Why Perps Are Taking Over | Kaledora Kiernan-Linn

Our view is that the biggest opportunity in DeFi is not rebuilding the exchange stack from scratch, which is basically how everybody has approached trying to build out perps in crypto. It is taking these really liquid and highly functional existing markets that are working, massively extending their global reach, and bringing the instant-settlement and transparency benefits of what you would get on-chain.

All right, guys. Welcome back to another 1000x podcast. We've got a very special guest today, Kaledora, who is the founder of Ostium, which is an awesome exchange that I wish I had invested in when she first called me because it is doing so well right now. You can trade basically anything on it, and I'm happy to have her on the podcast today. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me, Avi. I'm excited to be here.

1. What it Takes To Become a Founder

I wanted to start by asking you about your background because you have a very interesting path into crypto. A lot of people, when you ask them how they got into crypto or finance, say, "Well, I graduated college, then I got a job at a finance company, then I hated it, and then I left." But what happened with you is that you actually started on the stage of the Royal Danish Ballet. Did I get that right? You did 5 years of professional ballet, performing under intense pressure, and then you pivoted to finance. Maybe walk me through how all that happened.

Definitely an unusual background. That's correct: my first career was as a professional ballerina. I started dancing when I was 3. You have to start training very young, and I started dancing professionally after high school. I spent 1 year at Boston Ballet and then 4 years at the Royal Danish Ballet.

Ballet prepares you in a lot of surprising ways for being a founder. Obviously, that was not the intention. I pursued ballet single-mindedly and was focused on that for 20 years, then went back to school and found my way into building a company, but a lot of the skills have been surprisingly translatable.

There are obvious ones, like focus and a long time horizon, which I think is an underdiscussed and undervalued one. You start ballet when you're 3 for a dream that might come true—you might have a shot at it coming true—15 to 20 years down the road. In a very short-time-frame, positive-outcome world, where most people are operating on a very short time horizon and foreseeing returns on their choices, I think it's insane alpha to be able to think on a 10- to 15-year time scale. That's probably a unique edge, along with discipline and all the basic competitive-athlete-type things.

There are other parts that I think have been unhelpful in some ways from ballet. The most obvious one, and I've written about this a little bit, is perfection. I like seeking perfection rather than good enough.

I think anybody who's built a company would say this, but building companies has fundamentally changed me as a person, or changed my philosophy about certain core things. One of them is the pursuit of perfection versus good enough.

A very important way to understand why people don't understand politicians who become businesspeople is that they don't understand that being good in business is a lot about 80/20. It's all about making a lot of decisions really quickly, and being decisive is often more important than being right.

That's a very different mindset from ballet or classical art. Ballet is both an Olympic sport and a classical art, where you're practicing the same move for 2 or 3 decades to get it to a point where it's as close to perfect as possible.

I think all those points are very valuable and interesting. For me specifically, one of the things that I love betting on, if I'm investing in a founder or investing in a trader, is somebody who has done competitive sports.

For example, I used to work with Mike Novogratz, managing his book, and he loved hiring Princeton wrestlers. He just loved it. I was a wrestler in college, and I think that's why we bonded a little bit.

There's this mentality that you bring toward everything that you do. A nontrivial part of it is the determination to see things through. You just don't give up.

I think it's important to discuss that philosophy here because hopefully a listener will say, "Okay, if I'm evaluating a company, let's see if the founder did anything really impressive before they started a company." I think that's a pretty good signal.

I think also just being able to stick to the grind, not expecting to see immediate results, and not operating on that basis. A lot of building a company is momentum. You need these 2 very different mental frameworks.

One is knowing how to growth-hack and chase momentum to generate momentum. That one's very memetic, very dopamine- and short-term-driven. You have to know how to ride that wave.

But there's also an element of building a startup that is just literally not dying. These are 2 very different mindsets.

I personally found the biggest, most jarring transition in the company was going from the period of time long before we had market feedback to indicate that our core thesis for the company was correct, to when it turned out that the core thesis of the company was correct, but now we had to move really, really fast to make sure we continued to capture the first-mover advantage.

