¶ Intro
The black rocks of the world don't make bad bets, like they understand, they do an incredible amount of due diligence. So it's nice to kind of see them endorsing the technology in this way, like it will just get to a point where I go to my brokerage account, I buy eth and in the background it's automatically staken and it's a given.
So do you see eight continuing to hold that mantle of being let's say, the top enterprise blockchain. Oh?
Absolutely, I think there's no doubt.
Etherium has kind of two key selling points like security one hundred percent of time, and then like you mentioned, liquidity.
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visit the link in the description. Hey, folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward and joining me today is Keen Gilbert, who is the head of institutional Relations at the Loto Ecosystem Foundation. Keen, great to have.
You, Ay, thanks so much for having me. It's great to connect.
Absolutely, Keen. I think it's very timely that we're speaking. There's a lot of demand for etherorem, a lot of demand for etherorem staking and Loto is playing a big part in the staking aspect for etherorem. And then recently the SEC gave some clarity around liquid staking. So I got a lot of questions for you, But let's kick it off with your background. Tell us a bit about
¶ Kean's background
yourself and your professional background.
Sure, yeah so ours boy.
I kind of grew up in Dublin like business background, did marketing management consultancy. From a professional point of view, I started my career in Deloitte doing like FS capital markets consulting on crypto so I did that for around a year. After my time time in Deloitte, I joined Consensus. I was in Consensus for around five and a half years, mainly working on like meta mask institutional and fur staking tokenization, like a number of different products, so I kind of
got good exposure there. After my time in Consensus, I joined a small startup for a while that was doing like portfolio and risk management for crypto funds. And now currently I'm at Liido for just over a year, so I'm head of institutional relations and I would look after
and a lot of institutional clients. So by that I mean different crypto funds, asset managers, hedge funds, like really anyone who has a significant mental eat and we had obviously encouraged them to take it with a love for the added benefits of liquidity and capital efficiency.
Very cool and at your time at Deloitte, what was your first encounter with crypto. Was it Deloitte? You know, were they researching this technology and then you kind of got into it or did you find out about it outside while at Deloitte?
Yeah, it was kind of an interesting one. So in college when I was doing my master's in consultancy, we had to do a consulting project and my client was Deloitte, So that was kind of my first I suppose aha
a moment for crypto and blockchain. So we did the consulting project for deloittte and this would have been I think twenty seventeen, so the technology would have been quite nascent, So all the work that Deloitte was doing at that time was very educational based, like just getting people to understand that like blockchain and bitcoin wasn't the same thing. One is the technology and the other's use case. So yeah, college would have been the main dip to kind of
getting into that kind of crypto part. After that, a lot of the proof of concept based, so nothing was really going into production at that point. You were doing a lot of use cases around like trade finance, which is quite popular, and eating from a process and improvement point of view around smart contracts and fast forward kind of ten years later, nothing really goes down that proof of concept rabbit hole. It's all straight into productions with people that bought into the idea.
¶ TradFi adoption of Crypto
It's amazing to see the amount of adoption taking place of blockchain technology and the crypto acid class. You have almost all of tradify here, the banks, the stock exchanges, the payment companies, they're all here. What does it mean to you or you know, how do you see that with all these folks coming in? Is it just you can't ignore this technology? This is the future pretty much?
Yeah, Like it's just been insane that it's kind of been this almost light switch moment. I felt like for a long time we were talking about institutions coming and regulations coming, and now it finally feels like it's arrived. And so the starting pistol has sounded in my mind, like, by no means do I think we're kind of nearing the end of the race. It just feels like the race is starting, and I'm quite fortunate I'm in New York this week, like the financial powerhouse of the world.
And when you meet with the likes of black Rock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, like you understand that they're taking this technology incredibly seriously and they're making these big investments. And my view in these things is like the black Rocks of the world don't make bad bets, like they understand, they do an incredible amount of due diligence. So it's nice to kind of see them endorsing the technology in this way.
Yeah. Absolutely, So give us an overview of lido. What islido,
¶ Lido overview
your mission, your services, and much.
More for your listeners.
