes, since you run a podcast about this space that you’re all working in and that you’re invested in, and that has made you money. So Rob’s like, you know, people all told me that you guys should probably just not show your faces on the episode, and I should basically monologue. I don’t disagree with them.

I think Santi will listen to this, and my feedback for him would be to be more bullish, because we’re in crypto. But I will say Santi is one of the best people I’ve ever met at not having emotional beliefs tied to prior positions. I remember at the very bottom of the market after FTX, Santi went very long on Solana. This was after he was a big ETH investor and ETH person, and I remember how much crap he got for that. He ended up being very right.

Then I remember at the top of the market, he said, “I’m selling a lot of my soul,” and he ended up being right about that, too. I do think he’s too bearish on many things, and this is a crypto podcast, but I respect the ability to not be emotional with his longs.

Yeah. I mean, listen, even the memory trade, he was a week early, too, until everything blew up, right? He’s obviously a very, very good trader. So let’s figure out how to get him to be very positive and very good at trading this market going up.

That’s the goal. That’s the goal. How about that?

1. Did Saylor End Strategy’s Sell Off?

All right, let’s make this a fun episode. This week is Tech Companies Are Actually Doing Really Cool Things in Crypto Week. We had Robinhood, we had Stripe, and we had Stripe and the consortium building OpenUSD, I think it’s called, which we’ll talk about in detail.

Open standard.

The open standard. So, the open standard, which is many companies—Stripe, DoorDash, and a bunch of folks. We had Robinhood Chain, which is very interesting stuff. I’d say Cloudflare’s announcement is one that many people probably would have missed because it went a little bit more under the radar, but I thought it was a very interesting announcement, too.

Maybe if we get to it, there’s a whole conversation around Venice and token versus equity. Maybe we could start, though, with MicroStrategy.

You were at the Goldman conference, I think. Whose conference was it? You were at a conference.

The Saylor conference. They do it every year. They did it this year, and it was the biggest one ever: 1,300 people. It was great.

Saylor presented. So I have 2 questions for you. One is, what is the reaction at a conference like that to Saylor and his “Bitcoin is the hardest asset in the world, the perfect collateral” thesis? What is the reaction to Saylor in that room?

And then, 2, what is the reaction to crypto and digital assets in that room in general right now?

The Goldman conference has been going on for, I think, 5 years. It might have been the 4th or 5th year, and I’ve gone to every one. It’s gotten bigger every year. The first one was maybe a couple hundred people, a lot of traders, and some of Goldman’s high-net-worth clients.

You could tell it sort of felt like some of the early Bitcoin and early crypto conferences, where there were these odd people who were interested in this thing. Even though, at that time, we thought we were mainstream, it was still a couple hundred people.

This week, it was 1,300 people. They were at double capacity. I actually ran into somebody outside Goldman’s office who was like, “Hey, listen. I thought they had registered me, and now I can’t get in. Can you get me in?” There were people texting, saying, “Oh, I want to get in.” There was a lot of FOMO around it this year.

The excitement around the institutional adoption side of crypto—a lot of the infrastructure, the tokenization, and the stablecoins—is at all-time highs right now among a lot of these people. There are also a lot of Goldman clients, both on the corporate side, the enterprise side, and the high-net-worth side, who are still very bullish on the space.

I have never seen an institutional Goldman conference—not a Blockworks conference or a conference put on by someone who’s more crypto-native, but an institutional conference—be as bullish as this one was. I’ve never seen as much FOMO around a conference as there was for this one. That was awesome to see.

Saylor specifically is a tougher conversation because I think a lot of people, especially after what’s happened over the last month or 2, have a very negative view of some of the things he’s said and done. That was actually quite interesting to see because he kicked off the conference, and it might have been the worst-received conversation that happened that day.

Saylor was the worst received? So people were actively negative, or was it just a lot of skepticism?

I think there’s a lot of skepticism about Saylor specifically because of all the financial engineering that has happened at MicroStrategy. A year ago, that had people really excited, right? And do you remember? We had so many months of this podcast where we were talking about DATs—almost that entire time.

There were a lot of very smart people going out and saying, “Hey, listen, this is why this works. This will work forever.” You had people on your podcast, on Empire, or otherwise, who were actively saying, “Hey, listen, this could exist for a long period of time.”

Now we’ve gone through the rout, maybe near the bottom or somewhere on the downswing of the market. We’ve seen the bad parts of what Saylor has done, specifically around Stretch. He talked on Tuesday morning at the conference. On Monday, they came out with their guidelines about how to respond to Stretch specifically and to Stretch trading as badly as it did.

I think there was a belief broadly that he was unwilling to make the hard choices and was kicking the hard decisions further out into the future. It was going to continue to create this overhang on the market that we’re going to have a hard time getting past until he makes the hard decisions that he created for himself by launching this product.

Yeah. I don’t know. Any other thoughts on Saylor? Obviously, the Bitcoin market hangs on a lot of his decisions and what he ends up prioritizing, but I don’t know—any other takeaways from it?

Yeah. I think my only takeaway is that Stretch was a bad idea, right? I think he got greedy, and Stretch is a greedy product. They launched this framework on Monday that says, “Okay, now we have to keep at least 12 months of cash at the company to pay for these dividends. We’re also going to overcollateralize it with a separate bucket of Bitcoin.”

We’ve got, I think, about 20 months of dividends right now. We can continue to—we’ve told you that we can sell up to X amount of Bitcoin in the future without coming back to the market or coming back for board approval. We’ve put it in a box, in a way, so that we can make decisions around Stretch.

He clearly did that because he wants to preserve the ability to continue to raise more capital and hopefully go and buy more Bitcoin, I guess, right? But it’s clear that, in times of market stress—and there will be more times of market stress—this product is going to continue to be an overhang.

I think, in my mind, the decision that will have to be made at some point in the future is to essentially get rid of Stretch and/or just let it trade at a significant discount and not raise net new capital in that way, other than in the common.

And so I think there are some people who are quite upset about the current situation that we were in and believe that the current ways in which they've decided to respond to the market volatility are not the best path forward for either MicroStrategy or Bitcoin.

2. The Launch of OpenUSD

Yeah, I tend to agree with a lot of that. Where I think I will not agree with you on some things is Open Standard, OpenUSD. So that's the meat of this conversation. I want to get there, so I'll pull up my screen for anyone who's watching, but I'll talk through it, too.

