Ep. 240 - Boys Club LIVE @ ETHConf: Guests Amanda Cassatt (Serotonin), Scott Dykstra (Space and Time), Azeem Khan (Miden), and Chris Yin (Plume Network)

[00:01] We'll be right back. [00:31] you [00:34] Hi! [00:36] at ETH Conf in New York City on the floor. [00:42] We are on the floor. We are at Javits. [00:44] We're at Javits. Javits. Javits, as some would say. [00:48] And we're here with Space and Time. [00:51] Yes. And they are the presenting sponsor of Voice Club Live at ETHConf. Thank you so much for spending time. We're so excited to be here. [00:59] Ease, Conf, [01:01] is Ethereum's first institutional conference here in New York City. Mm-hmm. [01:05] So what's the vibe? Vibe check. [01:07] The vibes are electric. [01:09] That's what the vibes are. No, it feels... [01:13] Institutional, like the last few conferences that I have seen and been to in the last year of... [01:20] Crypto? [01:21] You're seeing all your friends in suits. They're coming in with their blazers and... [01:25] The SEC is here, the CFTC is here, DTCC, all of the acronyms are here. Yep. And...

[01:34] Banks are here and then you have World and you have Matcha and you have a bunch of other players that have been in the game for a while as well. So. [01:42] That's sort of my read on things. Curious how you feel. I am curious to... [01:50] walk the floor and see if there are familiar faces or if there are new faces. What was your sense? It's a little bit of both. There's a lot of people I do not recognize. And then there's a lot of like... [02:01] - Yeah. - And so, [02:03] I think also that is makes sense because it's our hometown. We're here in the city that we know and love Nixon for. And I think that that makes sense that we're running into all of our friends. Okay, quick before we keep before we do more. [02:19] Let's do more. Before we do more... [02:22] Quick shout out to our presenting sponsor of this very special edition of Sports Club Live, Space and Time. [02:30] We're going to roll a tape. [02:32] Kate. [02:32] Roll tape. [02:35] - Hi, I'm here about the loan, the $100 million loan. I brought my financials. They were accurate this morning, but my collateral is spread across 47 exchanges and a few protocols. So by now some of it's moved. That's the issue with paper. If I were you, there's a network called Space and Time. It can pull all my actual positions from every exchange and protocol I'm in, and attach cryptographic proof that the numbers are real. So you can check them yourself. [03:03] use it.

[03:04] Oh, so you've seen everything? Everything. [03:08] Okay? [03:09] Thank you. [03:10] *knock* [03:12] Virtual Vaults brought to you by Space and Time. [03:17] Incredible stuff from Kate. [03:19] What can't she do? What can't she do? She sent us a screenshot of when she was starting to do that and said, do you have a moment to hear about my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ? Which killed me. Absolutely killed me. Really funny. Yeah. I also want to thank Vercel. They are another sponsor, partner of this show. We love them. There's actually a Vercel. [03:37] Full billboard right outside of Javits Center promoting their ship event, which is happening in New York later this month. You can still register for tickets. And they are just the realest deal you can get. If you are a startup building with agents, look no further than Vercel. Their agentic infrastructure gives you and your agents everything you need to ship. [04:01] And if you're supported by one of their hundreds of VC or accelerator partners, [04:05] You have access to exclusive discounts and benefits, deploy faster, scale globally, and ship world-class AI products. Check out the platform that thousands of companies use from day zero to IPO at Vercel.com slash startups. [04:23] That's for sale. That's for sale. And then final shout out here to Polygon, our supporting sponsor as well. Every company moving money globally hits the same walls. [04:32] Legacy rails are slow, expensive, and built for a pre-internet world.

[04:37] Stablecoin rails are fast, but they're fragmented across vendors that don't talk to each other. The plumbing to deliver on the promise of stablecoins hasn't existed. Polygon's open money stack is fixing that. [04:47] One unified stack that puts global money movement onto proven rails that move at the speed of the Internet. [04:52] And why Polygon? Because they've been moving money. [04:56] Check out the link in the chat to learn more. [04:58] Let's get into the show. Let's get into it. Who do we have coming on? [05:01] Okay, we have four great guests today all here for this conference. [05:05] Amanda Cassette, CEO of Serotonin. [05:09] Scott Dykstra [05:10] Co-founder of Space and Time. Azeem Khan. Me? [05:13] who is the co-founder of Maiden, [05:16] Great energy. Really excited to talk with him. First time we're going to have him on and that will be really exciting. And then we are also going to have a last minute change here. So... [05:27] It is going to be James Frill. [05:30] The head of go-to-market at Plume? [05:32] Great. And excited to talk to them. They're doing a ton of stuff. Real world. Open finance platforms. Yeah. Yes. So it'll be a great show. [05:40] Power, power interviews. [05:42] And excited to hear from everybody. Let's get into it. [05:46] . [05:49] Our first guest is Amanda Cassett. [05:53] who is the founder and CEO of marketing agency Serotonin and living legend. Legend. Legend. [05:59] And you are a host of the podcast Endgame and previously CMO at ConsenSys, bringing Ethereum to market. Longtime friend of the pod. Welcome to the show.