You can think of Lido as a liquid staking protocol, and there's effectively kind of different levels. I would say the one that's most common are the one that gets the most amount of attention right now is native staking, so effectively with ethereum as the proof of state blockchain. So what that means is you take your eath, you secure it in the network, and as a reward for taking your eath securing in the network, you're given rewards. So I believe the rewards rate right now is around
three percent. The issue with native staking is that you're basically taking your capital in the form of eath, you're locking it away, So from a capital efficiency perspective, that's not terrific or it's not ideal. I suppose then the whole selling point of LIDO and liquid staking is we're solving that problem. So the whole process with LIDO is basically you would take your eth, you would go to the DApp take your eath, stake it, and in return
you're giving steeth or st eth in return. And you can think of Steith as a certificate of deposit, and that certificate basically represents two things, the east you've just staked and your staking rewards. What's really cool about Steith is effectively the network effects of it. So you can take Steith, use it as collateral, deployed into defied generally yield. But added benefit is that instant liquidity, so you can take that steeth and swap it into stables and that's
the key selling point. For a lot of institutions. They don't want to be beholden to the withdraw queue. So I think the withdrawal queue right now from a native staking perspective is around two weeks, so it's only like, you know, like the market can change quite a lot in an hour, let alone two weeks. So for a lot of institutions, they don't really want that exposure to time.
So again from liquids taking point of view. The ability to take steeth and go into stables is a tremendous selling point for what Loido is and what Steeth is.
Yeah. Absolutely, and you can put your capital to work and it's great to have that liquidity that you said in soil liquidity. So talk to us about the mechanics
¶ Staking setup
of how this is all set up. I'm assuming it's using smart contracts. How's the custody done and security and all these things, because that's going to be a big question for a lot of folks.
Yeah, so I should say, Likelido is adeo so to centralized autonomous organization. So one of the cool things about loido is that really practice what it preaches. So it's all around decentralization. Solido is effectively a middleware. Nothing is actually staked with Laider directly. So there's over six hundred different note operators and operating with LODO today or true
that's to middleware. So there's a couple of different elements to that, Like you would have what's called the curated set, so this is like professional note operators, so that would be the p tops of the world, figments, kills, course ones. Then we also have a community staking module to again driving that decentralized element, Like there's a big focus WITHINLIDO and all the contributors that you want to make Etherium as decentralized as possible, because ultimately that was the goal
of the technology from the very beginning. Again at a high level on like the setup and then from the custody point of view, this would come up quite a lot with the institutions that we deal with, so the asset managers, liquid funds, metfissuers. From custody point of view, we've quite good coverage. So that would be the likes of fire Blocks, Copper, cefu x Trust and the one
that's most recently been announced is with Bitco. So I would say like when we go and speak to these different asset managers, like unless you have custody support, they're very unlikely to go touch the asset because ultimately the custodium provides a terrific service, especially on the of the
structure side. So a big priority for me is making sure that steeth this institutional ecosystem added thindational level is supported with many different custodians, NPC, water providers and tech partners possible.
Yeah, that definitely makes sense. And custody is such a big aspect for trust and making sure assets are secure. It's great to hear you're using some of the biggest names in the industry like Bidgo and so forth. So on that note, you know, in pitching liquid staking and
¶ Pitching TradFi institutions
your services to institutions like black Rock, many of them are bullish on etherorem They have it in ETF format there some our companies are holding it as a corporate treasury and then they want to earn that yield right from the staking rewards and so forth. How are you pitching this to them? Are they open mind? Are they being open to the idea? I know some folks it's a matter of education, right and getting familiar with all these things. But how has it been pitching this service
to those institutions. It's been quite good, Like you said, like education is a big part of this. Like at the end of the day, people are not going to engage with the technology or ease any the service unless they're comfortable with it. But maybe the kind of taking example you mentioned there, so like the ETF issuers, like there's obviously a huge amount of work happening behind the scenes with these issuers to get staking added to these products.
