¶ Intro
Canter is a very well respected name in the traditional finance space and they have announced they're doing a two billion dollar bitcoin backed loan program and Maypole, along with falcon X, where two of the first two of the first borrowing partners there. So what that means is that we post bitcoin and then we borrow a larger amount from them, So I think, I think like a wholesale amount.
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into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host Tony Edward and joining me today Sid Powell, who is the CEO and co founder of Maple Finance, and we're going to discuss the great news this week with Canter Fitzgerald launching bitcoin lending and integrating Maple as well.
Sid. Great to have you, Thanks for having me on. Tony, very glad to be here.
Yes, Sid, you and I met years ago the Propy conference. As I was mentioning before the recording, I don't know why I took this long for us to set up an interview, but I'm glad we're able to get this on the books.
Yeah, me too, Me too.
It's definitely been a while and very very you know, very different stet of the world now.
Oh yeah, maybe because you know, with the environment change, the regulatory environment, the Trump administration is more favorable to create it's actually a better time to have this conversation because we can discuss innovation and not having to worry about I don't know, the SEC and other agencies attacking us.
Yeah, yeah, you can definitely, you can definitely be a little bit more you know, kind of kind of open and imaginative, imaginative about the innovation going on, this going on in the space. But you know, I will say that like the SEC has been, you know, been very welcoming now this year to the to the industry. They've been hosting a bunch of roundtables. So I think it's a very you know, it's a very positive dialogue happening now with them.
Oh absolutely, it's a completely one eighty And in fact, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, I saw yesterday the next roundtables around DeFi I believe.
I think so, yeah, we I think this would be the final, the final roundtable in their series. I was at the tokenization and the asset tokenization won a couple of weeks back. So they're discussing you know, things like real estate equities, you know, private credit, that type of thing. But I thought, I thought it was really positive and you know, the staff was very engaged and receptive, and
I think chair. Atkins was also you know, quick to call out the benefits of tokenization, liquidity, transparency.
So yeah, I think I think hugely positive.
Oh yeah, lots of progress being made. Said, let's kick
¶ Sid's background
it off with your background. Tell us about yourself, your professional background, what led to starting Maple.
Yeah, for sure, I, like like many in the space, I came from a traditional finance background. So I used to be in banking in an area that's called securitization. But what you need to know about that is that it was working with lending companies to help them borrow and access capital markets. And they would act almost like
mini banks. They take loans, they take really big loans from banks and investors, and then they parcel those out into smaller home loans, car loans, credit card loans, and and so I was doing that in Australia and then I went to work at another lending company which is a bit smaller, bit more of a startup, but that's where I sort of really got interested in crypto and and the idea of smart contracts and DeFi and that's that's where I met my co founder and we started
working on Maple. In the background, so always always been involved in kind of finance credit lending, you know, prior to starting Maple.
That's fascinating because to your point, your pedigree is in finance lending, Barry and so forth. And then now you're moving that to blockchain, right and web three.
Yeah, we're just doing the same thing on chain, and I think, you know, the the AHA moment for me was definitely when I was working at that lending company. We had to borrow from banks, and I started thinking about whether we could do tokenized bonds using smart contracts. And this was you know, this was like mid twenty eighteen. Then wrote a white paper early twenty nineteen. But you have to remember the space was so early back then
that DeFi comprised like five companies. You know, there was maker set Protocol, Dharma, DYDX, compound, and it was so early that the idea of tokenizing bonds was you know, you didn't have anything on chain that could be tokenized, and so we we kind of had to evolve the idea from there, and so Maple went through, you know, through a kind of ideas of eventually doing direct lending itself. But since then we've really focused on the institutional segment in the market.
So what goes through the different services that you offer
¶ Maple's Institutional services
to institutions. How can institutions leverage maple.
Two ways?
Primarily, so if you look at what we have today, we do the bulk of our activity is overclateralized lending, and in that instance we lend to institutions that might include trading firms, centralized exchanges, family offices or high net worth individuals, and.
Hedge funds as well.
And so they would post bitcoin or eth or SOUL or XRP.
You know, large large cap assets.
And they post them as collateral and then borrow from us against them and they use that in either op X trading activity for if it's a high net worth or a family office, they might use it for real estate investment. That was a big one that we've had recently.
Wow.
And then on the other side side.