The website is joinopenstandard.com. I'm going to read some of the highlights from this blog post: “Introducing OpenUSD, a new stablecoin for global money movement.” Stablecoins are being adopted rapidly, yada yada. OpenUSD introduces 3 key design principles: built for scale, earn by default, and govern collaboratively. The key here is that partners receive all the earnings from OpenUSD's reserves, less a small management fee to cover their operational costs. On the built-for-scale principle, it means they can mint and redeem OpenUSD at no cost and with no artificial limits on volumes.

So even just right at the outset of the blog post, you can see who they're going after here. You can see who they're kind of—there's a target on the back of one company, right? And, to no surprise, Circle stock opened down, I think, about 6% right after this blog post.

But it was down 17.5% on the day.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. A lot of huge companies signed up for OpenUSD right out of the gate, right? Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, Fiserv, Aon, Cloudflare, cLabs, DoorDash, BlackRock, U.S. Bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, MoneyGram—the list goes on, right? It's a huge list: Google, Samsung, IBM, Shopify, crypto companies, right? Anchorage, Ripple, Base, Solana, Tempo, Coinbase.

I think this is an open standard—hundreds of companies. It is really Stripe's initiative, is what I would call it. It's being run by Zach Abrams, who founded Bridge. Bridge was acquired by Stripe.

I think that's even interesting because Bridge was like, anyone should get a stablecoin. This is like, there should only be one stablecoin, so we should talk about that. Rob, you had one of the more thoughtful, better takes on this on Twitter, so maybe I'd just love to hear your take on this. There are a lot of angles, right? Is it bearish for Circle? Is it a capitulation of the thesis that everyone should have a stablecoin? But let's start macro, and then we can go into the specifics.

Yeah, because I think there are a couple of different things to talk about, depending on how you want to direct this conversation. There's the competitive dynamic: what does it mean for Circle, Tether, Paxos, Agora—all these guys?

There's the question of how likely this is to be successful and what you think about the way they've constructed it. And then there's, okay, what does it mean for stablecoin adoption more broadly? I think those 3 topics are really important here.

Maybe I'll start on OpenUSD itself and what I think are the good and the bad of this. The good is obviously, clearly: one, Stripe is an incredible product company and engineering company. I would actually say they have probably been the most important company in enterprise stablecoin adoption over the last year and a half or 2 years, and they're taking a leading role in trying to distribute stablecoins and tokenized assets, et cetera.

So that's great. Obviously, acquiring Bridge and acquiring Privy have been a big part of that. Those are some of the things they've done in terms of the structure. There's a lot we don't know, by the way. There was this blog post, and it's still pretty vague on some of the really important things.

But some of the things they said, like free mint and redeem—well, free mint and redeem is clearly, obviously, good for payments use cases. Redemption fees have been a problem that people have complained about, especially at payments companies, for a period of time. Getting rid of that allows for the free flow of money and better clearing, essentially, than has existed before. So that's great.

Mint fees are often nonexistent anyway, so mint doesn't matter as much as redemption does. But the redemption fees sit there on purpose because, of course, Tether, Circle, and others are incentivized not to have you redeem because they make money on the amount of stablecoins outstanding.

Things like yield sharing obviously matter to people. Now, this is already something that USDG has been doing, which is also a similar type of collective model over at Paxos, something Agora has been doing with AUSD. Circle itself, outside of their contract with Coinbase, has been striking a lot of yield-sharing and distribution deals with a number of different partners.

I think it's important, but I don't actually think it's that important, because the market was already moving in this direction anyway, and everyone was already focused on sharing yield anyway. So I don't see it as net new.

Then you get to, okay, well, we have all these partners around the table, and this is about adoption of something that we can all use for the collective good, for better new rails, and that's great. Having all those people around the table is great.

It's hard, and I think I would never—it's hard to bet against Stripe, but there is nothing you can point me to that's like, you know, a consortium of this size that has ever been successful. There are a number of consortiums that have tried in the stablecoin space before that have not worked.

Even Circle itself started as a consortium, and then they basically cut a bunch of people out of that consortium. There are some consortiums in the payment space that have come out of banks that have been successful, but it's a much smaller set of people, and all are clearly aligned on building better rails here.

I think there are actually a lot of misaligned incentives among a lot of these customers, or a lot of these consortium members. Now, that doesn't necessarily matter if you get a few of the really powerful and big ones to go and push this and distribute it.

So it doesn't necessarily matter that Adyen and Stripe might be misaligned, because Adyen doesn't have to do anything around this. I also expect that everyone wanted to have their logo and their name on this thing because they knew it would get a lot of play and a lot of coverage, and that makes sense. That's the right incentive.

How many of those people are going to do anything to actually further the distribution of this versus strike a deal with USDC or do something else? I think that's very much up in the air, and I expect the vast majority of these customers won't actually do anything to help further adoption. Maybe a few of the really big ones will, and that'll be what matters.

And I think Jeremy came out with a very long post, too, around things like how hard it is to get their compliance infrastructure, how hard it is to build these integrations in a bunch of different places, and how hard it is to get liquidity up. All of those things are true, but a lot of the names around the table here are people that can solve those problems if they want to solve those problems.

I think it's going to be hard. I think they'll probably end up having some level of success. I don't think it's a death knell to Circle the way other people think it is, and I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that they'll run away with some market.

3. Should Everyone Launch A Stablecoin?

Yeah, I thought we were going to disagree more on this, but I tend to agree with a lot of that. I think the most important thing here is I've never seen a consortium of hundreds of people, including hundreds of rivals—like 7 different banks, Aon and Stripe, and multiple crypto exchanges and custodians. A consortium of this size kind of has no precedent for working.

Maybe you could actually point to Visa as an example of a consortium that worked. I haven't actually read Dee Hock's book, One from Many: VISA and the Rise of the Chaordic Organization, on the founding of Visa and Visa getting started. But my understanding is it was a consortium of a bunch of banks and then finally became one thing.

So maybe that's the counter to all of this: big payment networks actually can start as a consortium, and Visa is a perfect example of that happening. But I tend to be in your boat, too, where, yeah, consortiums are very tough because there's no one thing there, for a couple of reasons.

One is there's no one person driving it. So maybe this is solved by Zach driving it forward. But the second is that the second you get regulatory risk—look, we have a beautiful environment to build this stuff. Imagine, I mean, it's 2026, right? The midterms are in 4 months. Imagine things start to turn. Better believe some of these companies are walking away.