[06:11] It's so great to be back. Thank you for having me. It's really nice to have you. It's really nice to have you. There's so many things I like to talk to you about. [06:18] I love to get your opinion on... [06:21] The world's [06:22] at large always. So it's nice to have a camera here to do it today. [06:27] But I want to... [06:30] Sort of get like a pulse check from you. You've been in obviously this space for a really long time. You've seen the ups and downs like vibe check. Where are you at right now? First of all, what year did you did you get in? So I got into Ethereum world in 2015. I started my job as consensus CMO in 2016. Okay. [06:49] So a decade, a decade of 10 years on. How are we feeling? [06:52] Yeah, I mean, I think actually 11 years. 11 years on. How are we feeling? [06:58] Ha ha ha. [07:00] So... [07:01] Ethereum did something really important. [07:04] which is extend the mission of Bitcoin. [07:07] which enabled anyone to send value anywhere in the world. [07:12] in a permissionless, decentralized way that's not controlled by anyone. [07:17] so that there's no government, there's no bank that can prevent you from getting value to anyone, anywhere. [07:25] And that happened in 2008. And that was absolutely wild, and it completely changed the world. [07:30] And then Ethereum extended that mission by making that value useful. [07:35] By making it programmable with smart contracts. [07:38] And so not only can you send value anywhere,

[07:42] You can also, ever since Ethereum, [07:44] do all kinds of stuff with that value. And it set the foundation for the development of a genuine alternate financial system for people that want to exit. [07:55] And what's happened [07:57] is that [07:59] That use case is alive and well. It's the same as it was at the beginning. [08:03] And people have built all this other stuff. [08:05] But, [08:06] When we talk about what really happened here, [08:09] macro long term with Bitcoin and then with Ethereum, that thing, that's what changed the world. Yeah. And that actually happened 10 years ago. [08:17] And it [08:19] It's a binary like that thing exists before it didn't exist. It was actually what PayPal originally was trying to do. It's what the architects of the Web were originally trying to do when they thought about creating an Internet based money inside Bitcoin. [08:32] the actual web protocol and we have it and it's amazing. So that's like super macro what I think. [08:39] um we're in a crypto bear market right now [08:42] The prices go up and down every four years on a fairly predictable cycle. A lot of times people say that that's over. [08:51] That's been a feature of every single cycle. People saying that that's over. Every single cycle has different features. [08:58] This one has been institutional adoption. [09:01] Mm-hmm. And [09:03] everyone thinks these are the final features. It's in its final form factor. It's reached maturity. And what I would humbly offer as someone that's been through the wars and the trenches and seen a lot of this

[09:14] is that it takes a new form and evolves and touches new industries and use cases every single cycle. It continues to find itself every time even more powerfully. We haven't seen the end state yet. [09:28] We haven't discerned exactly the direction that this is all going to be built in yet. [09:32] It's all still in flux and it all will come back price wise. [09:37] Yeah. On a pretty predictable timeframe in my view. [09:41] We love to hear it. I love to hear it. When you can precisely. But I so appreciate your... [09:49] optimism. Yeah. And really honestly needed it. Yeah. Hopium. Yeah, I really... Well, hopium makes it seem like it's false. Yeah. So hopefully it's just like actual hope without the EM. Yeah, yeah. [10:03] Just press you on one thing you said, though, which was that [10:07] And I've actually not heard it expressed like this, but that Ethereum being the extension of the promise of Bitcoin. Yeah. And about how the ultimate Bitcoin promise is around exiting the financial system. And I think that that's true. [10:19] for Bitcoin, certainly. I think I feel that [10:22] less in a room that is [10:25] This room where it's especially an institutional space. [10:29] Advance. [10:30] It's in New York. I think it's probably in New York for a reason. And I think that there's a lot of work being done across the Ethereum community. [10:36] to court institutional [10:39] money certainly [10:41] And I wonder how you hold those two things at once.

[10:45] So even if 0.0001% [10:49] of, [10:49] the usage of Ethereum or Bitcoin is to be that exit or that life raft or that bulwark against authoritarianism. [10:57] That's the most important bit, that that exists. [11:00] And even if that's a very small fraction of the total use, which I hope it is, [11:05] And also because I hope that there isn't so much authoritarian control that people have to do desperate things. [11:10] I'm, [11:12] That's still the important factor, even if it's a tiny fraction of the total use. Yeah. And it's the most historically important factor. [11:19] facet of the technology. And if we zoom out to an 1,000-year view, [11:26] And think about this time that we've lived in. The remarkable achievement of these technologies has been to create this pull work against complete authoritarian financial control. And the history books are not going to write about this TradFi or that TradFi that put this much ETH on their balance sheet. That thing is important, rightly, to a lot of actors in this room and a lot of people with various incentives in this space. [11:51] I'm, [11:52] that I certainly am supportive of. [11:54] But from a historical view, when you ask me like 10 years and then I kind of want to abstract, [12:00] Bene Gesserit style to 100,000 years. Um... [12:04] We're not going to look at that. [12:05] Yeah. [12:06] That doesn't mean it's not important. Yeah. But we're going to look at is the core capability that changed. Hmm. [12:11] So one thing that I'm seeing a lot of right now in our industry, and again, this kind of happens in the cycles, but.

[12:18] is sort of like talent drain. But talent drain going to other industries that are... [12:25] somewhat adjacent to [12:27] to crypto, like obviously we're seeing a ton of people move into [12:31] AI, but also longevity, also sort of like [12:34] maybe not decentralized science, but like [12:37] peptides, new innovations around fertility. Like, what is your thoughts about [12:43] on [12:44] that talent pool kind of moving around into other emergent spaces [12:49] And [12:50] What do you think it's net positive? Like, yeah. What's your take? Yeah. So, I mean, I think the smartest people. [12:56] Um... [12:57] And the people that I love the most often are [13:01] technologists. [13:02] and scientists. [13:04] and people that are not ultimately motivated by business or profit. [13:09] I got into this space to try to make sure their brainchild succeeded out of love for that brainchild and for those people. Yeah. Yeah. [13:19] If you look at who created the web, if you look at who actually created the scientific technological advancements that led to what's happening right now in AI. [13:28] or robotics or space travel. Those are all the same kind of people. They're all these very academic, earnestly motivated research [13:37] Um... [13:39] technologists and scientists. [13:41] and our space in crypto. [13:44] Right now, the... [13:47] The way to make money for your business in the space is no longer a competitive tech challenge.