Of the on the other side of that product is a yield is a yield product, and so we would have corporate treasuries, high net worths, h hedge funds, asset managers and UH and and increasingly DeFi protocols.
UH. They use us as a yield product.
So they might be sitting on stable coins they want to earn a yield from them. That yield ultimately comes from the loans that we originate. And then the other the other product that we've offered this year has been BTC yield product, and that's done in partnership with core Dow, which is which is an l one uh and that's that's a staking product, so we work with them. We
steake BTC along with the Core Governance token. But ultimately the most important part is that for our users it looks like a yield product where they put in BTC and they get BTC yield back. So that's that's kind of the most important aspect there. But that's that's that's effectively the product sweet we offer.
Very interesting. Now you mentioned earlier some of the folks who borrow against their collateral, they used the money to invest in real estate. I didn't think about that that they could take it to any other forms of investment, but I guess that's an option, right as long as everything's copasthetic with this setup.
Yeah, one hundred percent.
And you know, for particularly for a high net worth who might have made their money holding crypto for a long time, they still love they still love the asset, they still love the space, They don't want to give up the upside, and so by borrowing against bitcoin or ether or soul or XRP, they're able to do that and so keep the upside they do.
They also don't.
Realize taxable gains by having to by not having to sell the asset. So if they had to sell the asset, they're going to have to pay about a third of it out in taxable gains, and then they're they're not going to have the future upside there. And so one example recently is we did a We've done a loan where it's a high networth who's using it to purchase a big, big piece of real estate that they intend to live in and holders an investment, and so that's
a really good outcome for them. We can give them certainty on the cost of financing because we do fix rate, and they're able to keep the collateral in a qualified custodian. They don't have to put in a smart contract. The way that we do margin calls is much more user friendly. We'll reach out on Telegram or over email. We let them know, we give them twelve to twenty four hours to post margin. It's not like using a DeFi protocol.
Where they might wake up one morning and boom, they've been liquidated without warning.
Wow.
That's interesting because I thought, and maybe this was how you guys had it in the past, that it was maybe part of a smart contract set up, but in fact it's at a qualified custodian so you have the separation.
Yeah. Interesting, it's a hybrid.
And that's one of the other reasons that institution and typically you know, choose to come to US rather than using another fully fully on chain DeFi protocol where they have to wrap the assets and put them in a smart contract. Is if you're holding BTC. You know, some institutions have accountants who would say that wrapping in a taxable event, so then they have to pay the tax on the on their BTC gains, whereas with US, they can use native BTC.
If they don't.
Want to take the counterparty risk of US of facing US directly, they can put the BTC in a qualified custody account using using a triparty agreement, so the custodian looks after it. If it drops in value, then we would have the ability to liquidate it. But it's it's set up that really suits more conservative institutions. They can use native BTC unlike smart contracts, and then and then they can keep it in a custodian instead of having to to take the risk of an exploit in the
smart contracts. And you know, despite how far the space has come, we still see exploits happening all the time when it comes to smart contracts.
Oh yeah, I was just about to at that point as a follow up, the fact that we still see a lot of exploits and things happening. I'm sure it puts their mind at ease that Okay, this is not wrapped up in a defied protocol. It's kind of pseudo DeFi but it's what it qualified custodians that they can sleep at night.
Definitely.
Yeah, that's a huge selling point for institutions, particularly there for their compliance teams.
Wow, that's really great. So tell us how the partnership
¶ Cantor Fitzgerald Bitcoin lending
with Cantor Fitzgerald came about and the big news we heard this week of they're launching about two billion dollars in bitcoin lending and how Maples plays a part in that.
We were tremendously excited about that announcement. So it came out two days ago and Canter is a very well respected name in the traditional finance space, and they have announced they're doing a two billion dollar bitcoin backed loan program, and Maple, along with falcon X, we're two of the first two of the first borrowing partners there. So what that means is that we post bitcoin and then we borrow a larger amount from them, so I think, I think like a wholesale amount, and then we use that
to grow our lending book. So for us, it gives us access to larger amounts of capital, It establishes a partnership with a well respected stratify name, and I think it's a watershed moment where you'll start to see more traditional finance names coming into the space and participating in
some way. Cantor obviously has very strong links and ties to the industry through their relationship with Tether as well as you know, as well as the former CEO how at LATNX relationship with the administration being very pro crypto. But I think, I think what this means is that you're going to see a lot more institutions look at either fixed income products against bitcoin or other bitcoin structured
products from here. And also, you know, I expect Canta to really ramp up that two billion dollar program.
