The Exchanges

Q whatever, it's kind of like, The background radiation of the universe, right? Which is like, but there are cash flows associated with it, right? Like things are like, so talk to me about like, you know, it's not all just crypto, right? There's like these different narratives of like where crypto derives value and like what the system looks like. And how do you think about those things as different?

A So the Bitcoin is so abstract that I cannot rationally value it. So I don't consider it an engineering problem. There's no amount of work I can put in all my, you know, Illinois computer science education isn't going to help me here. So Solana is not Bitcoin or is trying to do something that is, I think, easier to understand. It's just a dumb information message bus. People need to send messages that have Value associated with them. Like, I want to sell a coin, whether it's Bitcoin for USDC or something like that. I want to make a trade. That's a bit of information. So you post it, and then that offer is valuable for whoever wants to be the first to match against it. And because only one person can match against any offer, there is now an economic opportunity to be first, and you'll pay a priority fee to be first. So the more offers there are offered on this message bus, the more it makes, the more money it makes. So as long as we get more assets traded on there, more coins, doesn't matter what they are. Like the message bus doesn't even know that these things are, are coins or whatever. It's just bits coming in and out and people set a priority of how fast they wanted to land and they pay more for a higher priority. So it's kind of like if

AI assessment note: “Bitcoin is so abstract that I cannot rationally value it... Solana is not Bitcoin”

Q Where are we roughly now, just so we know how fast we have to get there?

A Quarter billion. Okay, that's big. Yeah, we're 12 and a half percent of the way there, or 25% of the way there, so I think it's possible we'll hit that number. I mean, there's, I think it's macro-driven if I was, I thought the industry was going to die when interest rates went to five percent because the reason why we're like, you know, things feel like they're struggling or whatever is because treasuries are soaking up every risk capital, right? Like there's, there's no point to, to risk money on anything when you're getting five percent from the Fed, but somehow it's not, right? There's this still this huge appetite to take risks and Bitcoin and all these other things. And eventually rates are going to drop, and that extra premium that everyone earned on their ten-year T-bills of five percent has to go somewhere. It's going to go into stocks and a whole bunch of other things, and you'll see, like, I think a massive kind of growth mode, you know, risk-down mode, just going to drive more stablecoins issued and stuff like that.

AI assessment note: “Quarter billion. Okay, that's big. Yeah, we're 12 and a half percent of the way there”

Q Why is that the case in the US? So I get the value of stablecoins outside of the US. I don't quite understand what the play inside the US is.

A It doesn't matter. Like the, the world is so big that if this, everybody wants us dollars and if the programmable us dollar is tether or circle or whatever, they'll use it. And then us has no choice but to accept them because the economy is so big right now. The global economy is so big and us is a big part of it. It'll effectively kind of Switch to it. And normal people are not going to switch from credit cards because it's just kind of entrenched. But the way Visa deals with like banks, I think it's going to change because they don't have to care about banks as much anymore. They can actually just do everything in stablecoins.

AI assessment note: “the way Visa deals with like banks, I think it's going to change”

Q of crypto, and also what I'd call maybe others who are just crypto curious, so kind of know that we're in this big moment. We've seen a ton of deregulation. We're seeing, once again, so many exciting things take flight, but I'm curious from, like, where you sit, like, what is happening? Like, what, what does this moment feel like? How is it different from a year ago or not?

A Um, I actually see a lot of parallels between crypto and a lot of other tech movements, like open source and the internet and things like that. And it kind of starts with... Yeah. AI is more of a product, honestly, and less of a movement. I think it's, uh, yeah, I think you see the punks do it first, and then kind of the hoodies built a bunch of stuff and commercialize it. And then the final stage is when the suits take over. And we're kind of seeing that awkward transition right now, I think, as the, the hoodies are making progress and getting PMF and growing companies. In your early stages of suits trying to figure out how to take over the industry and make it like everything else.

AI assessment note: “we're kind of seeing that awkward transition right now, I think”

Q The regulators are coming around, aren't they? Or, or not really?

A Uh, they are this year, but yeah. For them to pass a bill, right, it just took six months. For that to take effect is going to be the next two to four years. So I think the stablecoin thing is, it's going to be like a fundamental change to finance globally. That's going to be pretty weird to watch. The other use cases Bitcoin is its own weird religion thing that I don't, there's no engineering that I could do to help it. The other use cases are all kind of like internet use cases when email took off. Nobody knows what they are. Everyone's talking about the internet. And we'll see, we like, it's just too hard to say. Like, I don't know.

AI assessment note: “they are this year, but yeah. For them to pass a bill”

Q Okay, so we've talked about meme coins. We've talked about stables having a huge moment. What, like, what's going to happen with these IPO valuations, Anatoly? All these big, the circles, and like, what's going on?

A There's too much hype and not enough hype as usual. It's really, really, it's really, really hard to imagine five trillion dollars worth of stable coins issued. Like, what does that mean for the world? It means the money has been digitized and it's become global and like everybody in Europe, South America, Africa, Southeast Asia has dollars and they use them all the time. That's a very, very kind of fundamentally different world than we live in today. And I think we're accelerating towards that. Like, I think it's crazy that there's quarter billion dollars has been issued in this like very non-scalable, like no support from, from the United States, like fighting tooth and nail, like against regulators and stuff, like environment that's already got to a quarter billion dollars.

AI assessment note: “hard to imagine five trillion dollars worth of stable coins issued”