[13:53] The tech isn't the differentiator right now in our space. [13:55] for these businesses. It's often BD. It's often regulatory. It's often [14:01] marketing and branding, which we are certainly happy to help with. [14:04] But if you look at the big competing projects, the main thing that they're competing on isn't the tech anymore. Right. And there is great tech coming out of the crypto ecosystem, but they aren't the big projects that have raised the most money or have gone public or anything like that. There's a there's a bit of a bifurcation. Yeah. And so what's happened is those kinds of leading minds have wanted to gravitate toward industries where the science is. [14:30] The tech is the differentiator because that's where they can make the most impact. [14:34] And crypto, I don't want to say it's matured because that makes it seem like it's permanently like this. But the current place we're in in crypto. [14:41] where the most value is added through something other than being the best at tech. [14:47] It makes perfect sense that those people would want to build elsewhere. [14:50] But there are [14:52] There is a group of stalwart [14:55] wonderful scientists and technologists that are building in our space. [14:58] but that are no longer building at the convergence of where the money is, that where the tech is and where the money is, [15:05] are no longer in exactly the same place, right? Like you look at something like Tornado Cash, one of the best ever things bills on Ethereum, super useful, serves a use case that people really want. There are all kinds of people building other versions of privacy right now. [15:18] with a mind toward, you know, better compliance. [15:21] But... [15:21] Those kinds of things aren't what's getting massive venture funding. They aren't what's going public. But that's the cutting edge of the technology in our space. Or a lot of it's being done at the foundation level or at the grant level. And that's where you still find those kinds of thinkers that are going to be

[15:36] who are creating things like that. They're just not going to be, you know, the ones in who the BlackRock Biddle Fund is putting on the balance sheet. [15:43] Yeah, totally. I'm pulling on that thread a bit. As your perspective, working, leading marketing in this space. [15:51] for those that are here, what are [15:53] some of the things, trams, [15:56] I'm. [15:57] that you're seeing or what do you think is the most effective way to be approaching [16:02] marketing as an exercise right now in this market? Well, it totally depends what you are and what you're trying to accomplish. So [16:09] I think of marketing as the art of making possible things happen. And so when people come to us with a project, we think, OK, [16:18] Is this actually doable? Do people [16:20] in this target audience want to adopt this thing, if only they knew about it, such that if we told the right story, if we distilled the message the right way, if we got the right mixture of images and words and video, would we be able to win? And so that's what we figure out most. Do people actually want this? And if we put some money, put some creative behind getting something out to this audience, would they like it? And I mean, that's how we approach it in any cycle. I mean, the trends right now [16:48] in terms of which arenas within crypto are the most marketable, [16:53] Definitely RWAs. [16:56] stablecoins, on-chain credit in various formulations, [17:01] DeFi I think is going to be a mainstay. Yeah. Okay. Last question here.

[17:06] either [17:07] What are you most excited about? [17:09] here at eatconf or [17:11] What is some technology that... [17:13] you're thinking about right now that's exciting to you? Like, what are you waking up in the morning... [17:18] Feeling juiced about. [17:19] Yeah, I mean... [17:20] Again, I think some of the most exciting vectors for growth of Ethereum right now are RWAs, are stablecoins, are on-chain finance. You know, just tokenization is going to just be such a big deal and it is going to happen a lot of it on Ethereum. [17:37] I personally am also very interested, as I expressed, in privacy. [17:41] I'm very curious to see what fully integrated ZK at the L1 looks like. Is it possible to have a configurably private transaction with every transaction? I think things like that would extend that. [17:54] the mission that we've been talking about. [17:57] Because it's been great over the past 10 years. You know, we had this decentralized money network, then we made that value useful and usable. But what about making it private? We haven't we haven't really crossed that chasm yet. And so I guess I'm waiting for that next thing. Yeah. [18:12] Great. [18:14] Thank you, Amanda. Thank you so much for being here. You're the best. [18:17] You guys are the best. [18:18] . [18:22] We have Scott Dykstra with us, co-founder and CTO of Space & Time. Great to be here. Welcome. I'm sure you're having me. How's it going? Going really well. Exciting to be in New York and... [18:32] Knicks are winning and it's ETHCON. [18:35] We love to see it. We absolutely love to see it. So I interviewed you a few months, maybe almost a year now.

[18:41] I was just a couple of years ago at the Chainlink conference [18:44] So much has changed in tech in the last year. It's been a crazy year. Insane. Yeah. Between. [18:51] agents, AI, all the regulatory changes that have happened. [18:55] How are you... [18:58] As the co-founder of Space and Time, how does that affect your roadmap and how you think about the day to day? Good question. I think like a year ago and maybe two years ago, especially, I think, [19:09] All the buzz was, let's bring AI agents on chain. And we were focused on providing data solutions to do that. [19:14] I think actually over the last year, there's been a huge shift towards institutions coming on chain in a way that we didn't even expect. [19:21] They've been coming, and Chainley's been talking about that too. Hey, institutions are coming. [19:24] And now it's a lot of vault based work, like [19:27] Lenders bringing... [19:28] heavy duty capital on chain, institutional capital on chain. So we're focused a lot a lot there. [19:33] We have a kind of a nice background in like helping institutions come on chain. So it's a good move for us at Space and Time. Nice. Tell us about Virtual Vaults. [19:43] Yeah, so right now, [19:45] The leading landscape is pretty... [19:47] opaque, non transparent. [19:48] Meaning [19:49] lenders really have no idea what borrowers are doing with their capital like a lender brings [19:55] tens of millions of dollars to a chain in USDT or USDC, puts it in a vol, curates that vol, provides it out to borrowers. But they don't really know where that borrower's capital is today, how the borrower is going to use that capital. [20:08] what collateral they have. Like it's, you know, like we're used to this lending world off chain where you provide tons and tons of documentation before you take out a loan. So it's basically providing like a trustless, verifiable data solution to lenders to give them transparency about what the borrowers are doing.