One of the key things that comes up quite a lot in the conversations that we're having is that what will the staking rate be of these ETFs. So if you take kind of Europe as an example, so Europe has had staking in these products for quite a long time, and there's a number of quite successful ones like twenty one shares a bit wise to etc. Group, but the staking rate of these products tends to be at fifty percent,
and the reason for that is again liquidity. So when a client wants to take money out of their ETP or ETF, it's typically operated on like a TA plus two basis, so they want to get their money backward in two days. The issue when you have a natively staked ETP or an ETF is that it typically could take around two weeks. So from the issuers point of view, that's why they have to have a certain amount liquidity. And by liquidity, I mean unstaked eath. Back to your
point around like what's the sales pitch. The sales pitch for most would be.
You could actually launch a one hundred percent stake product. You can have a product that's now one hundred percent staked, which means you're getting the full three percent yield compared to say a fifty percent stake product where it's only getting one point five percent. So from the issuer's point of view, that's obviously quite attractive. You can launch a better product, and then from the investor's point of view, you're getting higher returns and you're again getting a better product.
Is totality, that's really great and a huge incentive to your point. And then I'm assuming it would be very
¶ Ethereum treasury companies
similar for if your treasury companies as well, if they want to do the same thing exactly.
Yeah.
So I think one of the big reasons why the treasury companies have been such a popular topic right now is again because ETS still has staking yet. So I think you have the likes of sharp Link Gaming and the trust Machine and the eath machine, like they're seeing a significant amount of attention because ETS don stake, and I do think there is a world where both will kind of sit in parma low like these treasury codes can be a lot more aggressive in terms of the
strategies they deploy. They might have a defied strategy, they might have a liquid staking strategy, they might have a loop link strategy, and whereas the ETFs, for staking, it will be relatively straightforward. It will just be wholly staked, so from returns perspective, it probably will be lower compared to say a treasury co who could be a little bit more aggressive depending on the strategy that they want to deploy.
So that's interesting, and I can see why the etherom treasury companies there's kind of a race to get as much eath as possible because if the ETFs are not offering this yet and we're still waiting for the SEC to actually do something and you know, tell us if they're going to. But also the eat treasury companies seem to have more play so to speak, or more wiggle room to do more versus the ETFs.
Yeah, exactly. So, like I think Sharplink gaming is probably the best example. I want to again, the largest in space right now. I think that just is giving an opportunity for investors to get the exposure they want right now instead of waiting for the SEC. At clarity around staking and ETFs and at the end of the day, liquid funds, asset managers they do act as kind of mercenary capital. They want to go and get exposure to the market, especially since now is quite a good time
for eth. It does feel like the narrative has really changed compared to say, the beginning of the year, where I always quite honestly say I don't think Eath was getting enough load. Now things have really changed where we're in nearly the end of August and it's getting the
attention it deserves. And a big part of that is obviously regulars are clarity coming out of the US and again what these Treasury codes are doing and how aggressively they're buying Eath like it is a terrific endorsement that, look, this is now a strategy that's being deployed so actively.
You know, one of the things I was curious about, and I don't know if you can speak to this is because it depends on the companies. But you know,
¶ Staking rewards dividend
could they offer the treasury companies the stake and rewards as a dividend to the shareholders or maybe just simply reinvest the amount to drive more value on the stock side. What do you think about that?
I know this goes more into the companies themselves. Yeah, I think you're right at the end there, Like it ultimately depends on the company. So in the strategy they want to have. Like, it was quite interesting listening to the different investor calls for these e treasury companies. And again, this is kind of a green field space, like nothing has been around for twenty years and there's no real standards yet everyone is still trying to find what works
and what doesn't work. So I would say there's no real right answer, there's no real rom answer. I would say from the investor's point of view, the right answer is the one that makes the most amount of money or the highest return.
¶ SEC liquid staking
Now, the SEC recently gave some guidance on liquid stakings saying some of these activities are not securities. What does that mean for your business and even the future of liquid staking.
Yeah, well, at a high level, it's terrific because this has again been something that comes up quite frequently. So like when you speak to these big asset managers or issuers, they want one thing and that is clarity. They want to know what the rules of the game are. Like it's very easy for me to go and have all these different conversations, but if there's any kind of regulatory doubt in the background, they're very hesitant to get involved.