Are they really going to take risks on stablecoins? Even though I know we are lovers of the stablecoin here, I just don't see them taking risks here. So I think if it is one of their initiatives, they own it.

They’re taking the risk. If they’re one of 150 companies, they’re walking it back. So, yeah, I tend to agree with you.

Can we talk about this? I tweeted out, “You know, it took us 5 years to realize that not everyone should have a chain. Let’s not spend another 5 years realizing that we don’t all need stablecoins.” I think you pushed back, saying a lot of people are actually building both chains and stablecoins. Maybe the data, Jason, would show that you’re wrong here.

Tell me about it. Here’s why I said this: look at who’s running the Open Standard, Zach. To me, this feels like a capitulation. Bridge’s whole business is going to people and saying, “We’ll build you a stablecoin.” They also have their own stablecoin, right? They’re very similar to someone like Agora, I would guess, which I know you guys are an investor in. They have AUSD, and they help people build white-label stablecoins.

Zach running this feels like, to me, a capitulation of the idea that everyone should have a stablecoin, and a focus on the bigger idea, which is, “Let’s make a huge competitor to Tether or USDC.” But it sounds like you disagree with me on that.

Yeah, a couple of things. One, there are people on this list who have their own stablecoin and are actively moving forward with their own stablecoin. Coinbase is on the list. Coinbase has USDC.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I think MoneyGram and Western Union are both on the list, and they’re both going to announce their own stablecoins, right? There’s still a lot of reason for fintechs, especially within a closed-loop system, to have their own stablecoins. I think we’re going to see a lot of that.

To your point, I wouldn’t say that Bridge’s business is to go give people stablecoins. Bridge’s business is to give people stablecoin infrastructure, which is inclusive of maybe white-label stablecoins, their developer stablecoin, on-ramps, off-ramps, orchestration, et cetera.

One of the things that’s happened a lot over the last year, year and a half, since they got acquired, has been that Stripe has also gotten really good at going, “Hey, well, here’s Bridge’s product. Also, maybe here’s Tempo. Also, here’s Stripe Verify. Let’s do some sort of consolidated offering.”

The Microsoft pricing. Yeah, we’ll give you Power BI for free if you just use Azure. Yeah, exactly.

And so I think this is sort of just another part of that, which is, “Here’s everything you need.” Now we have this thing that will hopefully—I think the Stripe or the Bridge stablecoin is called path. Maybe I have that wrong. Maybe it’s a Tempo one.

The Bridge developer stablecoin isn’t big at the moment. It doesn’t have a lot of liquidity, and so maybe this is a way in which they can say, “You can do your own thing, or you can do this. If you do this, you have a lot more connectivity, a lot more liquidity,” et cetera.

It serves a different use case because this is more of a payment stablecoin versus your closed-loop, white-label stablecoin. I expect that’s actually what we see: tons and tons of people still doing this closed-loop-type stablecoin, and then we see competition on the payment side.

I will say that anytime you do M&A, you have to integrate the company or let them operate independently. The original Bridge M&A process was, “Hey, they’re going to operate independently.” I think that was also true originally of Privy. It does feel like there’s a little bit of a comeback into the fold, consolidation, and streamlining of the whole strategy that’s happening here. That’s probably part of Zach taking this over.

But is that a bad thing?

You talk about it.

Okay. So the next part of this question turns into an economics question, right? If you look at Circle’s OPEX, I think their adjusted OPEX, if you strip out IPO costs and stuff like that, was $600 million—$500 or $600 million, if I remember correctly.

That’s a large amount of money, right? Half a billion dollars. Let’s say the Open Standard is getting—I don’t know, what do you think they get? 10 bps, 50 bps, or 25 bps? If you have $10 billion of supply and you’re getting maybe 50 bps—I even think that’s probably too high—20 bps, 10 bps, 25 bps, you’re getting somewhere in the range of $10 million to $50 million a year.

Let’s say it’s 50 bps. Let’s be generous: 50 bps on $10 billion of supply is $50 million a year. Circle’s adjusted OPEX is $500 million. You’ve got to pay for a whole bunch of things, right? Partnerships, OTC desks, settlement, compliance, and business development people.

What do you think happens here? Is this just Stripe going to fund the bag? Is this part of Stripe’s company?

Yeah, I’ve talked to a lot of the different partners, both the crypto ones and the TradFi ones. A lot of people have very different opinions on this. There are a number of people I’ve talked to who are like, “Listen, this is Stripe’s thing for Stripe to go win.”

I think everyone thinks Visa was heavily involved as well. If that continues to be true, they’re definitely the ones who are going to be the most aligned. They have the most to win and the most to lose if this doesn’t go well, so they’re also going to put the most money into it. I expect that they will also warehouse a lot of the costs because of that.

One part of the reason that Circle has such high OPEX is the fact that they’re trying to turn an issuance company into a payments company. They’re trying to build all of these other things around their ecosystem to monetize in different ways and provide applications, developer tooling, and things to make it easier to use their stablecoin. Obviously, Stripe already has a lot of that.

It’s not that the OPEX is necessarily different between the two of them. It’s simply that Stripe has already built it, or Stripe will warehouse it, and maybe it will sit outside of the Open Standard. I expect that they take the most active role here.

Obviously, I think my expectation is that Tempo also takes an active role. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s just an expectation from the outside in. Tempo raised a bunch of money and is doing a lot of the engineering already with many of the people on this Open Standard list.

I think they’ll probably, quote unquote, subsidize a lot of the OPEX that’s needed by pushing those costs onto some of the largest shareholders.

Yeah. What do you think about the impact for Circle? Circle is now down from $125. It’s trading around, at the time of recording, $60 to $65, right? It’s been cut in half in less than 2 months.

Jeremy had the post that you mentioned earlier, but what are your thoughts on the impact for Circle?

Yeah, I mean, I guess they were back up 6% today. They were down 17.5% on the announcement, so they’re probably net down, call it 12%, since this thing came out.

This was also a poorly kept secret, so hopefully people weren’t insider trading, but I’m sure that there was some of that.

I think the market reaction is justified. To our point that we talked about earlier, it’s absolutely going to be tougher for the Open Standard to take Circle market share than some of the original takes suggested.

It’s almost a sign of not just this specific stablecoin, but the fact that the prize is big. Growth could be great, but when the prize is big, that also means there’s going to be a lot of competition. You’re going to get competition from people like Stripe, and you’re going to get competition from the banks.