So sid, I just I want to make sure I wrap my head around what this opens up for Mapel. So it gives you more liquidity, like so maybe.
For us, it's Yeah, for us, it's more liquidity and capital to lend out. So how it works is we post bitcoin, we receive dollars, and then we're able to lend those out to our customers. So for us, it's all about growth and securing new financing partners who have the ability to scale.
And I think it really.
Is a testament to the to the confidence that allocators have in the transparency and the liquidity of what we're doing. So all our loans go out on chain, so it's it's very transparent into how it works. And then the fact that Maple's loans are token ives and done using stable coins, I think gives them a degree of liquidity that's just not available when you look at traditional private credit and.
¶ Bitcoin loan terms
These loans that are given out, what's usually the terms on those are given that bitcoin's price does fluctuate and on the macro it's kind of the four year cycles.
Yeah, it's it's a good question. Generally the vanilla standard loan that we would do is you're looking at seventy percent LTV. So if you give me a million dollars of BTC, I give you seven hundred thousand dollars loan. We normally do it open term with the ability to recall within thirty days. You've got very short, short dated liquidity and access to the return of capital pretty quickly.
And then at this stage, obviously the price of bitcoin fluctuates, and the and the interest rates against bitcoin also fluctuate. I would say roughly, you're seeing kind of market pricing in the like nine to ten percent range at the moment for corporate borrowers. And how we manage risk given your point Tony about the fluctuating price of bitcoin, is we have an initial LTVs that's at seventy percent level I mentioned, and then we would have an eighty percent LTVs which.
I reach out.
That's the point at which we reach out and ask for either more bitcoin or for the borrower to start to pay back some of the loan. And then at eighty five percent LTV, that's when we have a stop loss level. So at that point we're just looking to
liquidate the bitcoin. But in our case, we can liquidate it back to just the initial LTV, so it's we're not fully liquidating the borrower and so it's not a terrible experience for them, whereas often in the defile loans it's a full liquidation and then there's very heavy penalties on the feed associated with the liquidation. So we try and do a little bit more of a borrower friendly product here, and that's that's again another reason why institutions
will choose us. But I'm I'm very very confident that bitcoin back lending is going to be the next way that institutions really participate in the space because it pays out three to four percent more than T bills, super short data. You can get your money back within a month, and then it's overclateralized by an asset that trades over fifty billion.
Dollars a day worldwide, and.
You can you can, you know, you can exit a position at two am on a Sunday if you want very different to you know, to to to selling houses with real estate, back to mortgages.
Oh absolutely. And you know, it seems like the puck
¶ Bitcoin reserve asset
is heading to a place where Bitcoin becoming this ultimate reserve asset. You know, countries is setting up Bitcoin strategic reserves Just yesterday Pakistan they announced they are going to follow United States and do the same thing. Yeah, ETF, you have corporate treasury, right, Michael Saylor's playbook, And it seems to your point what we were talking about earlier. Folks don't want to sell this asset, but they want to hold on to it and then borrow against it used as collateral.
Absolutely, it's holding it as a reserve asset gives you the ability to quickly access cash by using it as collateral. I think you'll see a lot more. You'll see a number of countries I think, adopted as a strategic reserve, and it's kind of just the next evolution in sovereign wealth funds in a way, you know, a lot of a lot of countries, most famously Norway, some of the golf countries set up sovereign wealth funds to you know, to to to invest and preserve wealth for future generations.
And that's how I see that's how I see bitcoin strategic reserves for the United States and for other countries following suit. Also, I think I'm very interested in the trend among some of these corporate treasure even publicly listed companies, in holding bitcoin, and I think it shows that the market is clamoring for this exposure, and we also see a strategic opportunity for Maple to be a financing partner.
One of the things that not a lot of people remember is that Sailor had a facility with Silvergate Bank back in twenty twenty two, prior to the banking collapse in early twenty twenty three. But what a facility borrowing against your bitcoin or ether or soul allows you to do is opportunistically buy the dips in the market. And so I think, you know, Maple would love to work with some of these treasury companies, and indeed we're starting
to make outreach to them. But we can be a facility that allows them to opportunistically buy dips and then anytime they want, they can repay the facility using convertible notes, equity issuance pref equity issuance. But it just gives them another arrow in their quiverity.