Those are 2 very different mindsets. One is more of a scarcity mindset, prolonging runway, and the other is more of a throw-everything-at-the-wall-as-quickly-as-possible mindset to move forward and create action.

You need to be more balanced toward one and more balanced toward the other at different points in time in your company, depending on your stage. A lot of being a founder, especially at the early stages—and just long-term, for company longevity and making the right decisions over time—is surviving long enough to get lucky.

I think there's a lot of that in athletics as well. Don't get injured. There's huge alpha in just not getting injured.

2. Building Ostium

Yeah, it's avoiding the blowup scenarios, I guess, is one way that I phrase it. I want to dive down on what you said there about the core thesis.

After you're an athlete, you go to Bridgewater, and then at some point at Bridgewater you have this aha moment and leave Bridgewater to start Ostium. I'm curious: first of all, what was the core thesis that led you to leave Bridgewater to start Ostium, and what have you done since then to bring that vision to reality?

I retired from ballet and went back to Harvard. I started as a freshman. I was a bit older than the average freshman because I'd been dancing for a few years.

I met Marco the first week of freshman fall in Ec 10, which is the intro econ class at Harvard. We were the 2 most opinionated kids in the class, so at some point we decided we should stop bothering the rest of the class and just start talking to each other. That was the genesis of the friendship and, ultimately, of the company.

Wait, you were friends with your co-founder for a long time before you started this company?

Yeah, he's been to my Thanksgiving, he's friends with my brother—we were super good friends before we started the company. We've been friends since the first week of school.

Both of us interned at Bridgewater in different summers. I was there 1 summer working on one of the CIO's teams, and then he worked the next summer on the commodities team. I also spent a summer working at an equities fund, so we interned at different hedge funds in different summers.

While we were in school, we spent a lot of late nights sitting in the dining hall, talking about markets, philosophy, and geopolitics—basically macro. We met in a macroeconomics class, so that was very prophetic in many ways.

The way I would articulate the core thesis that we developed, which was the driving force behind our choice to build out the company, was that it was the core thesis behind Ostium.

I've said this a few times, but contrary to a lot of companies, we were not in pivot hell. A lot of companies are in pivot hell. It's very common to start a company, start one thing, and then move on to another thing because you're not getting market feedback.

I would describe the first 3 years of Ostium not as pivot hell, but as conviction hell, because we had 1 core thesis and incredible conviction in it, but the market wasn't mature enough and wasn't ready for it. That is also why, going back to what I was saying before about this scarcity mindset and staying alive versus pushing momentum, these are 2 very different modes. A lot of the beginning of the company was this conviction-hell period of building in stealth, building in the darkness, before there was real market feedback. The crypto market was definitely not mature enough at the time for what we were building.

We were in conviction hell, and I tell my team: if you focus and have the right thesis, and follow it for long enough, it will lead you to conviction heaven. You have to pass through conviction purgatory; soon we'll be in conviction heaven.

The core thesis was the following. We thought the first generation of consumer trading applications evolved basically between the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 and COVID in 2020. They evolved during a completely different macro environment than the one we're in now, which is characterized by 3 main things: basically zero inflation, very nonvolatile and predictable interest rates, and very little geopolitical instability, certainly compared to where we are right now.

Our observation was that COVID—we lived through COVID in school; we were in college, got sent home, and went through the whole thing—fundamentally changed something in the markets, and we're in a new paradigm. It was a paradigm shift. We thought the next 10 to 15 years were going to be completely different from that first window during which consumer trading had evolved. It was going to be characterized by basically the opposite of the 3 things I described: persistently higher and more unpredictable inflation, persistently higher and more unpredictable interest rates, and much more geopolitical instability.

I think if you just look at what's happened in the last week in terms of the reversals from anticipated 3 rate cuts this year to 1 rate hike, that's been one of the fastest reversals in, I think, a decade or some nontrivial period of time. So that has certainly come true. The third one was much more geopolitical instability, and I think that goes without saying. What does this mean for markets?