I think the banks are actually maybe the thing that we should be more worried about for Circle than Stripe. Maybe Stripe wins a payment use case, but the bigger use cases today are treasury management, capital markets, and clearing. Those are the really big use cases, and those markets are dominated by the banks.

I think there’s real concern that the banks take a lot of that flow. Circle has a push-pull happening right now. They have a head start, and they definitely have a head start on the institutional side. It’s going to be harder to compete with them than people realize. They have all of this liquidity.

Everything that Jeremy said is mostly right, but it’s also going to get significantly more competitive. The competition is going to come from people who are probably more well-versed in product, on the technology side, on the payment side, or in capital markets. I think that’s going to create a bit of a headwind for them in terms of taking that market share.

As Peter Thiel says, “Competition is for losers.” How does this impact—well, actually, one more on Circle: should you be long or short Circle here?

I would not be long or short at this point.

I think this is a bit of a wait-and-see market. I think they probably do need to do something defensive. I don't know what it looks like right now, but I've been saying for a while that I think they should be acquisitive.

Obviously, the stock has come way down and has come way in, so it's harder now with the current stock price than it was before. But I think they should be acquiring things to expand their capabilities. I think that the issuance itself—the fees that you can take from it—continues to go down and down. I think a lot of the value has to come from building better products, value-added services, and so on, on top of those rails.

Stripe understood that early on in the way that they expanded their product set. So I think it's a buy-versus-build conversation right now, and I think building is going to take too long as this market heats up.

Yeah. I've said this before on the podcast, but I'll say it again now because I think it's relevant: These all end up being moments in time that really just come down to how good the founder is. I think a lot of people have lost a lot of money betting against Jeremy.

It's very easy to say this is a short Circle moment, right? It's very easy to say, "They're cooked. Their business model's going to zero. They've got to share all their fees." But at the end of the day, everyone saying that is still using USDC as the backbone of every single thing that they do on-chain.

Until I see OpenUSD as the backbone of my Hyperliquid trades and my Uniswap trades, or whatever it is getting deposited onto Aave or Morpho—wherever you do things on-chain—I'm still not long or short Circle. But I just wouldn't bet against Jeremy. He's proved a lot of people wrong.

I totally agree with that. I agree that it doesn't make a ton of sense to be short here, considering also the market growth that I expect. There was, to your point about things on-chain, something that I believe the head of stablecoins at Ramp came out and said. Ramp has a very close relationship with Stripe, so I'm certain that they will be a big user here.

One of the things that they said, responding to Jeremy's point about liquidity and on-chain activity, was that they thought people were focused on the wrong thing. Yes, that will be hard to compete with, but that's also not what AUSD is supposed to be. Where they believe AUSD will win, and win quickly, is in interoperability and integrations with PSPs, banks, payment service providers, different PayFacs, and different technology companies.

It was basically, "If we're not even focused on that market, we're going to have the deepest liquidity and the deepest integrations with all of the traditional payments companies, and that is the thing that matters."

It's possible, too, that if they do that and Circle has the on-chain piece, you have to be concerned about Circle's growth potential, but not necessarily about losing the market share that they have today.

All that said, if this becomes a very deep Stripe product, Stripe is the one that has the most to win here. To the point I made earlier, Adyen will support it if its clients want it. They'll want to be able to support it, but they're not going to push it. That is going to be true for all of the acquirers, and for a lot of the banks and different people around the table.

It's one thing to support something, right? Everyone supports USDT, supports USDC, and a lot of people support AUSD. A lot of people support Paxos USD, and so on. But who people push and who people distribute is different across all of those players, even though they support everything.

4. Cloudflare's Monetization Gateway

Yeah, 100%. Anything else on this before we get to Cloudflare?

No, I think it's a wait-and-see moment, and I think it's going to take longer than anybody expects. I expect we actually get into a situation where people are like, "Oh, yeah, this was a bust," and maybe that'll be calling the death a little bit too quickly. The market's big, and a lot of people are going to win here.

Yeah, I agree. Okay, let's talk Cloudflare. Cloudflare, for those who don't know, is a cloud networking company, and I guess you could call them a cybersecurity company as well. About 20% to 25%—I think the number is 20% or 21%—of all HTTP requests on the internet go through Cloudflare. About 20% of the whole web is protected by or runs through Cloudflare.

They have about 100 million HTTP requests per second. One hundred million per second. It's a massive company, with a good founder and CEO, and it's publicly traded. I think they started in 2009 or 2010, so it's a really strong company.

They announced a really cool thing: the Monetization Gateway. I'm going to read their tweet: "We're opening the waitlist for our monetization gateway, which will allow you to charge for any website or, excuse me, any webpage, dataset, API, or MCP tool behind Cloudflare. The charges will settle in stablecoins over the x402 open protocol."

To translate that, they're supporting x402. The cooler thing, maybe, is that millions of websites can now turn on pay-per-request stablecoin payments. They don't need any knowledge of stablecoins, and they don't really need any knowledge of how to do that. It's very natively built for AI agents.

There's been all this hype around agents, agentic commerce, x402, and things like that, but the numbers have actually been really small. I think this is one of those examples where things will clearly happen; it will just take longer than people usually think. This was a very interesting product from Cloudflare.

Yeah, I agree that there is going to be a lot of stablecoin usage and the embedding of payments. You might have seen that two or three weeks ago we saw some data that said, for the first time, the majority of internet traffic was agentic.

That was Cloudflare, too, I think.

Yeah, it was. Cloudflare talked about it, so clearly they have a better vantage point than anybody in terms of understanding what is happening on the agentic use-case side. They're part of the x402 governance board, and I think they're also going to do stuff with MPP.

When you talk to them, they do have a belief that there are going to be non-stablecoin transactions in agentic commerce. The reality is that stablecoins are very good for certain types of transactions. They're going to play an important role here, but maybe that role is very much around agent-to-agent transfers or payments, or an agent needing to pay for a microtransaction, versus some of the other things people have talked about where it's human-controlled or involves larger transactions.

We've started to see most people come around to the idea that cards can actually be modified to be used for most agent transactions, especially when they're user-controlled or when they're enterprise transactions, particularly for enterprise use cases. Maybe that applies in some of these marketplaces, too, which are in many ways just really advanced RPA for some of the free-flowing agent transactions.

For the transactions that agents need to pay for, obviously stablecoins are better. But I also have a belief that even if cards are good, all card settlement is going to stablecoins over time, personally. I think stablecoins are going to play a role in all of this.