Use mm hm And do you believe that eventually, uh, you know, everything pretty much starts with bitcoin first and uh, but then we may see folks go to ethereum and then x RP is literally over the past two days, you had an etherorem treasury strategy news announced from a public company, and yesterday an XRP treasury strategy, So it seems like there's a race here.
Yeah, I think, uh, Bitcoin, e F, x RP, and SOUL are kind of you know, they're they're you know, they have the highest liquidity in the space, and so they're kind of the preferred, uh, starting points for institutions. But I do think, uh, I do think that bitcoin is kind of the gateway drug. When I talk to people at Galaxy, at coin base, some of these uh,
you know, more institutional shops. Whenever they talk with the pension funds, the endowments and and the uh the insurance companies, you know, your your big balance sheet investors in tread fy, the starting point for all of them is is bitcoin. They just want to buy bitcoin. And so how we've positioned ourselves is we then offer the two next products from there, which are borrow against your bitcoin or lend against bitcoin, and the other one being how do you
get a yield on your bitcoin? So the bitcoin yield strategy we run. But I think that's the natural kind of gateway drug. That's the next thing they think about. But you're absolutely right, Tony. Of course they're going to look at at ethereum, and you've already seen that in practice with black Rock and Biddle. You know, it's got over a billion dollars of tokenized assets and money market
funds on ethereum. And I think somebody made a point the other day, but I think Ethereum has kind of evolved into the DeFi debt capital market and in another sense, Solana has become kind of the center for a lot of you know, tokenized equities and equity capital markets.
And how do you feel the staking component to ETH, Well, uh,
¶ Eth staking yield
when the product eventually gets built around ETH, right, could that be a very strong incentive because you're you're already getting a natural yield?
I think, uh.
I think ETFs have been looking at staking eth for a while, and I think actually there's there's a couple of ETPs or exchange traded products that are outside of the US that have staking built into them. I think one in the UK and one and one in Canada. Uh So I think, uh, I think once you when you have the initial call it spot asset, so whether it's BTC or ETH, uh, that's always that's V one
of the product. And then you get to staking as kind of a V two because competition drives this, right, you have to you know, if if you've got five BTC and eth ETFs, uh, the sixth one is going to have to do something different and so it's going to have to look at either staking or generating a yield on the assets somehow, and the market's going to have appetite for that.
So you know, you're servicing institutional investors primarily, But can
¶ Services for accredited investors
accredited investors participate in users?
For sure?
Yeah, I mean we have so if you look, we have kind of three product lines. We've got Maple Insto that's where accredited investors would go. We've got Syrup USD, which is the more defive friendly option but blocked blocked and not available in the US. And then we've got the BTC Yield product. So accredited investors can all use Maple Insto and that's available in the US and it's
actually been extremely popular with high net worth accredited investors. Uh. They just sign a loan agreement with US and then they're able to earn an interest rate on their stable coins and they can choose two strategies. We have the more conservative one just BTC and eth back lending, and then we've got the higher yield strategy which will also do lending against soul XRP and other assets. But both
have both have been immensely pop popular. The BTC back to one is kind of paying six to seven at the moment, and the high yield one will start paying around ten at the moment.
I need to look into that, said, you and I going to have to talk after this interview.
For sure.
Now in regards to security, right, you mentioned using the third party custodian and so forth. Tell us a bit more about your security infrastructure and what layers you have in place to prevent someone and Mabel from doing something, because I know these are questions people are going to have.
Yeah, sure it's and it's definitely you know, it's definitely a good thing to ask. And it's a core part of the operational due diligence that you know our partner is doing us before you know, before they start participating. And so internally, the controls we have against uh you know call it employee or insider UH misbehavior policies, so same same as you would have in a traditional company when you have who has access to the bank accounts and how much approval you know, what is required in
the way of approvals we have. We have multi sig wallets in place that all have policies in place, so we use we like fire blocks for defy and port which is anchorage of product. But we have you know, people who can approve or initiate transactions internally, and then we have senior people who are required to approve and so we have that in place for any movements of funds, whether it be funding loans, shifting collateral, and that just helps protect our assets.
