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Last year, Atlas Merching Capital sponsored an eight hundred and eighty eight billion dollar, I should say million dollar merger involving Sonnet Therapeutics to create hyper liquid strategies, a digital asset treasury company centered on the hype token. For more on this, we're joined by Bob Diamond. Bob is the current CEO of Atlas Merchant Capital. He is the former CEO of Barclays. Bob, thanks so much for coming in
on our one hour launch of bloomber Crypto. I want to start big picture before we get into hyper liquid. How would you characterize the current environment for risk given how much sentiment and momentum on crypto has really shifted since last October.
Well, I think over the last week or two we've certainly seen de leveraging and probably a little bit of a risk off trade, you know. I think it's one of the reasons why we're so excited about hyper liquid, which I always try and simplify things a little bit scarlet, But if you think about bitcoin and the volatility of bitcoin, it's really a store of value and the price is really much more about supply and demand. It can be quite volatile, where hyper liquid is a layer one blockchain.
It's a blockchain that was built for exchanges to be on top of it and execute on top of it. And I think of hype the native token, as more similar to equity in a company, so it's much more valued based on the price, earnings based on the volumes. And as we see Hype be traded on hyper liquid, but now trade xyz, which is a platform a part
of unit. Through Hip three, they're able to go in on hyper liquid and build an exchange and they're trading the Nasdaq, they're trading SpaceX, they're trading Tesla, and just recently they've been trading silver and gold metals. So we're seeing for the first time real application of real world assets coming on to an exchange, and I think this
is a sea change. But the volatility we've seen in things that are supply and demand driven stores of value is very, very different than hyper liquid, which is really a business.
We've heard a lot in recent years about the idea of real world, real world assets being tokenized in trading, but I think there's still a lot of people out there who are unconvinced that this is a problem that needs solving. Convince them right now.
Well, silver has been trading on hyper liquid for about two or three weeks. Last Friday was the single largest day for volume of silver trading. I think as far back as you can go in history and trade x y Z on hyper liquid was two percent of the volume. I think if nothing can say we actually have real world assi that's on this exchange, hyper liquid is doing it now. Over the last seven days, bitcoins down about twelve percent, Ethereum's down about twenty percent, and Hype the
native token is up forty percent. Think about those numbers. Down twelve percent, down twenty percent of forty percent. It's because the volumes have been growing, Revenue has been growing. Last year revenue is just under a billion dollars. There's eleven employees. This is a real business and for the first time we're seeing real world assets come on chain.
What kind of adoption do you see from TRAT five, from traditional Wall Street onto the hyper liquid platform right now? Because they have a lot of concerns around know your customer and anti money laundering, and these are things that don't get solved quickly.
I can't even say TRADFI very well. I say traditional finance. I'm so traditional finance of trad FI. I'm trying to work on it, Scarlett. You know, I think is some of the people were saying when you did those clips, the institution adoption is real. We were an early investor. You had Jeremielaira on there. We're an early investor in Circle. That's infrastructure, that's stable coins, that's blockchain. These are things
that real bankers or traditional bankers can really understand. And I think today all major banks JP, Morgan, Bank of America, Bank of New York, State Street, Barclays, they're all investing in blockchain. They all have use cases for blockchain. So one thing we're seeing for sure is the infrastructure is very much adopting blockchains. As in my own view, over the next five to ten years we'll see blockchain emerge. Is probably the most prevalent infrastructure really in finance at large.
We just spoke to Mic Novograds over at Galaxy Digital and he regrets not getting into the prediction markets game sooner with investments in the big players, the upgrade to hyper liquid will allow support for prediction markets. How do you compete with the call she's and the polymarkets out there. What gives you the edge?
So, first of all, thank you for asking that Hip three, we've been bringing equities on metals. On Hip four, we're doing some more changes in the technology so we can
bring prediction markets on. Literally in the next couple of weeks, they'll be on hyper liquid, and I think what we've seen is that hyper liquid is fast, hyper liquid has deep deep deep liquidity, and hyper liquid is on chain, and those things mean that it's going to compete, just as we've seen, you know, three weeks of having silver on trade x y Z, it's already competing.
I want to just end on one more digital asset treasury type of question here. It's the ticker per that's the ticker for your firm. It's been trading below net asset value, So what's driving that and under what circumstances would you actually consider selling hype?
So I don't think it's under set value. We have earnings next week, so we'll go through so that we can be more public on what the net asset value is so people can trade it back and forth. But yeah, I don't think your calculations right.
Okay, well have to go back and look at that. Just one more on that is part.
Of the listening, and to be fair, I didn't really answer your question. I think we announced publicly a few weeks ago that when it was below net asset value, early on, we had approval from the board to buy up to thirty million of shares. I don't think we've reported back on that to the market. But next Tuesday is our first earnings, so we'll be talking about that.
Then we'll wait to hear on that. Very briefly. Is the value proposition for per to give access to a wider audience and a wider user base.
So I think there's two value propositions. Value proposition one, and this is really really critical, tim, is this is a business creating revenues. The volumes are exploding, and they're exploding in a very substantive way. We're going into new markets. We're actually getting real world assets through Hip three, through unit and trade xyz on chain. We now have a native token which is USDH. So there's a lot of
things that are building this business and increasing revenue. And so the first valuation of Hype is it has all the characteristics of a share buyback because ninety seven percent of the income that's produced within hyper Liquid is used to buy back those tokens. So think of that as very very similar to a share buyback. That's number one and number two, now number three, what we're doing with
our data, and I think it is different. Everyone says it's different, But we're giving access to a lot of US investors who are not yet approved for perpetual futures to get access to hype into hyper liquid, and I think that's the third your.
Proposition, Bob, thank you so much. Bob Diamond is Atlas Merchant Capital CEO, but you may also remember him as a former CEO of Barclays