And that's quite fair and like these are big institutions Tier one have probably been around hundreds of years. They have quite a low risk appetite and they don't want to offend the regulator. So when this news came out around clarity around liquid saking, it was terrific because now we know what we can do and what we can't do. So liquid staking not falling under securities law is a big part of that.
Yeah. Absolutely, And I know there's still more that they need to provide, but this was a good start, and you know, hopefully maybe with the Clarity Bill, the Market Structure Bill that's coming to be passed by Congress, maybe there's some additional language there, or maybe not, maybe the SEC provides the full guidance later this year. Yeah.
Absolutely, like that's what everyone wants.
Like again, kind of going back to my Deloitte days, Like it was funny, no one really wanted like regulation. They didn't want like the government to come in and like dampen innovation. But I think people soon realize that, look, like regulation is not a bad word, it's a good thing. Everyone just wants to know what you can and can't do.
And ultimately the structure is the foundation of how big things happen, and I think if there wasn't this regulatory clarity and less will be happening in the market today. And like it's again kind of going back to the beginning of the year. I was here in January, the week of the inauguration, and it did feel like there's this like terrific energy in New York where Okay, things are opening up, innovation is happening, whereas I think maybe
two or three years ago that energy wasn't there. And a big part of this new energy is obviously new administrations. And again that regulatory clarity that's now starting to CAMA or is at least quite close to being kind of launched their live.
Yeah, for sure. And I think, you know, I think people sometimes think that if there's regulation is coming in, that it's going to stifle innovation. But it's just a balance. I think if you get the balance right where you're not stifling innovation but you're protecting consumers and users, that's fine, right. You allow the entrepreneurs to build, the innovators to do their thing, and there's protections for consumers. And I think that's the balance we just have to strite. But I know,
to your point. Some people think, oh, you let the government come take over, we won't be able to do anything, But it's not true as long as you are able to get balance regulations.
Yeah, and I think like once the regulators are actually listening to the market, like it would be quite bad if the regulators went into a black box. They did all their research and they didn't engage with people on the front line. I think that's when you have big issues, whereas like what the SEC is doing with the crypto daask force, speaking to as many different people on the front line as possible, that's where you start getting meaningful regulation.
And that's where again that confidence starts to grow that Okay, this is a serious technology and serious players will want to get avolved.
You know, you mentioned engaging with regulators. I don't know if you're able to talk about this, but have you and and poks on your team spoken to the SEC about your services and you know, giving them feedback and things like that.
Yeah, there's definitely conversations and there's engagement there. Like there's a number of different kind of liquid staking groups and staking groups, where as effectively, collective we would go and we would speak to say the task force or if there's kind of open questions and given that Lido is the largest liquid staking protocol, like our guidance would hopefully have some weight, and we just give feedback on what we think is the most appropriate.
¶ Going beyond Ethereum
Will Liido expand beyond Etherorem? There are other proof of steak blockchains out there, other services that offer or other blockchains that have staking integrated, like Solona for example. Are you just going to stay with Etherorem in the ecosystem around Etherorem?
I think, like my view on this is like, if you want to do something incredibly well, you have to focus on doing that one thing incredibly well, and for us, that's Ethereum is taking So in the past there was some liquid staking and offerings Withinlido, but that was effective. Is sunsash again kind of based on that decision you want to do something well, you just focus on doing that.
And again kind of my own personal opinion on this, like Etherium is probably one of the only kind of institutional grade blockchains out there today, so like why not focus on the one that's getting the most attention on that is Ethereum.
Yeah, that's a great point because and we could talk
¶ Ethereum enterprise adoption
a bit about this Etherorem usually seems to be the first platform or blockchain that it's being used for tokenization, and there's the majority of stable coins out there are on Etherorem. When black Rock and some of these other funds launched their tokenized money market funds, it was on Etherorem, and yes they branched out, but eth seems to be the starting point that it's the most trusted the ecosystem with maybe the most liquidity, a lot of network effects
obviously and things like that. So do you see ETH continuing to hold that mantle of being let's say, the top enterprise blockchain.
Oh, absolutely, I think there's no doubt.