I was going to ask you to dive into that a little bit more. I'm curious. I think people often hear, “Okay, this is my thought on what is going to happen in the future,” but how did you get there? What were you seeing in the markets, or what were you seeing in the world, where you thought, “Oh, everyone else has it wrong. I think we have an edge here to go build this?”

I don't know that I necessarily thought we had an edge as a team in the beginning. I think we were just—this is super nerdy—but we were just in college, and we were this kind of meme of people being in college and sitting and having late-night conversations about philosophy. That was literally us. We were the meme of that. We were like that to the end. People who went to school with us are like, “Kaledora and Marco were always in Dunster dining hall, talking about philosophy and markets.”

We were still thinking about where we thought the world was going, not with any end goal. We weren't like, “We're going to build a company.” It was just talking about markets and philosophy and all this stuff. Going back, I think we're very first-principles thinkers. We didn't get to the company by paving some windy road; it was really top-down: where do we think the world is going? Then we got to, “What are some things that you would build if—how would you make your career decisions? What would you do if you thought this is where the world was going?”

To be more practical about what we thought, we also read a lot of Jeremy Grantham and all these long pieces about how the market was going to collapse. I think we read a little bit. I was also really into Taleb at one point, and he's proven to be a little bit—

I think all of us have had a Taleb phase. I think everyone successful and intelligent has had one at some point in their life. Then later, they sort of woke up and went, “I like this guy?” But it's fine.

Anyway, he had a big influence on my thinking. Fun fact—I don't know if I've ever talked about this publicly—but I read The Black Swan when I was dancing.

I don't even talk about this, but the reason that I also retired from ballet was extremely first-principles. It was very rational. I don't think a lot of people retire because they get injured or because they hate ballet. I loved ballet. I loved it. It was my first love. It was my obsession. I spent 20 years focusing on it.

I retired from ballet because I read a few books, and now I'm embarrassed that these were the books that had such a huge impact on me. I read Sapiens, and someone's going to roast me for being so mid-curve. But I read a lot of—

Actually, here's my take before you denigrate yourself for these books: they're mid-curve now, but when you were first reading them, maybe 6 or 7 years ago, they were actually good books. I think too many people read them, and then they became mid-curve. So I don't know if I love that take.

I'm totally going to accept that. I'm not mid-curve at all. I just was so ahead of the curve that I—

Neither. Nobody's mid-curve here. You either want to be left or right.

I think I'm left. That's my skill set. But I don't know. We'll see.

But anyway, I read some of these books. Basically, I was dancing, and I thought the world was going to change in a completely insane way in my lifetime. Choosing to be in the arts for the rest of my life is fundamentally like preserving a kind of existing art, which is extremely noble and wonderful. I'm a huge supporter of the arts, and it was amazing.

The world's going to change a ton in my lifetime, and I saw it as this kind of fork in the road: I can dedicate the rest of my life to preserving an art form, which is incredibly noble and great and is a really amazing choice for a life in 1 universe, or I can try to be a part of building the future in some really abstract way.

Again, that sounds extremely abstract, but I had this conviction that we were at this big technological turning point. I knew nothing about AI at the time. I knew nothing about crypto. But I thought the world was going to change faster than it had ever changed in my lifetime, and I could either be on that train or not be on that train. Ideally, I'd be close to driving the train, or somewhere towards the front.

So I saw retiring from ballet as basically a choice to try to be on the technology train, as abstract as that sounds. Oh my God, I'm doing a really big weave.

3. The Perpification of Everything

No, I mean, this is good, but I want to bring you back to a point for a second, because now it's not abstract at all. Now you've built a company.

Yes.

And I think the specific sentence was, “Postmodern investing is happening on Ostium now.”

Yeah, I tweeted that today.

You tweeted that today. And it is the gateway to gold markets. It's happening now. You guys are driving significant volume through your platform based on this original core thesis of the perpification of everything, right?