And then.
And then as well, from a cybersecurity perspective, we have a bug bounty program. We have constant monitoring of suspicious transactions using TRM labs, and then we also have monitoring in place around you know, any attempted exploits or malicious transactions where people are attempting to access our contracts. So yeah, effectively three layers of protection. And as well, I think it's worth noting for most people. So we don't keep
honey pots of funds in smart contracts. We when we take in stable coins, we're lending them out to the institutional borrowers, so it's not like they're sitting in a stable, it's not like they're sitting in a smart contract. And then when we take collateral, it's in these custodial accounts as well, which because the extra layer of protection so very different from the early days when you saw the exploits of things like you know, folkrom protocol and some of the other early lending markets.
HM, that definitely makes sense. I'm curious about how Maple's were. Which blockchain is Mabel running on. Is it a proprietary
¶ Supported blockchains
blockchain or is it a Ethereum layer two? And then you have a couple of tokens, Syrup and the MPL Maple token. Tell us about how all of that works.
Yeah, happy, happy to explain how all this fits together. So we're primarily on if may neet at the moment. We are also going cross chain imminently actually, so we're working with chain Link and chain Link and their cross chain initiative to have Syrup USDC available and it will be the it will actually be the first DeFi asset that could be minted in USDC on Solana.
So we're really excited about that.
We you know, we are big believers in the Solana ecosystem. We've been active there since twenty twenty two, but we're trying to come back in a big way and we're doing integrations with some of the DeFi ecosystem there, so Camino Orca. We want syrup USDC to be available as both a collateral asset and as a high yield savings account type product there and then we're actually one of the big strategic pillars for US this year, will be getting syrup USDC across chain in future, so we want
it available on multiple other chains. We're going to be working with chain Link on that, but we want it available as a high yield savings product there. We actually call it liquid yeld Dollar. Then to your other point on the governance token, so we actually have closed out support for MPL. We did a six month migration period, but now it's just Syrup, so we have one governance token for the entire protocol. Everything is united under the Syrup token. And how that fits in is you can
stake it. If you're staking it, you get governance rights and so you participate in key decisions and we have a rewards program available for staking, so we do buybacks where we take twenty percent of the revenues of the protocol. We can update that on a quarterly basis through governance voting, but that currently gets used to buy back this year up token and then that's distributed as rewards for people
who are staking and participating in governance. So we're one of the few protocols that has an active FEA switch an active buyback program in place, because we're one of the few protocols generating sustainable revenues at the moment. So currently the protocol earns around ten mil annually and that's growing and it only spends between seven to eight so it's actually it's actually now profitable.
That's awesome. And what's on your roadmap? You know, obviously this you have the big announcement with Canter, but anything that we can potentially expect laters here.
Well, I think the big thing to keep an eye out for this year. I'll just go through in order of kind of the product, so Maple and so we're going to be doing more of these traditional finance partnerships and really rolling out the idea of fixed income coming from bitcoin back lending to you know, to a trad fire audience.
So expect more more.
Facility partnerships and funding partnerships then Syrup USD. Syrup USD, the focus is really going to be on cross chain expansion and also centralized exchange partnerships. So we've done integrations with the binance wallet, with OKX, with bitget.
We want to.
See more of those partnerships. We think a lot of users are on those exchanges. They have great user experiences, they have a very large customer bases, and we think it's an interesting product for them to offer in the yield space. And then on the BTC yield product, the most exciting thing we've got coming will be lst BTC.
So think about this.
It's almost like the it's almost like STEF, but for BTC it'll be yield bearing liquid available in DeFi. You'll be able to purchase it on secondary markets or you will be able to use it as collateral for borrowing. So we expect a big uptake there.
That's great. Now, I know we're running up on time,
¶ Crypto outlook
so I want to get your take on your outlook for the crypto market. Obviously, we got legislation work being worked on in Congress and to anticipate those getting passed, and uh, you know what what could that do for the crypto industry. Do you see a boom and much and things.
Like that, Yeah, for sure.