Like obviously, Ethereum secus second larger blockchain after Bitcoin, like Etherium has kind of two key selling points like security one hundred percent of time, and then like you mentioned, liquidity, Like the type of conversations aren't dealing with conversations I'm having with people, they really do care about those two things quite a lot. Like institutions, they're not going to
engage unless they feel it's secure. And then a liquidity point of view, they're not dealing in hundreds of millions, they're dealing in billions, so they want to know how much they can sell, how long it takes to sell, and there's really no one else kind of operating at that scale or that size where big institutions can get evolved. And then on the final point around network effects, like again you have Visa and MasterCard, black Rock, Fidelity. These are all big players and for me, I think they
place big long term bets. It's never about a quick win. And I think again, depending on the strategy of like the firm you're dealing with, quick wins can be quite good, whereas if you want to make meaningful changes, that long term bet is far more important. And Etherium has been around for quite a long time now. It's proven that
it's battle tested, it can handle a lot. It's changing with the times, like the move from proof of work to proof stake Like these are all endorsements that look, this is a very future focused technology.
Usually there's I see these comments online on social media, people criticize, oh, gas fees are high, But I would love to get your perspective on the institutions kind of look past that, because to your point, they look at security, network effects, liquidity. Is it that or is there more to it?
Yeah, it's funny, like the gas fees, I would say, comes up more from a retail point of view, which is incredibly fair. Like if there's a high amount of congestion on the network, paying thirty dollars to process the transaction not exactly ideal, and I think we all know that, and the YEF is doing a significant amount of work
to make those changes. So yeah, I would say from an institutional side, it doesn't come up along conversation and like if you look at kind of traditional finance world, thirty dollars transaction on a couple of million, and it would be incredible, be cheap, yeah, Whereas it's so yeah, you're not really comparing Apple to apples in that sense or apples.
Okay, that's a great perspective because I think to your point,
¶ Ethereum gas fees
retail just thinks about their little mini transaction, which I get right, But if you're a black Rock and these other institutions, you're moving billions or millions and you pay even one hundred dollars in fees, that's nothing.
Yeah, no, exactly, And like it's it's peer to peer and whereas compared to like traditional kind of payments model, like if I want to send money from Dublin to New York. It probably has to go through two or three different banks before it gets there, and it takes four or five days. Whereas again the efficiency provement and with etherium, again we all acknowledge it can be expensive.
With that efficiency I provement where it happens in minutes not days, it's terrific and it will only get better as more and more people join the ecosystem and they build kind of different technologies on top of ether or ethereum.
So speaking of that, the technology is on top of you, you've got a lot of roll ups, right, get lt u's and we're seeing adoption of L two is like I just spoke to a vlat Tina at Robinhood and they're using Arbitrum you know, to base their blockchain and tokenization effort. And you have a whole bunch of other layer twos right that are getting adoption in different ways, even by institutions. But maybe those could serve the retail
who are worried about the high fees. Go to a layer two that is still using the security from the base layer of eth and that would be the you know, the nice fit so to speak.
Yeah, of course, and then, especially like when you have the big exchange is like coin base, I think has the base L two, crack In has their own L two, and consensus is linear, Like a big part of the success for L two's and like my opinion is distribution. So when you're a coin baser, when you crack in and you have a new L two that you launched, and you already have excellent distribution, like, it really is
set up for success right from the very beginning. Let's talk about the future of staking, right, I know it's
¶ Future of staking
still early. I know a lot we're still getting clarity, right, We're still waiting on certain alority from like the SEC and so forth. But let's say ten years from now, what does staking look like. Is it just simply built in and if I'm whether I'm a retail or I'm an institution, I'm earning these passive rewards if I hold the respective token.
Yeah, So I would.
Say future of staking like big kind of idea right now, or at least from our point of view, is institutional adoption is only going to increase, like once we get more regulatory charity mons, there's a maturity of infrastructure and education of course is a big part of that, like, I think it's going to only increase, and that is going to go up other big elements, I would say decentralization.
So again that's something light I was doing a trimific amount of work on to make sure that Aterium remains decentralized.