[20:23] So can you walk us through what that process looks like for... [20:27] both the lender and then [20:30] You guys aren't interfacing with like the end consumer on that, right? [20:34] Really, it's it's lenders and borrowers. OK. [20:37] they're getting to be more institutional like larger capital with more requirements around what the borrower can and can't do [20:45] Last year of lending on chain has been like a more full vol, [20:49] 10 million goes into it. Yeah. Borrower gets chosen and that's that. And they just hope they get paid. Okay. [20:55] That needs to change. [20:56] If we want like a, I don't know, a major American bank to bring $80 million on chain, they're going to want some understanding of what collateral the borrower has. [21:06] how they're going to use the money. If it's a market maker borrowing to make trades on centralized exchanges, space and time can reach into those centralized exchanges and provide the lender, the bank, [21:15] tons of transparency and verifiable data about like, what kind of trades they're placing, what's the risk management, etc. Okay, okay. So this is solving for a specific pain point for larger lenders who might not have the confidence [21:29] that they need and want in order to be able to allocate more capital. Exactly. And borrowers love it because that borrowers get more loans. Okay. Because they can show the lender, hey, we're legit. And here's where our collateral is. Yeah. Here's all the capital we have in the market today. And here's how we're going to use your new money once we borrow it. Yeah, that makes sense. And is this a net new innovation? [21:48] Yeah, I think like I don't really think there's a lot of transparency right now. So like, yeah, we had we had this tech solution, this infrastructure, and now we're applying it to this net new use case.

[21:58] which is virtual vaults on chain. - For an industry that is so obsessed with transparency, it's funny that this, [22:05] It's taken so long for us to get to this point here, which is where it's like, [22:09] There's always transparency. [22:11] when you stay on chain fully. Yeah. But most borrowers are like taking that, for example, USDT capital, sending it to a bunch of centralized exchanges. [22:20] doing market making or placing trades. And then from there, it's a black box. Yeah. [22:25] Yeah, totally. Okay, so switching gears a little bit here to talk about the regulatory environment. [22:31] So, um... [22:33] The Clarity Act. [22:34] Looks very likely that it will become law before the midterm elections. [22:39] and [22:41] Basically, we'll put into law how digital assets are classified and which enforcement body oversees them. We're here and all of those enforcement bodies are here today. And seemingly, we're all sort of working towards the same goal. I am curious. [22:57] what [22:58] THE CLARITY, [23:00] There's a lot that [23:01] the Clarity Act becoming law will mean for businesses and what they will then need. And I feel like from my understanding, that's where space and time comes in and sort of solves for that. Can you speak a little bit about that? Yeah. Every bank wants to create a stable coin and they need the Clarity Act to pass before they have clarity on how to do that. [23:17] Um, [23:18] We've got all these T-bill reserves, all this off-chain capital, traditional portfolio spread all over the place of capital. [23:24] And bringing that on chain as a stable coin gives, you know, 24-7,

[23:28] access to that capital, a wider [23:31] market to sell into more liquidity and of course more programmability so [23:35] When these banks realize, hey, [23:39] Step one is like creating our own stable coin with our cash reserves. [23:43] We need some kind of trustless solution in the middle as a facilitator, as a conduit to get our off-chain portfolio on-chain. [23:51] and then talking about programmability like taking it a step further they say oh my gosh [23:55] If we can take our T-bills and mint a stablecoin, [23:59] What about all the other securities and like our portfolio of real estate, our portfolio of collateralized loan obligations, our portfolio of. [24:06] equities off chain across these 37 portfolios. The space and time could act as like a data relayer that grabs that data from those portfolios and helps them mid new securities on chain. But then that's really gonna happen at scale [24:19] until the clarity act passes. Yeah. Like there's been a few banks that have jumped the gun and that's great. And they've, they're kind of like. [24:24] starting to create stable coins, but everyone wants to. [24:27] Yeah. [24:28] And what's your... I think you have a really... [24:31] unique vantage point where you are in the market as sort of acting in between a lot of these player institutional players and the on-chain players and i'm curious from that perspective how you feel like the appetite is for institutional players in this market especially like to be coming in and on chain now [24:51] what's the vibe check it's been actually a much higher appetite that i expected at this point in

[24:59] And I have to believe some of that is [25:02] led or pioneered by like [25:04] you know, Tempo and Stripe and PayPal and the fintechs that jumped in early last year. [25:11] Since like the fintechs and Wikio Circle and with their ARK blockchain. [25:15] I would call those fintechs not like banks. [25:18] Those led the way. [25:19] They said, "Hey, we're getting into crypto last year. We're starting our own chains." [25:22] And then with clarity passing, [25:24] All the banks are like, Hey, it's time to start tokenizing things. It starts, it's time to start, uh, falling like the. [25:29] the Larry Fink blockchain, BlackRock kind of let's tokenize the world. Yeah. [25:34] And I think we're just waiting for clarity to pass. So I think once that happens, you'll see a few banks create their own chains. [25:41] and a few more banks, of course, create their own stablecoin. [25:44] Backed by T-Bills. [25:46] And then finally, some really exotic securities that come on chain because they're these like [25:52] legacy off-chain processes like a CLO that gets like a satellite loan obligation that gets priced once a month. [25:58] We'll bring that on chains as we price daily. That makes sense. And what do you think the timeline for all of that is? [26:06] Later this year, we'll see the activity pick up. [26:10] Eh. [26:11] There's always smart contracts that have to be written. [26:14] And institutions are like terrified of doing that right now in this security conscious, cybersecurity conscious world. Yes. [26:21] So I think that will actually create the biggest hesitancy with the mythos hacks, with... [26:27] Peace. [26:27] Uh, [26:28] exploits with