I think our listeners are very familiar with Hyperliquid and what's happening on Hyperliquid. But maybe you can talk about what is happening right now on Ostium and what you're super excited about here, because your now-abstract thesis is happening in real time. Maybe talk us through a little bit about that.

I'll make the abstract thesis more concrete. We thought that this paradigm shift in the markets was going to lead to 2 very direct consequences in how consumer behavior would change and how people would start relating to the markets. The first one was that we thought people were going to start trading events.

And not just the first-order effect of events, but the second-order effect. Obviously, there's been a rise of prediction markets, but we think that prediction markets are almost a gateway drug, or they're a supercharger for this second-order effect of trading events.

Traditionally, this was the realm of institutions. Someone might think, “Maybe this geopolitical thing will happen, or maybe Fed policy will change in some way. How does that affect how I should trade rates based on that?” That wasn't consumer behavior. People might have been looking at single-name stocks, but now Twitter is full of people speculating on what's going to happen with the Strait of Hormuz and, as a result, trading the spread between Brent and WTI or just going directional on WTI. That's not stuff people did at all 5 years ago. That was not the realm of consumer trading.

The reason we thought that would happen—and this is exactly the kind of thing we thought would happen—is because macro is now driving volatility. You have this big shift from internal asset-class dynamics driving volatility, with traders fundamentally chasing vol, to macro being the most interesting show on the road. I say macro news is the new reality TV. It's the most interesting thing out there, and it's what drives volatility. Everything is downstream of it, and the smaller internal asset-class dynamics pale in comparison to what's going on at the macro level.

We thought people would start trading based on events, not just first-order effects, but also second-order effects. We thought the next big impact, from a practical perspective of this big paradigm shift, was going to be that people would be cross-asset by default. My parlance at the time was, “The cross-asset trader of tomorrow is cross-asset by default.”

Rather than being segmented, in the first generation of consumer apps you had Coinbase built for crypto and Robinhood built for stocks. You had this segmentation because traders characterized themselves as, “I'm a crypto trader,” or, “I'm a stock trader.” You see this really in Bloomberg this morning: The headline was that crypto traders are now pivoting to being cross-asset. This is just the beginning of that trend, and the whole segmentation of traders into people focused on a single asset class is completely breaking down.

4. The Future of Trading

We thought there was no platform catering to this next generation of what I would call prosumer or protail. It's not long-tail, super-tiny consumer, and it's not institutional. It's this large segment of traders that we thought was going to be the fastest-growing segment: prosumer, protail, and cross-asset by default.

Someone would want to trade Bitcoin, gold, oil, and NVIDIA in the same day and in the same instrument. They wouldn't want to be segmented between platforms or between different instruments. They would want to trade those assets in a simple instrument that abstracted away some of the complexity of dated futures or options. Perps are, I think, very clearly the instrument for that.

This led us to the big thesis that everything was going to be perpified. We called this the perpification of everything. We tried to slot perpification into the verbiage as an alternative to tokenization. Everybody was talking about tokenization. When we first started the company, nobody was talking about any of this stuff. RWAs were a niche subsector of crypto, and then everybody was talking about tokenization.

But I think, really, where you see the shift in consumer behavior—and this is not just a crypto trend; this is a secular trend across all segments of traders—is that all these things are getting mushed together. This new generation of traders is cross-asset by default and wants a simple instrument that abstracts away the complexities of different instruments, whether they're dated futures or options.

On top of that, it has the transparency, instant settlement, and other benefits that people have come to expect a blockchain-based product can offer. You can move the assets on transparent rails—everything that stablecoins bring. That's the big-picture thesis. This is what Ostium was building for. This is the future Ostium was building for.

No, no. I think that was really great. And I think this is something that our audience is definitely shifting toward right now. If you just look at this podcast or anything in what I now call entertainment finance—

That's a really good tagline. That's a good one.