There's been a lot of concern where you have big centralized exchanges, they have a tremendous amount of control, so may say too much, they may not be the most transferrent, whereas if you were to use say someone like Glido and it's middleware, it's incredibly transparent because it's the dough where everyone can make a vote if they want to bring changes to the doll And again around having six hundred plus different note operators like really none is doing
and anything compared to Lido in terms of making Materium stronger and more decentralized.
Yeah, that makes sense. And then I wonder if with
¶ Mainstream adoption of Crypto and crypto
all these institutions like banks and so forth adopting eth and doing liquid staking, using Blido and whatever, it may be that the average user, the average Joe and Jane, they don't necessarily go buy crypto on coinbase and hold
it directly. They're going through the banks, and the banks are giving them some of these staking rewards and it's better than the traditional interest that's being paid out and checking and savings accounts, right, so it gives more opportunity to earn higher yield and better returns, and institutions can share some.
Of that absolutely.
Like for me, think real adoption and like mainstream will happen when you're not gonna be talking about staking your decentralization or where the nodes are located, Like it will just get to a point where I go to my brokerage account, I buy ether and in the background it's automatically staken and it's a given. And I think that's probably what like black Rock seeds like based on an Ether product, like, they're not gonna launch a second ETF.
They're not gonna have one that's staked versus unstaked, like based on the filing that I've seen, and it's just gonna be one product with staking. Like so for me, that just makes sense, Like why would you want to leave all those rewards on the table. It's just again that capital efficiency element is just critical.
Yeah, that makes sense, And I know some people had talked, well, we're putting the idea out there that maybe there's a separate ETF, but to your point, doesn't really make sense. And then it's better just keep it in that same ETF and then you can either pay it out in some sort of reward or dividen or just keep it keeps reinvesting in compounding.
Yeah, and of course then it's obviously a case of like how much of it is staked. So again back to that analogy of like in Europe, like only fifty percent of the the au n estaked. When we go only speak to different ASCID managers, we're really leaning on that. Look, Okay, fifty percent is good, one hundred percent is far better. So you could almost have potentially a combination. You could have fifty percent natively staked, fifty percent liquid staked, or
you could have one hundred percent liquid state product. So again you're kind of offering customization, and that's a big part of what these institutions want. They want to have flexibility. And one of the new products that lied Up is working on is st vaults and like lighter V three and part of that is offering that customization where different asset managers can pick the custodian they work will pick the note operator and choose if and when they mintsteeth.
So again, this kind of goes back to the future of staking. That's why I really believe that institutional adoption is only going to grow.
I love that customization so they can shoes what they want to do. That's really great. Are there any criticisms
¶ Criticism and risks
out there or things people have said that maybe this is risky that you would want to address, or are there common themes you know people put us on social media. What it may be is saying, hey, this is risky. You know, I know you mentioned like you're trying to be more decentralized, avoid centralization. So how would you address some of the critics and about certain risks and things they may have highlighted.
I would say, like the biggest criticism that comes up, and again I think this is just more from like a lack of knowledge, is that like Lido has too much control and like there's a centralization risk from Lido, And I think like Glido's market share is around twenty five percent right now. But one of the key things that people forget is that Lodo is a middleware. Nothing has actually staked with Lido. When you go on the DAT you take your each you stake it. It's distributed
across six hundred different note operators. So yes, the headline Lido has twenty five percent market good share is terrific and that sells clicks.
That's true.
But in reality, when you start looking at it, like Ido is doing a terrific amount of work to make sure it's being distributed as much as it possibly can. So I think the curated set, like I mentioned professional note operators, we have community staking module, we have solo stakers. We're trying to remove those barriers for community sakers and solo stakers to get involved and making it as easy as possible then for them to run notes. So I would say that's the criticism that comes up quite a lot,
but it's not founded on any real merriage. It's more someone has seen a headline and they haven't decided to read the actual article.
That's a good one. Yeah, I've seen that one. So I appreciate your addressing that. Are you able to share the names of any institutions that are using your service? You know, TRADFI institutions. It's okay if you can't, but I got to ask, no.