[26:30] uh, Oracle exploits. [26:33] He's like, hey, [26:34] Clarity's here. [26:35] But... [26:36] Let's make sure like there's good security around smart contracts. I love that. Thank you so much. And this wasn't on our list of questions, but I am now that you've brought it up very curious. [26:47] just generally how you feel about the [26:51] quantum discourse, [26:53] as it pertains to... [26:55] our beloved cryptocurrencies, what's your [26:57] What's your sense? Off the cuff. I appreciate this. I'll give a quick answer that along. Quick answer is I think we're three years out from that being like, [27:05] a problem that we deal with on a daily basis. [27:07] For now, it's going to be research papers that scare everyone. Yeah. [27:11] Effective. [27:13] Every year for the next six years, probably. [27:16] Uh, we will teams like Google's quantum team will get better at cracking fatter and fatter curves. That just means like. [27:24] Getting closer and closer to breaking a Bitcoin or Ethereum wallet. [27:29] Uh, [27:30] Thank you. [27:31] And then it becomes a cat mouse race between hardware and like the hackers. So as people build better quantum solutions, then [27:39] You know, you just use... [27:41] more intense hardware that generates fatter curves or like the thicker wallets [27:46] I'm using non-technical terms here. No, I'm talking... [27:49] I think in three years, it's going to be that cat-mouse race is going to be really hot. It's going to be on everyone's minds. [27:56] If the hardware folks don't build good enough hardware to run a different kind of signature for Ethereum, for example.

[28:03] that quantible be Ethereum. [28:06] I'm hopeful the latter's true. You don't feel existential... [28:10] Risk around it, dread around it. I do for Bitcoin to a certain extent. Yeah. Because I don't think Bitcoin is going to fundamentally change. But what do I know of that? I'm not a core developer. Yeah. In the... [28:21] Uh. [28:22] In like the. [28:24] Reddit every day. [28:26] - Okay, last question here. I know we're running up on time. [28:30] We are, this is sort of a negative question, but opportunity to grass is greener it, but [28:36] Eve is trading at pretty depressing levels at the moment. Are you selling? No, you never sell the bottom. No, you wouldn't be surprised. I was like 11 years old and my grandpa's like, someday you're going to trade. You buy low, you sell high. It's low right now. I try not to sell the bottom. That's what I try not to do. [29:00] I mean, are you buying the dip? I'm buying the dip. You're buying the dip. Yeah. Okay. [29:04] And sometimes the dip keeps dipping and then I'm buying the first dip. I'm like, I should have bought the seventh dip. [29:10] Thank you so much for being here. We love the team at Space and Time. And you guys are doing so many cool things. So nice to have some time with you. Thank you so much. [29:23] Okay, so we have with us Azeem Khan, co-founder of Maiden. Welcome to the show. I'm so happy to be here. Happy to have you. I've loved what you guys are doing for a while. Like, my wife is... [29:33] Also a huge fan of what you do. And so I'm happy to be here. We adore her. So that means a lot. Okay. So Maiden, the programmable privacy network for the next generation of compliant finance. Yeah. Did I sum it up? Yes. So to date, what we've primarily seen are blockchains that are either entirely public

[29:52] which is problematic. [29:53] or entirely private, which is also problematic. And the solution thus far has primarily been, let's create permission to change. [30:03] But the problem with permission chains, when you sort of like extend the logic out [30:07] is that there's counterparty risk. Like if you're, you know, without naming any of them, a U S based chain, who's running a permission chain and you're very successful, [30:16] If you're... [30:17] a different country, [30:18] Even Greenland, right? It doesn't have to be like North Korea or Iran or something. [30:23] And... [30:24] The government here decides that you're not a friend tomorrow. [30:28] And you've put large amounts of funds on that chain. [30:31] you wouldn't feel comfortable with it. And so [30:34] We've looked at how do you enable privacy in a practical way while still building something that will be a permissionless and incredibly neutral chain. And instead of like thinking about it a lot in terms of decentralization, so much of my conversations with institutions comes down to counterparty risk. [30:52] Um, okay. [30:53] What do you feel like the institutional appetite for crypto is right now, given market conditions? Massive. So last week I was in Paris at Proof of Talk and I was on stage. I did a co-fire side and we closed out the event. And it was with the global head of digital assets at Invesco. [31:09] They're a $2.5 trillion financial institution. Wow. [31:13] Yeah. And the topic of conversation was actually we called it [31:18] crypto winter institutional summer. And it was basically how there's been this really interesting divergence where I've been part of