There's a proliferation of shows that used to talk about just crypto, including ourselves. Jonah and I have both traded traditional assets before. We weren't just crypto traders, but we were in crypto because we felt that was where all the opportunity was. Then you fast-forward to today, and there's so much more opportunity outside of crypto.

I mean, macro trading 4 years ago wasn't nearly as interesting as macro trading today. When I was trading at GoldenTree in 2022 and 2023, the limit of my macro trading was paying attention to Fed meetings, trying to bet on economic data, and trying to bet on what the Fed was going to do. Now there's so much more.

I think part of that has to do with the election of Donald Trump. He's introducing a lot more volatility into the markets just via headlines, but I think part of that is just a natural increase in volatility in the state of the world. One question that I have for you is: What do you think that means for the future? What do you think that means for the markets today?

Are we going to have everybody trading their portfolio? Are people going to have to stop investing passively? Is there going to be too much volatility? Do you think that people might actually manage the vast majority of their portfolios on platforms like yours in the future?

Okay, it's a really good question. I think you mentioned this at the beginning of the pod. I consider this the era of postmodern investing.

In the same way that a lot of the rise of tech was kind of like “revenge of the nerds”—it turns out, you were cool in high school, but now the nerds are on top—I think of what's happening in the markets right now, relative to Wall Street or whatever, as revenge of the super-online. Revenge of Twitter, revenge of 4chan. Now there's alpha in being really online. That was weird before, but now there's real alpha in it. I genuinely think there's real alpha in it.

When I see some of our traders, it's nuts. I really think, especially now, there are some Twitter accounts that, if you set up your agent to be hooked up to them, it trades programmatically based on some indication of pivotal news that will change sentiment.

The markets are now so momentum-driven and sentiment-driven because crypto and TradFi are converging. TradFi is behaving like crypto. It's so momentum-driven, so sentiment-driven, and so reflexive. If you're good at gauging sentiment and you understand viral loops, online culture, and the way information spreads on the internet because you grew up on the internet, I genuinely think you have an edge.

I know our listeners are going to love to hear that, and I do 100% agree with you on that point. Everyone's kind of competing on similar levels now because if things are volatile, it's actually good for the small fish. If you have to change your opinion on a dime, it's better to manage $1 million than it is to manage $1 billion.

100%.

One other follow-up I have for you is: Are you seeing that play out on your platform? Are you getting a lot of small fish and retail traders on your platform trading? Who are the types of people trading on Ostium, I guess?

That's a great question. Actually, no, it's not really—it depends on how you define small. We don't have a lot of big institutions, and we don't have a lot of really small traders.

What I would say we service uniquely well—or who we uniquely service well—is this one layer below pro: prosumer, pro-tail. Somebody who is moving significant size, but from their own portfolio. Or maybe they're a single-family office—small individuals, basically, who are managing a significant portfolio and are moving size, which is why they're using us.

I'll speak in a second to our architecture, because I think that'll be very interesting for your audience and actually quite important to understand the product. You mentioned competitors before: How do we fit into the competitive landscape? How does our product actually work?

Our user base is disproportionately skewed toward these single whales, these large traders who are moving size and, because they have enough size, execution really matters for them.

They're not just filling tiny orders at the top of the book. They want a place to express their views across all these different asset classes. I would describe them as being in their late 20s and early 30s. They grew up on the internet; they trust the internet more than they trust traditional institutions. I think that is really aligned with everything we've described. That's sort of our core user base, but they're not really tiny shrimps.

I don't think that's a permanent thing. We're obviously very early in the journey, and I think a lot of moving into a smaller user base depends on building out a massive consumer distribution arm, which is still—we're not there yet. Some of that is a path-dependent factor of how we've gotten our name out. But I think it's also largely a result of the product.

So, to speak to the product and where we sit in the stack, I think this is a very common misunderstanding about Ostium. We are not an exchange. We are not a DEX. I would analogize us to the broker layer if you're drawing a traditional market analogy. We don't have an order-matching function, and we don't have an order book.