This was really cool from Cloudflare. I think the stock hasn't been doing particularly well, but I actually think they stand to play a very interesting role in the payments ecosystem. It's a whole new revenue stream for them and could theoretically be very, very good for their business. I'm super excited to see them do this.

I expect this will continue to be a lot of transactions from a volume standpoint, but from a volume basis, I expect it to continue to grow very slowly, personally.

5. Robinhood Launches A Chain

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. I'll get to the conclusion after we talk about Robinhood, because I think you can tie all 3 of these together into almost 1 message for this podcast. But let's talk about Robinhood first.

Robinhood announced the launch of their chain, basically. They launched the public mainnet of their L2, which is an Arbitrum-based L2 chain called Robinhood Chain.

They rolled out a bunch of key features: tokenized stocks, including NVIDIA, Apple, and Google, available in 120 countries; on-chain DeFi, including a Uniswap AMM and Morpho lending; agentic AI trading for U.S. users specifically; Chainlink as the oracle; and 90 days of zero gas fees.

HOOD stock went up, I think, 8% or 9% on the day. I have to pull that back up. HOOD is up 20% in the last 5 days, so, yeah, very interesting.

I think it's funny to see a publicly traded company launch a chain and everyone get very excited about it. The chain announcements of 2021 and 2022, the crypto-chain announcements, have now turned into the TradFi chain announcements. So, I would love to hear your thoughts.

For me, maybe I can start with my most interesting observation, which is that for years there have been these pay-to-play games where chains go out and pay applications and big companies to come launch on them. I don't have all the details—I haven't talked to the Robinhood folks about this—but I've only talked to application founders for many years. The chains would pay huge amounts for people to come join their network, right? So, if you see a big TradFi player coming onto a blockchain, there's usually something—

I think it did happen this time, too, for them to build what they built—

I think, yeah, it definitely happened here as well, right? Many chains wanted to be the underlying infrastructure for the Robinhood Chain. But what I'm getting at is that this is the first time I've seen applications now pay, or at least try to pay, to join the Robinhood Chain.

There are a lot of founders of DEXs—AMMs, lending and borrowing platforms—who don't really understand where the future of their company is going to go. If you're not Aave or Morpho or maybe Spark or Kamino or Uniswap or one of the Aerodrome-like tier-one players, it's a tough situation. It's a dogfight out there. I think a lot of founders are uncertain, and I think a lot of founders see joining the Robinhood Chain as, “Maybe this is our comeback story. Maybe if we can pay to get on this chain—or not even get on the chain, if we can pay to be presented front and center inside the Robinhood app—maybe that's our comeback story and that saves us.”

Again, I actually have no idea about the structures. I don't know if Robinhood is taking payment. By the way, I'm not sure if Robinhood is letting people pay them, but I do know that many founders are going to Robinhood with large amounts of money saying, “Please let my app deploy, and please put us front and center in the app.”

Yeah. So, anybody can deploy on the chain. What can't happen is that anybody can be integrated into the wallet, and that's what we've seen people be really excited about.

If you looked at the announcement that came out, and if you actually watched it, there were a bunch of different names of different types of protocols in that announcement. Ethena was on there doing a kind of yield vault, Morpho, Lighter, and dYdX's new brand—I think it's Aster. There are a bunch of others, like the ones you talked about.

Any of those people can build on the chain, and there are a bunch of other people building on the chain itself. But there were 3 companies that they highlighted very deeply during the presentation, people who are building deep integrations into the wallet: Lighter, who I think got the most attention; Morpho; and Aster, the dYdX business. Those were the 3 they highlighted. Aster is dYdX, right? dYdX.

Yeah, correct. It's a new brand, and it's a little bit more like dYdX V2 infrastructure, the way they're building it. And so they've gone back to—

Lighter, Morpho, Uniswap too, or no?

Uniswap wasn't talked about as much in the actual—

Another one, too, here, if you go down: there's Uniswap, and then I've never heard of this Pletes[?], which—

Yeah, there's Rialo, and there are a bunch of others that are actually there. So, I think if you go down the list—

Lighter, Aster, Uniswap—yeah, so there are a few. I get what you're saying. They are—

What I'm saying is, when you actually listen to the live presentation, they spend a lot more time on those 3 right now. But, yes, there are a bunch of different names if you go up and down the list.

Also, for the trading experience, there's something else on the lending side, on Aave as well, and so on. What I found very interesting during all this is that, if I take Lighter, for example, I don't think they're taking payment. I've never heard that they're taking payment. But what they are asking for is, “Can you do something that, one, works very specifically for our wallet and makes sure that the experience is best-in-class?”

Lighter, for instance, has made a segmented instance specifically for the wallet. I know they're working to also aggregate liquidity between the 2, and that's sort of an alpha, so it will happen. But at least to get the experience where they want it to be at first, they did a segmented instance.

They're also adding, I believe, $20 million of LIT token incentives specifically for users of the Robinhood Wallet. So, it's more about what you can offer to Robinhood's end customers. I believe Morpho is offering special incentives, too. The Earn product in the wallet is 7% right now, and I think a lot of that is coming from Morpho token incentives.

There's a lot of focus on, “Can you provide things to our end customers to get them really excited to put their full financial lives here and to trade here?” Robinhood doesn't need the money. What they do want is to make sure they have the best offering. How can these people do the work to make sure that they have the best offering?

Yeah, 100%. Where do you think this goes? This feels like the most exciting chain project announcement since probably Tempo, I would say.

Yeah. I'm interested to see the dichotomy of what happens in the wallet, which I think will do incredibly well. The wallet's actually a very good product. I don't know if you've used it. They're clearly building—

Dumb question: Is the wallet inside the app? You're talking about the wallet, not a—

Oh, I have not used that. Okay.

6. Venice Raises $65M & Crypto’s Token vs Equity Problem

Yeah, so it's sort of a separate app now. I don't know what their plans are for the future, and I—

It's an app I can download on my phone, or is it like a Chrome—

Exactly. Yeah. So, it's sort of—do you remember how Coinbase used to have Coinbase Wallet, and it was a separate app?

I do remember.

Yeah, so it sort of started that way, right? It's all DeFi-type stuff. I don't know what their plans are for the future. My guess is that they'll probably bring it into the core app when they can, from a regulatory perspective. At the moment, it's separate, but it's actually quite a good product. And that—go ahead.