[31:25] many bears dating back to 2012, 2013, being in this space. Nice. Yeah. And so I've noticed like every time we would see like a Bitcoin boom, [31:33] you know, Goldman and JP Morgan or whoever it was, they would hire like a large crypto team. And then the moment the bear would come, they'd fire everybody, right? This time has been really interesting because even though we've seen Bitcoin is down... [31:47] More than 50% from all time highs at this point, like 40 to 50 to 55%. [31:52] What we're seeing on a weekly basis is actually that every single one of these large financial institutions are hiring more. And they're talking about it more. And they're realizing the benefits of it. And right now, what I've seen is that they really like stable coins because stable coins make sense to them. And stable coins are something that their traditional rails allow them to do. But stable coins are faster, cheaper, and more efficient. But now they're actually getting really excited at... [32:18] you know, tokenization, tokenized deposits, all of these different things, because now they're like, wait, [32:24] This blockchain technology enables things for us that our traditional rails don't allow. And so if anything, [32:31] I've seen a super increased demand from institutions. [32:35] Their sales cycles are still long to get stuff done. Kathleen, who's at Invesco last week, was saying on stage that for them to launch any new product, it requires. [32:44] 50 teams to sign off, which is insane to think about, right? Because in crypto, we're used to just like... [32:49] The telegram chat. It's like a telegram chat. You sort of know who runs the thing. And then you're just like, yo, can we get something done? Yeah. But literally 50 teams have to sign out. Wow. And so even once you've come to an agreement, 50 teams signing off takes time. Yeah. Right? So...

[33:04] It seems slower just because we're so used to just being like, yeah, let's do something on Wednesday. Right. [33:10] But the demand is only increasing, actually. But for them, it's becoming more and more of a thing where they're asking people, [33:17] Well, there's gonna be certain things that we need privacy on. [33:20] But we can't do this on a chain that's going to be fully private because we need to follow regulations and compliance standards and things like that. OK, let's talk about that relationship between privacy and compliance, because I think a lot of people, some people in this room, I think even would think that those two things are very much at odds. Yeah. Can you tell me about how you sort of square that? [33:40] So we we launched this thing called Guardian right on Maiden, and it sort of basically act as. [33:47] an opt-in two of three multi-sig of sorts. And so you can set up an account on Myden and you can stay fully cypherpunk private if you want and fully everything. But if you opt into Guardian and let's say, I don't know, one day JP Morgan runs one, it basically enables you to give privacy to [34:05] the operator of the guardian. And so, you know, you can say, I want JP Morgan to have this, and this allows them to have the ability to do [34:13] real time compliance monitoring of every transaction. Because how it works is one signer is like one of them is your phone or your computer that you're using your like hot key. [34:22] The other one's a cold storage key that you keep stored away somewhere in the event that you lose your phone. And then the third one is the guardian signer, so it could be any institution. [34:31] But it gives them access to have a view key. It gives them the ability to do on-chain or off-chain KYC. So you can be whitelisted into this thing. They can do real-time compliance monitoring with any of the compliance providers. They're able to help you with account recovery in the event that you lose it. And then it also doesn't give them custody because they only have one of three signings.

[34:52] And so it's basically you get to grant them the ability to do that. There's benefits to you and then there's benefits for them. So they could say, you know, [35:00] The only people you can send transactions to are these other white listed addresses. And so if I try to send it to someone who is on an OFAC sanction list, it's automatically going to reject it. And you can't send that money. And so, I mean, even last week, we could know a week and a half ago, I was in Washington, D.C., explaining this at Georgetown Law. And it was a bunch of people from the SEC, IRS, FBI, all these places trying to understand exactly this because I was sitting with the guy from the IRS being like, [35:28] I want to make sure that we're not mistakenly doing illicit things. [35:32] and giving them demos on exactly how we think that we're going to be able to do that. Cool. That's awesome. OK, recently you tweeted, I don't know exactly when it happened, but digital assets has replaced crypto and Web3 as terms when talking about this industry. Can you say more about this? Again, going back to like having been in this space for so long. Yes. I remember when it was just crypto and. [35:54] To a lot of people outside, they use Bitcoin plural to explain crypto. It'll be like your Bitcoins. And then it sort of became more common knowledge to say crypto. [36:03] And then... [36:04] Maybe it was Read Write On did it, but like Web3 sort of became a thing for a little while. And what I've seen happen more recently has been this thing where everyone just says digital assets. And in particular, when they're talking about like the business of our industry, and sometimes when they're trying to talk about the underlying tech, they'll still say blockchain. But.

[36:23] everything built on top when they're talking about tokenized rwas even nfts whatever it is everything is referred to as a digital asset which i think is sort of funny [36:33] Because... [36:34] I don't know. [36:34] Our money on PayPal is also technically just digital. [36:38] You know, but like, it's something that I've found [36:40] In the last couple of months, particularly like the last six months, that all the conversations that I have [36:47] particularly with institutions, but even non-institutional people, they all started saying digital assets. Yeah. [36:52] Do you feel... [36:54] a sense of maturing of this industry? And if so, like, positive or... Totally positive. I mean, [37:01] Back in 2013, when I was buying Bitcoin for like a hundred bucks. Congratulations. Wow. I was selling it at a thousand. I would not be working if I had kept... [37:12] I thought I was so smart. I was like, yeah, I did 10X. And I was like, go buy some sneakers. And I was like, I'm a genius. Right? Now I've learned I don't trade at all. I'm just a bad trader. So I like buy stuff I believe in where I'm like, technically speaking, [37:29] it's more likely than not that this has the chance to succeed. Yeah. I'm going to park a little bit of money here. I'm putting it in cold storage. I'll look at it in five years. Yeah. And I just sort of like. Long tail. Yeah. Because I'm not good at short tail. Like I've seen. I have like. Know thyself. You know. I have more than a decade of experience seeing. Yeah. I don't do well with it. But. [37:48] Just the idea that, you know, a week and a half ago I was sitting with [37:51] people from all parts of the government. In February, I was with the governments of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. I met with both the other central banks. I met with the commercial banks. I've gone to-- I'm going to be in Japan in August, sitting down with a bunch of folks.