I think Look, it's uh, the legislative space moves around so much day to day that it's hard to give concrete predictions. I think, however, that stable coin Bill gets through the Senate this year. I think Market Structure Bill is kind of the for many of us in the in the space, that's the bigger that's the the you know, that's the bigger ticket item, and that has downstream impacts on all of us. So what is a security? What is not a security? How do you know, how do
you raise money through tokens? Uh? You know, what kind of disclosures do you need to provide? Uh, there's gonna be a lot of there's a lot of meat on the boat and in the in the market structure build. But I think that'll probably come next year. We've seen drafts of it. I know a lot of people are kind of confident on it, but I just you know, you never you never want to bet on Congress being too fast, and it's it's always safe for them to
kind of take their time. But I think either way, what what this legislation means that gives clarity to institutions coming into the space. It gives clarity to builders like myself who want to create products that ultimately, you know, enhance users' lives, whether by making it cheaper, more transparent,
more accessible. This is ultimately what we want to build, and we just want a chance to compete with some of the some of the trad FI institutions who have had regulatory capture for a very long time, and competition that was prevented by the posture of the last administration. So I'm actually I'm quietly, you know, quietly, I have my fingers crossed for a ball market for the rest
of the year. I think, you know, naturally, I'm kind of an optimist by disposition, but I do think there's a number of catalysts that are kind of helping things. And I think if we get some of these trade deals in place, if we get inflation under control, then you could potentially see a right cut this year that I think kind of catalyzes more of a bull market for the space. But either way, I think people are
returning to the US to build. I meete a lot of founders who are considering exiting Europe or if they had gone offshore earlier, are looking at returning to the US to build. So I think it's very very strong for the space.
Yeah, that's that's great to hear. And it's just the air has changed. People are more optimistic about building here. Yeah, complete one eighty all right, I got some wrap up
¶ Wrap up questions
questions here for you. At first, if you could create your own metaverse, what would the theme be?
Good question? I kind of toss up between two. I kind of like, I'm a fan of the of the you know, the the classical times, so maybe like a Roman Empire themed one. I also like kind of the Age of Discovery as well. I've been I've been reading a lot about Magellan and some of the early you know, early explorers of the New World, So I think one of those a Roman Empire or Age of Discovery.
Awesome rapid fire questions. Favorite food.
My favorite food is actually it's overnight oats.
I kind of make this I make I make basically the same thing every day, but it's like it's protein, you know, It's like protein powdered peanut butter and overnight oats with banana, and it's just like kind of how I start every day.
Favorite musician or band.
I like the nineties alternative stuff. I'm a big fan of the Verve and the Goo Goo dolls. They usually make it make it onto my rotations.
You won't believe this. Johnny Resnik lives in the town next to me. I bump into him all wit, no shit. And I'm a big fan of Google.
I love it. Yeah.
Yeah, me and my wife are always kind of belting it out on the on the on.
The car rights. Yeah. For sure. Favorite movie, favorite one, I have a couple.
I have a couple of my top three, but let's say my favorite one is Whiplash. I was actually just having a conversation about this the other day. And another one I really like is Sakaria. But I think I think Whiplash just kind of like the grind that the guy goes through is reflective of what you do as an entrepreneur.
Oh, for sure. Favorite book.
Favorite book at the moment is probably thirty eight Letters by John D. Rockefeller to his son. So it's just it's literally just a bunch of letters that he wrote wrote to his son, as is outlined in the title, but it gives it gives a hint of his thinking, like how he thinks about competition, strategy, you know, mission vision, all that. But you know, in my mind he's the most successful entrepreneur of all times. I think there's a
lot to learn from him. And then the other thing is I'm generally a fan of Napoleon biographies.
I'll have to check out the book John D. Rockfeller, the letters you wrote that sounds fascinating. And when you're not working at Maple, what are you doing for fun?
I used to play a lot of tennis growing up, and since I'm in Miami now, I uh, there's actually a really good Padel community. So for those who don't know Padel, it's kind of like a it's like a hybrid between tennis, squat tennis, and squash, but you can hit you know, you can hit the ball off the back wall, and there's a there's a big community of people in in like the crypto and venture space to play. So it's kind of like it's nice exercise, gets you outdoors,
and it's also good for networking as well. I kind of don't have the time or the patients to get good at golf, so so Padel is the next best option.
Good stuff said, really great to have you and I'm definitely gonna have to have you back on We got to do around too, as you guys you know, on Unleash and open up new great things on Maple. But thank you so much for joining me.
No, no, thanks for having me. Tony really enjoyed it.