Oh, I was just going to say, on that note, I think that's where Robinhood, Coinbase, and actually OKX are all going, for what it's worth. More and more trades are starting to settle on-chain. If you fast-forward to what Robinhood will look like in a couple of years, or what Coinbase will look like in a couple of years, a lot of the pairs and a lot of your trades are just going to settle on-chain.

Robinhood wants to own the wallet, maybe some ownership in the DEX, and maybe more of the stack. The more of the stack you can own, the better, obviously. I wouldn't be surprised if we see Coinbase incubate a DEX or Robinhood incubate a DEX. The more they can actually own themselves, I think the better, because I think that is where things are going. And OKX—

You know, maybe not as big in the U.S., but OKX is another one that has done phenomenally well on-chain. They have, I think, maybe the biggest wallet in the world today, bigger than MetaMask.

I think Binance is still the biggest.

Okay, you might be right. That might be right. But they've done a lot on-chain, and I think if you go talk to the product teams at any of these exchanges, they'll say—and we can see the data through Blockworks—we can see more and more CEX trades not settling on the private CEX order book and actually settling on-chain.

Yeah. No, and you're 100% right.

Robinhood Wallet. I see it. This looks—

Yeah, got to download it. It's a good product.

And so you're 100% right. Also, what all of these guys are doing is, to your point about incubating, investing right now. Robinhood has invested in a bunch of these guys. Coinbase has invested in some of them and also acquired some. Kraken's doing the same, et cetera. You're seeing them get that alignment early on, and maybe an investment turns into an acquisition in the future.

M&A with products that have tokens is still a very hard thing to think through today, but we'll see more of it. I totally agree with you, but I think the point I was making was that the wallet product is going to do incredibly well. The people who are integrated and pushed into the wallet are going to do incredibly well. I don't know if I think that the things that are not doing well in the wallet will do well on the chain.

For the people who aren't getting this preferred position in the wallet and who deploy on the chain, will there be other liquidity where people are doing things outside of the wallet on the chain? And that's where I would be much more dubious. But I think this is where the whole world is going, though. This is why I said this in a tweet in response to your tweet about, “Have we figured out that we don't all need all these chains?”

I think we're going to see chains from a lot of the world's fintechs and a lot of the world's banks. They're just going to have their own execution environment for the things that exist on their apps. Maybe they'll be open so other people can interact there, but they want to prioritize the things that they want to prioritize in their applications.

I remember it was Kyle Samani, and we got into a back-and-forth about this on Twitter a couple of years ago. I've been saying this was going to happen for a while, and he said, “No, it's all going to happen on Solana.” I continue to see the signs that this is what's happening and this is where we're going in the future.

In fact, I even talked to a founder of a high-throughput L1 earlier this week. It's a high-throughput L1 that hasn't had a ton of traction but has some good tech, and it's a team that came out of one of the really good L1s. This founder was telling me, “I'm actually getting a lot of acquisition offers from corporates right now,” which is kind of weird because he's building this thing and hasn't really had the traction yet, but he thinks he has great tech. All these corporates are coming to him and saying, “Hey, I actually just want to acquire you.”

I think that's what we're going to see: a lot of things like this, where someone like Robinhood is doing all of this on-chain crypto economic activity and wants to own its own execution environment. I think that's where we're going.

I do, too. I do, too. To wrap all this up, my summary statement is: What's the takeaway from all this? We're talking about Stripe, Cloudflare, and Robinhood. There's this very famous, probably overused statement: startups versus incumbents. Can startups get distribution before the incumbents can figure out the innovation? Something like that.

Maybe there's a third bucket in today's world, which is tech companies. Many of these companies are 10 to 15 years old, but because of the scale and the growth rates of some of these internet businesses and tech companies, they're almost the size of many of these incumbents, but they still have the scrappiness of a startup.

This idea that there are only 2 companies—the startup versus the incumbent—maybe there's a third group that crypto companies need to be both excited about, but that's also their competitor in many of these cases. It's the tech companies. It's the Web2 companies. It's Stripe, Cloudflare, and Robinhood.

It's an opportunity because they're your customers. Morpho will do very well. Lighter will do very well from integrating with Robinhood. Both those companies will benefit greatly. But they're also, in many cases, going to be your competitors.

It's an interesting idea. I haven't fully formed my thesis on what that means or what the takeaway is, but I do think this idea of startups versus incumbents might weirdly be an old-school idea now that there are the tech companies.

I do think I had—it's a little bit all about perspective, right? Very clearly, Stripe builds products and has engineering that is far ahead of a lot of the people that you and I would consider incumbents. But I got a call from a reporter yesterday who wanted to talk about all of this stuff and had seen my post on X. That reporter's perspective was that Stripe had failed at a bunch of products and was not that good of a product organization. This is a reporter in the Bay Area.

I think in many ways it's just natural that, as businesses get bigger, they have a harder time doing net-new, risky things. So, yes, is Stripe or Cloudflare—or name your tech company, Robinhood—better at building new tech than Charles Schwab and Global Payments? Yes, absolutely. But they are sort of the incumbents now, and will they still be able to move as quickly as a startup, especially in a world of AI? Probably not.

I think it's just that everything is getting faster and everything is going to market quicker, but startups still have advantages in certain things.

Yeah, I don't know. I'll update you in 2 months once the thesis is fully formed. And look, we'll see. We'll see if Open Standard takes off.

Well, Open Standard's not even going to launch until late this year. Oh, 2 months is too fast. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Problem with consortiums, right? We'll see in 5 years if Open Standard takes off. We'll see if the Robinhood chain gets big. We'll see if anyone uses this Cloudflare thing.

Yeah, TBD.

I think my takeaway from all of this is 2 things. One is that things are coming on-chain. It's happening. You can tell it on the Goldman thing. You can tell it on all of these announcements. There's no doubt in my mind that fintech, stablecoins, and tokenization—the DTCC is going to launch its thing in October—these things are coming on-chain. It is happening. You can't get in front of this train.

The other point here is that things are just happening quicker. The level of uncertainty is higher, the pace of movement is quicker, and there's a general sort of manicness, or mania, around having to ship this stuff very quickly.

I would broadly say that we are going into, with AI, tokenization, digital money, and digital assets, a world of incredible GDP growth and the financialization of everything. People should be ready for that, prepare for that, and work toward being part of that future economy.

Yeah, Venice. Tricky one to talk about because you guys led the round. Venice is Erik Voorhees's second act. It's an AI platform that is permissionless, can't be censored, and has done very, very well. They just raised—they announced a fundraise, a Series A, I think it was $65 million.