[38:07] I'm meeting with the SEC a week from today on Monday to meet with the task force. [38:11] I remember before when [38:14] just the idea that these people would sit down with you and take you seriously was not going to happen. Yeah. So I like very vividly remember that and I've seen the maturation of the space over time. I remember when ICOs were going on and that was the time also I was getting paid like [38:30] dozens of Bitcoin a month to do consulting for different folks. And it was like, back then, it was just like, oh, this is all a scam. And then NFTs came. And again, it was like, oh, this is all a scam. Meme coins came. And it was like, oh, this is really a scam. And now, I'm like, wait, but now... [38:46] You know, at Digital Assets Summit, I was on stage with the, on a co-fire side with the head of digital assets at Morgan Stanley. And last week was at the head of digital assets at Invesco. Like, collectively, they have like five and a half trillion managed. And I'm like, and they're getting on stage with crypto founders. And so. [39:02] I don't think I've ever felt... [39:04] better about building and crypto ever wow i love that well azim thank you so much for coming on thank you for having me it's so nice to i think a theme so far with [39:14] all of these interviews has just been like a real optimism about the future. And every time I've talked to you, I felt that. So thank you for being here and getting interviewed and spreading the optimism. Yes, yes, yes. Thank you. Thanks so much. Great. That was awesome. That was so great. Thank you. [39:32] I really appreciate the optimism, genuinely. It's just needed right now. I get that prices are down and things are more difficult.

[39:38] But at the same time, [39:40] It's fleshing out a lot of the people that [39:43] shouldn't be here in the first place. Yeah. You know, and having been through so many bears, it only strengthens [39:48] The next bull [39:50] Let's say it's a year and a half from now, which is what I think. Like, 2028 is the next time it'll come. I love that. You know? So, like, everyone who's still around, you're like, oh, like, okay, it's easier to figure out who to work with. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Totally. [40:04] Well, thank you. Thank you so much. [40:09] We have with us here Chris Yin, the co-founder and CEO of Plume. That's right. A real-world asset chain. $5 billion of assets in your pipeline. 200-odd apps and protocols building on Plume. That's right. [40:24] Hi, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. It's been lovely to be here today. Tell us about Plume. Yeah, sure. So Plume, you know, we... [40:31] Like most things, right, our website is always like a bit of a mismatched reality at this point. So we're working on fixing. But big picture is Plume. You know, we're an ecosystem that's been focused on real-world assets since we've started. So our focus is really helping it make real-world assets easier to use on-chain and really focus on this from kind of a crypto-native perspective. And so making sure that individuals on-chain can use these assets, can loop and lend and borrow, all these things a day. And we started off doing this with a chain, right, because we needed more of necessity, right? As we began to tokenize assets, we realized that... [41:00] tokenizing is just one piece. And truthfully, it doesn't really matter. Meaning like, if you can tokenize anything and nobody uses it, who cares? Right? And so our focus is really, how do we make it useful? And we just looked around and, you know, we all come from more cryptonated backgrounds than many of the RWA people. And we looked around and said, who actually holds these things today? And not a single one of us could have had any experience actually using these assets. So what do we actually do to make these usable for us? And when we did that, we realized, okay, to actually make them useful, you need to make sure it's easy to access. It's got to be, it's got to feel like

[41:30] versus having to fill out 50 forms and back and forth. Second is, you know, what I'm really hoping to do is lend, loop, lend, borrow, and sort of like leverage up on these assets to get a better APY, right? Because truth is, right, 3%, 4% APY, it's cool. [41:41] But I'd rather get, you know, 10, 12, 15, even if it's not real. Because you're like chasing a dream. And so that's kind of what people were focused on. So we were sort of, hey, how do we do that? And it turns out we had to build a whole ecosystem of applications that sort of take this and make it useful. Over time, though, what we realized is that, you know, other people picked it up as well, which is great. And so now we've taken the best of what's on Plume and packaged it up into Plume Vaults. And so our Vault product is now everywhere. We have it on Eve Mainnet, on Solana, on BNB, also on Plume Chain, but all over the place. So that's kind of where we see the most of our attention today is like, how do we take these assets, [42:11] vaults and then make them composable with all the other stuff happening in the ecosystem. [42:14] Okay, great. So can you give me an example of someone who has the assets all the way to the looping and borrowing and lending? So the truth is today, it's not very many, right? We're one of the few and one of the first people to do it. And it turns out it's like a whole thing to do. It's very expensive. So I give you a couple examples. I mean, for, you know, for us, we have in our assets, in our vaults, we have a couple different assets. One called Nest Alpha, right, which is kind of like our alpha product. It just means all the new assets go in there. So in there, you've got a mix of things like T-bills, of course, right? But T-bills are not really enough to loop.

[42:44] things like oil rights, right, that yield about 20%. We've got things like payment finance. We have things like, you know, short-term Brazilian private credit, all these things in there that sort of mixed together, give you a blended average of called 12%, but still instant liquidity. So, you can get in and out very, very quickly, right? So, that's an idea where you can like, you know, on Nest today or Plume Vault, you go there, you take your stables, you click one button, you swap in, you hold the receipt token. Quick question. Yes. They're blended. Yes. So, you're not opting into, I just want the Brazilian equity. I just want... Yes. Well, we have both. Okay. So, you can do all these things. Turns out each one is deficient in some ways, right? [43:14] Like most things, right? In crypto, we want high APY. We want composable, right? We want permissionless. We want liquid, right? We want all these things, right? We want it all. It turns out 20% of the AI, that's instant. It's just not real. You know, we've seen this move before last time. It turns out it all went to zero, right? So like we have to blend these things together to make it work. And so that's how we start. We take these assets, we blend together, put them into composite vault. It blends your risk, blends your APY, blends your liquidity profile, all these things. And so we take those things. Now you can say, look, you go into Nest, you push a button, right? You can swap into this asset and you hold the receipt token. [43:44] basis without having to like, you know, claim or redeem it. It just happens. It's a recrital token, right? Okay. From there, right? And on our chain, you can do a couple different things. One is you can go to Morpho, right? You can lend and loop and borrow on these things, put it into a vault, take out a loan, loop up against the thing. So now the thing that starts at 12% APO, you can get down to 30%, 40%, right? Without any incentives on top, right? So that's number one. Number two is then you can also do PTYT stuff, right? You just launched a vault with Pendle, right? On ETH Mainnet to do something called Opal. Opal is one of our Brazilian credit card receivable products, right?