The reason for this is that our core view is that, for this kind of trader that we're talking about, they want to trade the real market price. They see a price on TradingView—usually, they're looking at prices on TradingView—and they don't want to then go and open a trade. If you're trading gold, it's a $30 asset. I don't know what it is since the last price movements, but it's a gigantic asset. Obviously, there's tons of liquidity.

If you're trading on a venue where you're rebuilding liquidity from scratch, the order size that you could execute without impacting the book or having poor execution—if you were trading on a traditional broker, if you were trading the traditional markets—would be orders of magnitude larger than what you could get if you were trading on an exchange where the liquidity is being rebuilt from scratch. This is just a fact of physics: you're rebuilding liquidity from scratch.

Our view is that we want to offer people the best execution. Importantly, we don't think it makes a lot of sense, especially if you're catering to that user base, to try to rebuild that exchange liquidity from scratch. Instead, we think the bigger opportunity is in doing for global markets basically what stablecoins did for the dollar.

If you look at the most profitable companies in crypto—Circle and Tether—it's very simple what their business is. I would contrast them with Bitcoin maxis, right? Bitcoin maxis are like, "We're going to rebuild the fiat system from scratch." Stablecoins are like, "No, we're going to take the dollar that's in the existing system, where there's massive untapped global demand for it, and we're going to put it on-chain. We're going to make it transparent, instantly settleable, and traceable, and we're going to bring all the benefits of blockchain to the dollar."

In so doing, we're going to massively expand the scope of access to the dollar and bring in massive new demand for the dollar itself. I think our view is that the biggest opportunity in DeFi is not rebuilding the exchange stack from scratch, which is basically how everybody has approached trying to build out perps in crypto. It is taking these really liquid and highly functional existing markets that are working, massively extending their global reach, and bringing the instant-settlement and transparency benefits of what you would get on-chain.

So, more functionally, how does that work? We have the first architecture of its kind. At a very high level, we have 2 big pools of liquidity.

One is a liquidity pool that acts as—you can think of it as an intraday lending facility. I'll caveat all of this by saying there's a big upgrade coming very shortly, so everything I'm describing right now will be perfectly valid very shortly. We're just in this interim period. If you're watching this at any point in the future from when this is released, it'll be true.

Basically, there's 1 pool of liquidity that you can think of as an intraday settlement layer or an intraday lending facility. It is always a multiple of whatever the unrealized P&L of the trades is, and it's there to ensure this North Star: any trade can be instantly settled. If you want to close your position, take your money, and leave the platform, there's a pool of capital to always front you, allowing you to close your positions, and you can settle your debts—whatever your positive or negative P&L—instantly.

However, directional flows are hedged with a separate pool of capital in the underlying market. Once a day, there's a mark-to-market and a rebalancing on top of this layer that sits on top of the liquidity pool. So, there is directional hedging, or hedging of directional flows, but there's also this pool of capital that always ensures instant settlement.

The component that handles this hedging is plugged into a network of traditional market participants that compete for flow.

This model seems like it might work for assets with large liquidity a little bit better than it works for assets with lower liquidity, right? Would you say that's accurate?

I would say it would. It basically works better for everything, in the sense that it doesn't require anything. It depends on what you mean when you say lower liquidity: is there a market at all? We're not creating a new market for things. It's more that we're allowing people to tap into the real market liquidity of the world's most liquid markets.

I would even argue that if you have a slightly longer-tail market, like copper or something—obviously, copper is a big market—trying to rebuild the liquidity from scratch on something like gold, you probably have enough participants in crypto who might be willing to rebuild that. Obviously, if you're expecting to trade massive size that you could clear in the underlying gold market, you couldn't do that, but it would be more doable with something like copper.

The more long-tail the asset is, the tougher it is to fragment liquidity across a bunch of different order books.

Right. I was thinking more along the lines of crypto assets that are maybe controlled by 1 or 2 market makers already. This format helps you launch larger-liquidity assets by working with market makers that already have deep liquidity, and it helps you bootstrap those markets a little bit faster than if you were launching a long tail of altcoins. It wouldn't really matter if you were using this architecture or not; you'd still have to contact the 1 or 2 market makers.