It's the only seed fundraise they've ever done, so ignore the Series A part. They announced a raise of $6.5 million at a $1 billion valuation, I think it was.

The first thing to do is congratulate Erik because he's one of the better founders. He's obviously an amazing founder. He has deep conviction in his values, ethics, and morals, which I think is what led him to build Venice.

It's also very relevant to this conversation because the interesting conversation this sparked is that Venice was one of the few—usually, when you build a crypto company, you raise a pre-seed, then a seed, then a Series A, and then you launch your token. You get this huge valuation on the token, and the token is down only. What Venice did was launch its token from basically day 1, and the token has done very well over the last several months.

The controversy around this round is that they raised equity, but they already have this token. So there's a dual-token, equity model now. Many would criticize this, including my co-founder Mike, who had a video on Twitter that went viral in the crypto sense of the term, criticizing this dual structure.

I know many people who looked at this round, and some who invested in it. Obviously, you guys led it, and I do know that behind the scenes, during the fundraising, this was a hot topic: How do we even structure this so that the equity holders and the token holders would both benefit?

I don't know what you can actually say about this. Obviously, some of it is confidential, but maybe walk me through your thinking on this dual structure and, obviously, Venice in general.

I'd like to hear your guys' investment thesis.

Yeah. Listen, on Venice specifically, I think if we've learned anything over the last, you know, over the Fable 5 announcement and over what we've started to see in terms of general winds of focus on the AI conversation in D.C. and in global regulatory bodies, it's that there is a clear need for privacy and a clear need for continued access to a broad set of different models.

That doesn't mean Venice is going to be a solution for potentially, you know, export controls. We're not committing crimes here. But we're going into a world in which your data is a commodity. Everything you do online, everything you do on these models, is being used, sold, and packaged to everybody else.

The VPN industry isn't, in and of itself, a $70 billion industry. I don't know if you saw, but there was a bill that I think passed in Utah to ban VPNs. One of the most ardent groups to come out against that was one of the national press lobbying groups, because you actually put the press at risk of retribution from the government if they don't have VPNs, right?

The understanding of and need for privacy, and what we've seen in terms of government overreach, is going to continue to exist, and Venice is going to be a big part of that. Beyond that, their ability to do routing to different models, give you access to different models, and also that token model with DM and VVV that allows you to lock in some compute prices—it's all very innovative. It's a great business, and it's grown incredibly quickly.

We're very excited about Erik and his co-founder, Jesse. I've known Jesse for a long time. He was a fintech founder, and I helped him sell his old business to Betterment. We're really excited about them and what they're building.

Is it Jesse Proudman from Makara?

I never put that together.

Yeah.

Interesting. Interesting.

They've got a super-interesting story about how they came together, too. Jesse and Erik knew each other a long time ago and came together recently.

On the token and equity split, I have a perspective that is going to piss a lot of people off. Most of the takes on Twitter were so ill-informed and misunderstood what business is that they weren't really worth my time to respond to.

But I will say about the broader point that there is a naivety to the situation we are in. We do not have a Clarity Act, and if you look at Polymarket today, I think the likelihood that the Clarity Act passes is 40% to 45%. If you talk to people in D.C. today, many of them are quite bearish about it.

The ability to do deep, detailed governance and deep, detailed capital return to token holders globally and in the U.S. for U.S. founders is impaired. That is just the situation we are in today.

You have a couple of global foundations and companies that have done this sort of collapsing of the equity and the token to try to give the token the best rights possible. These structures are untested. They are mostly global, not U.S.-based, and they have created a situation in which the only way to raise more money to operate their business is actually to dilute current token holders.

They've also created uncertainty about the ability to do things like enterprise contracts. You saw when Across Protocol went private a number of months ago. One of the things Hart said in his announcement was that they could not do the enterprise contracts they needed to do with businesses for B2B contracts with the token. It was a blocker for them.

Erik and Jesse went out there and fair-launched this token, and they allowed for a significant amount of price discovery. They have a very interesting model, which they've been very clear about: with Venice AI and subscriptions, they buy back the token.

They have never once been anything but incredibly transparent about how they return any sort of value back to that token. They have also never once said, "Hey, you now have full legal rights to it like it's equity." If people thought that was what had happened, they were stupid, frankly, and naive. They've never been unclear about that.

Would we like to be in a situation where there is regulatory clarity and we can collapse these 2 things? Absolutely. We are not in that situation, and we will not be in that situation anytime soon.

I want a better world like everyone else. I believe in the future that a lot of people are hoping to get. The fact that people say things like, "There's no reason for this in 2026," is a level of naivety that I frankly do not think is worth a conversation because it does not understand the situation we are in.

I'm very excited for these guys. I believe—

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Rob, why do you think it doesn't warrant a conversation? Isn't that one of the main conversations to be had? Because tokens are so fun.

Sorry, go ahead.

Tokens have been so fun. Tokens are such a good idea. Tokens are such an amazingly fantastic idea, and yet they're so fundamentally broken today. So isn't there a really, really, really important conversation—maybe one of the most important conversations in the industry—around tokens and equity?

Yes, but we cannot. What I am saying is that the naivety exists in the idea of what is possible. We can't create a new security and then decide that that security is just going to exist unless you want these founders to go to jail.

The idea that we are in a situation today where we can, in the U.S., in companies that need to do things like build a data center and have these enterprise contracts, collapse token and equity into a single model that allows them to have full ownership, full rights of the equity owners, and full governance, while also having rights to anything around M&A and any sort of capital-return policy, is obviously something that cannot exist.

It is so obvious to me that I find a lot of the discourse to be incredibly silly, frankly. Do I want that to be the truth in the future? Absolutely. I'm completely aligned with that, and all of us are. That is not the situation we are in today.

Yeah. Yes, but why would you launch a token then?

Well, listen, certainly—it's like a public company. The way I think about this is, when someone has a token and you're like, "Oh, you should share all these things," they're like, "Why would I ever share that?" It's like, because you chose to run a public company.

The moment you launched your token, you—not me, not the public—chose to go public. It's like a public-company CEO being like, "This is ridiculous that I have to submit this stuff to the SEC. This is ridiculous that I have to do quarterly reporting," which some of that probably is. The requirements on being public are way too many. We can all agree with that. The costs are way too high.