[44:14] IT on this as well, right? So you can split this thing up, you can buy the YT. And I think right now the APY is like 123 or something like that. So now you can get really dynamic stuff, right? And so that's the idea with this is like by putting this into crypto and by changing the nature of this asset, you can sort of isolate what's good, what's bad, right? What's long duration, short duration, liquid, what's not liquid. And then you can target them. People think of crypto users as just one monolith, right? Which is like, oh, they're all DGENs in their underwear, your AP FAR coin, which is maybe true, right? I mean, maybe others, right? But the truth [44:44] Yeah. Right. There are people that who are just like here for the payment stuff. Right. Maybe if you're in a different country in Brazil or wherever it might be where you're really like, you know, down bad in your currency. Right. Then holding the U.S. dollar is a big deal. And that alone is enough. Right. Right. And then you have the people that want to trade shitters or trade whatever. And so you've different you. So by taking this and making them open. Right. And composable. You can split these things up into components that make them useful for that individual audience. Yeah. Wow. Wow. [45:07] I'm... [45:08] I would be curious, part of what I'm struck by in hearing you talk about this is... [45:13] The difference between when I think about real world assets and I think about sort of the energy around that as a category, very institutional. Yes. And I don't necessarily put that. Yes. [45:24] But complementary, I think that your approach is clearly very crypto native. [45:29] And that seems to be a feature, not a bug. And I'm the two worlds meeting is interesting. And have you found that there to be tension in that or? A little bit, a little bit. I think there's a lot of desire and open and demand though for it. And there's a lot of interest in it. But I do think there's a bit of a mismatch in what's going on today. Right. I normally dress like this. You can see my chains on like a bracelet. But like, you know, I see I have to put on a suit occasionally now. Right. And even at like a vault summit in these places, you know, your suit are up to get in there. Right. And I'm in Korea and all those places like that where you have to go in like full. I haven't actually go buy a suit.

[45:59] more than one in years. You have to do these things. And so, like, I think you go there and you begin to talk to me and realize there's real demand interest, but there's just, like, a big cultural difference, I think. And I think they see the world as one way, right, on the trad side, and maybe the sort of cryptocurrency is another side of things. And so I think for us, the thing that's worked really well for us is, like, for example, RGC Salman, he was at the CFTC before, at the SEC before that, right? Our latest folks we've hired are from Citibank and from, like, you know, JPM and these places like that. And so, you know, we really do have a nice blend of the trad file element as well. Yeah. [46:29] I think it's by pairing these things together. So, for example, one of our investors is and one of our biggest assets is Christina of Apollo. Right. And so Apollo is one of our big deployers. We have a large deployment of a cred on in all of crypto today. Right. Wisdom Tree is a big deployer on us. We have a bunch of other ones as well. And so like working with them and helping them understand this, I think is the key. Yeah. I think most people in crypto are used to like. [46:50] Here are the docs. You know, just like, good luck. Read the docs. You figure it out yourself. And that's just not how this stuff works. Totally. And these guys are also trying to figure out how do you [46:58] distributed crypto, right? Because like this total permissions that like truthfully, you've got some like North Korean flows, you've got a little bit Iranian money, you got to like be a little bit careful. And like the crypto natives are not always as caring or understanding of that, you know. And so I think helping them understand trying to blend the two lines and thread the needle of like, how do you make the TradFi folks comfortable? But how do you make it still use one of the cryptonatives? That's the real magic here. And I think we're still figuring out as an industry. We haven't yet got the got the tools together yet, but it's coming together now. Yeah. Yeah.

[47:25] Nice. Okay, we're at time here, but I would love to hear from you. I know you just got in from Singapore, so you haven't had time to walk the floor or anything, but curious what you're hoping to get out of the next few days. What are you excited about being here at ETHCOM? Yeah, totally. I mean, look, I was going over the agenda earlier and just like talking to people and I met a bunch of my friends out here and everything. It's like, I think I've been really excited to just hear what everyone is doing around this because I think even within RWAs tokenization, there's so many different sub areas of this. [47:55] another thing. Take payments is a whole another thing, right? Or even cross-border FX. All these things, there's so many different areas within this market that are really interesting. So I think just hearing from how all these different products are working together to make this thing happen, it's been really exciting to see. And also even just seeing like, I mean, names I haven't heard of in years, candidly. Like, you know, we're talking about Stellar now. We're talking about all kinds of stuff out there, right? And like, these are, they're coming back in a very, very serious way, right? Working with the big companies. And so I think it's been really interesting to see like all these people come together and go together in a more positive direction, right? Versus sort

[48:25] Everyone has to put on a suit sometimes, and everyone still has to go home and play video games, like do all nonsense. So like being able to put these two things together and realize that everyone has a little bit of everything, I think that's the interesting part right now. And so it's my first time I think... [48:34] in the last couple years, seeing both these worlds become one. Yeah. Nice. Well, really exciting stuff. Can't wait to follow along with Plume and what you guys are up to. So thank you so much for coming. Awesome. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.