Yeah, that's roughly correct.

5. Final Thoughts

According to the stats, it seems like 80% of all of your volume comes from these RWAs anyway, which have established markets. We only have a few minutes here, so I want to get some things that I think our listeners will really appreciate out of this. Ostium has a bunch of trader data on the platform. What are some of your favorite ways of using that data to evaluate the market?

This is a great question. We're working on something related to this. I love looking at the directional skews across different assets and seeing what kind of implied view people are expressing.

One really interesting piece of data is that our traders have been expressing a stagflation view since January. They've been very early to this view, I would say. Since January—and I think, oh my God, I don't want to misquote, but I think it accelerated in the last week of January especially—our traders have been extremely net long oil, net long gold, and lightly short S&P, which is a stagflation trade.

On almost all retail platforms, you want to go against them. But I guess this is pro-tail, as you said. It really depends on the trader. Obviously, there are really wild P&L swings because they're such big traders, but in aggregate, our traders are actually quite good.

That's awesome. One other question: do you have a favorite book on markets, psychology, or trading in general that you would advocate our listeners pick up?

Oof. Oh man. I wasn't prepared for this question. You know what? I'm going to defend my normie stance. I'm going to say—[laughter]—I feel like people are going to hate me for this, but I would say it had the biggest broader-psychology impact. It's less about markets specifically and more about the big-picture dynamics that affect how paradigm shifts happen, or how to think about tail risk. I see it more as a philosophy book.

And as your listeners can probably infer from our discussion, I tend to operate from a really first-principles, high-level, top-down, philosophical perspective. So, yeah, I'll pick that.

I think that's a great choice. And then the last thing I wanted to ask you is, if you guys don't know, Kaledora put out a great tweet on St. Patrick's Day about how St. Patrick was not actually Irish. He was Romano-British. Yeah, it shocked me immediately. Why do you know this? I guess that's one question. And then a follow-up is: I assume this means you're a student of history in some capacity. Do you feel like that's helped you navigate the markets?

That's great. Yeah, so fun. I'll reiterate, for those who didn't see my tweet, the quick story of St. Patrick. The fun fact is that St. Patrick was actually not Irish, which is kind of ironic given that the Irish and the Brits are not always great friends, but he was Romano-British. He actually was enslaved by the Irish and treated terribly by them as a slave.

He escaped by having this crazy vision. He had this divine inspiration that there was going to be a boat in the middle of the night that was going to rescue him. He walked 200 miles to the shore, and there was a boat. The boat rescued him, and he wound up back in Britain. After a period of time, he had this kind of divine inspiration and thought it was his life's mission to convert the heathens who had enslaved him.

So he went back to Ireland and basically spent the rest of his life converting Ireland to Catholicism. He's basically almost entirely to thank for the fact that Ireland is, in fact, a Catholic country. So, that's the story of St. Patrick. There are also some weird, niche claims that he killed all the snakes in Ireland or something like that. I mean, I guess that's great for the Irish.

So how do I know this? I'm a nerd. I don't know—just weird, late-night rabbit holes, reading Wikipedia or talking to Claude about niche historical aspects.

And you asked me about being a student of history. Well, one fun fact I would toss out is that my dad is German, and he, I guess, grew up with a lot of family stories from East Germany, a lot of stories of hyperinflation. A very defining memory from my childhood is that his phone case was a custom-printed phone case featuring a 100 million Reichsmark note, which was the top denomination of the German currency during the Weimar Republic and hyperinflation.

So I grew up with a very anti-excess, money-printing, hyperinflation-fearing family and a very libertarian, Austrian-economics-leaning family. So that obviously shaped me.

That's a great way to end it. It's in her blood to be in love with crypto. Yes, that's what she was born to do.

So, thank you. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. I think our listeners are going to love this one. You've got some great stories and good insights, so thank you again. We really appreciate it.

Thanks, Avi. Thanks for having me. This was fun.