Still, you have to do it. It's the cost of being public, and it lets you access the capital markets. So there's a benefit to having a token, but there are also costs that come with it. You don't get to launch your token if you're not going to do some of this stuff.

But what they didn't do—and I think people are misunderstanding this a little bit—is launch a token and say, "Here's equity," right? They never told anybody that, right?

What they did is launch a token that said, "Take this token, and if you stake this token, you get another token back." That is a pre-buying of compute power, right? That is the reason for these tokens to exist: to allow people to essentially hedge out future compute costs.

It serves a purpose. Erik and the company made this point a bunch of times yesterday: The company is incredibly incentivized and aligned by having the token because they're the largest holders of it by far, and they're going to continue to be the largest holders of it.

They didn't have to dilute the other token holders to raise money to build a data center. Instead, they helped those token holders by not having to launch or put a lot more tokens into the market to build a data center, which is something they need to do.

That token, which exists to help you hedge out and lock in compute costs, has a purpose for you. The equity has a purpose, too, so that they can go and build a big business.

To your point about whether this should be the long-term fix, none of us want this to be the long-term solution. We want there to be more options and more collapsing of tokens and equity.

It's just that the thing does not exist today. And so we have to be pragmatic about the situation we are in.

Yeah. I agree with that. I agree with the second half. I also think Erik is one of the better founders, but also just one of the better people in the industry, with better morals and values than most of the industry, I'd say.

He also gave one of the best talks I've ever heard, which was at Permissionless. It was a phenomenal keynote, which people should listen to as a reminder of why we're all doing this in crypto in the first place.

I read all of his replies because this is something Blockworks feels strongly about, saying that they are one of the biggest holders of the token. They're incentivized just like the holders, and that has gone really poorly for the holders of tokens for the last several years. Every chain is the biggest holder of its token. They were all incentivized to have it go up, but the founders got super, super rich while the holders of the token did really, really poorly.

So I don't think Erik should be concerned with solving this, by the way. He should be concerned with building the biggest possible business, but I think the industry needs to recognize that this is a problem that should be solved.

And I don't think anybody, including Erik, would disagree with you that this is a thing that needs to be solved. It's just that Erik understands, one, he bootstrapped this thing and fair-launched this token, and he got this thing to a very big place before it took in any outside capital, right?

He created this token with the idea that they were going to try to do this interesting compute model, like I talked about, and then he ran into the realities of trying to build an AI business that was scaling exponentially and was unable to pay for compute, right?

He had an option to release a bunch of tokens to the market and then try to build a governance infrastructure and a legal infrastructure that, frankly, doesn't really work for most serious investors. Or he had the option of doing what he did. Maybe this is a lesser-of-two-evils situation, but it is also, by the way—you can disagree with the whole thing, but one thing that Erik has done, to your point about having high morals, is he's worked really hard to be as transparent as possible.

There is no hiding the ball here whatsoever. People know what is happening. So if people want to invest in the token because they believe in the product, or they think there's going to be so many net-new signups that the buybacks are going to pay for that, then they should do that.

If they don't like the fact that now there is this dual structure and that they don't have the same rights as the equity holders, then they don't have to buy it.

I know I'm going to use this analogy, which I know is not completely fair. I know people are going to yell at me about it, but there are also different rights if you're a debt holder, a preferred holder, or a common holder, right? You invest in different things—you buy different things—with the understanding that the rights are different. And so how you price those things and how they should be priced is going to be different. The market will figure that out.

I see where you're coming from on all this, and actually I tend to agree with most of it. Do you think that token holders should know the deal that was done? Do you think that, let's say, Dragonfly had—or all the investors in this round have—an option to buy VVV tokens, should the token holders know that somewhere? Does that need to be public?

I mean, Erik made the decision to make that public, right? Because for Erik, it was very important to make sure that there was as much transparency as possible with the token holders, right? And not every founder decides that that is something they want to put out there.

I think it's a personal decision that's going to be contextually different depending on the product that you're building—consumer versus institutional, et cetera, right? But what I will say is that his perspective was that this was the right thing to do, and it was also his perspective that it was most likely to allow the token to continue trading well.

To your point, you guys are very focused on transparency around the token, and so he's trying to be as transparent as possible in the hopes that people want to continue to be a part of the ecosystem. I don't think he's trying to get people to buy the token, but he's trying to make sure that if people want to trade it, it trades well.

Yeah, I agree. Maybe my summary from this conversation would be, one, I do think this equity-token structure is something that really needs to get fixed for the industry because I think that tokens need—we need to make tokens work for crypto. I really believe that.

Second, it was actually kind of a bummer to see this conversation take away from the success that Erik has had with Venice. I would end this by just saying congrats to Erik. I actually didn't know Jesse, but I didn't realize it was that Jesse. So, yeah, congrats to Jesse and Erik and the whole team. It's cool to see them do well. That would be my summary.

Yeah. And it's a great product. Try it out.

It is a great product. Anything else on the week, Rob? Content of the week?

No, I think—listen, I think the reality right now is that there are a lot of things going well, and that's very clear from this. I think we say this every week, and it hasn't mattered for token prices, but I continue to remain very excited about things that are happening here.

I think I'm sounding like a bit of a broken record at this point, even though the tokens keep going down, but I'm excited for institutional adoption, excited for the fintechs, excited for these cool, innovative products from people trying new things like Venice. Enjoy the Fourth. Have a beer. Eat a hot dog.

7. Content of The Week

Have a beer. Eat a hot dog. Watch the U.S. win. Indeed. Content of the week.

That's the content: watching the U.S. win.

Watch the U.S. win. Watch the U.S. win.

I like it. I like it. I do have a good book, which is When the Heavens Went on Sale. I'm about halfway through this thing. It's about all the space companies, like Rocket Lab, Astra, Planet Labs, and Firefly, except for SpaceX.

It's about all the—it's Ashlee Vance. I don't know if you've read any Ashlee Vance. He's a good reporter, actually.

Yeah, he broke all the OpenAI stuff, right?

Right?

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

I will say, I will give a real piece of content, just because it's not just the U.S.: the new season of The Agency with Michael Fassbender on Amazon Prime. Very good. It's a remake of a French show. They did a first season and a second season. It's sort of a spy show—an incredibly good one. If you want something on the holiday weekend with the family, I'm all about it.

Nice. All right, Rob. Good to see you, Santi. We missed you. Come back with some bullishness, Santi, if you want to be let back in. Cheers, folks.

Thanks.