It's fair question, but my answer will be quite high level. So the usual kind of tier one asset managers' funds. We have a number of different liquid funds that use us every day, and I would say on the collateral side of things, you would see Steith used as collateral by these major kind of liquid funds. But unfortunately my answer is going to have to be quite high level.
On that one. Totally understand what's on your road map.
¶ Roadmap
I know you mentioned some things that you're working on, customization so forth, anything else you want to highlight.
Yeah, the big one for us right now is kind of light of E three and st vaults. So, like, again, I feel like it's kind of beating the drum on this. Like the whole decentralization narrative for Lido or Liido Core is terrific. But one of the big pieces of feedback we've gotten from asset managers is that, look, we love what you're doing supporting decentralization. We love the liquidity you w get for Steeth, but for our internal risk department, that's a bit of a challenge to kind of get
them over that hump. So the whole idea what sc vaults is that customization piece. So again, the idea that you can choose the custodian that you work with, whether it's bit Go, copper, fire blocks, you can choose a note operator that you work with figmunt Kill and Course one or whatever it may be. And then the final part that's really attractive is that you can side if and when you miss teeth, so you could have a one hundred percent natively state vault. Maybe your attempation quest
comes in. That's when you decide to mince teeth and get out of your position. What I would say, the customization part is amazing, Like I kind of look at it as I have an extra tool in the toolbox when I go and speak to these asset managers where I can say, look, if you're comfortable using lider Core, get all the benefits there, go down that route like that as terrific. Whereas if we speak to kind of institutions where they're more risk adverse, we can say, look, here's a custom setup.
You can work with the.
Custodian you've been dealing with for the past ten to fifteen years. Here is the node operator that you're already on boarded, you have an SLA with, you have an insurance policy in place, and then we come along with the added benefit of liquidity.
I wanted to get your thoughts on the general crypto market at large. You know, there's a lot happening with tokenization and stable coins. Obviously we got the Genius Act pass, and it seems like everyone's going to launch a stable coin, banks and much more. Let's start with stable coins. What are your thoughts on that market and do you expect a massive boom?
I think yeah, at a high level, Like anyone who says different, like where there's not going to be a big boom is probably just crazy. Like again going back to the point of like regulatory clarity is the terrific thing, Like people know the rules of the game, and once you get to a point where you're not expecting kind of negative regulation or penalties in place, innovation will usually follow.
And I think, like what USDC is doing circle all these huge successful IPOs, it does highlight that to a significant demand for the capital markets to actually get involved in these type of use cases. So I would be very surprised if, like stable coins is not the next killer use case for blockchain.
On the lines of stable coins, you get the tokenization we were talking about black rocks and money market fun. There's tokenization of real world assets happening. That market is growing as well. What are your thoughts on that. Do you see a lot of traditional asset stocks, real estate and so forth being tokenized on the blockchain?
I think so, like black Rocks, biddle phone, it has been hugely successful. Like real world assets, Again, tokenizing makes a huge amount of sense from a liquidity point of view, Like everyone wants liquidity. So when you especially take an asset like property a liquid for centuries and suddenly a technology has come along with blockchain and tokenization where you can make it liquid. Fractionalized ownership like these just make
a huge amount of sense. And then I'm neither side of that around like bonds and commodities, like the trading of that automating with Smern contracts making more efficient, like it kind of sells itself.
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, It's exciting. A lot happening in the industry, and I think as we get the Clarity Act in place passed by Congress here in the United States, I think the innovation is just gonna surge. It's gonna be a lot of building keen, great stuff. Love what Leto is doing and you know, I might eat holder and a steaker myself. Sell This is really really great stuff. But I got some wrap up questions here for you. First,
¶ Wrap questions
If you could create your own metaverse, what would the theme be.
I'm a big golfer, so probably golf related.
Rapid fire questions, favorite food steak, favorite musician or band.
Beatles, favorite movie Interstellar, favorite book, how to make friends and influence people?
And when you're not working at Lighter, what are you doing for fun.
Golf when I can? Yeah, that makes sense.
Keen, great stuff, man. I love again what you guys are doing, and I absolutely believe in it. I'm looking forward to hearing some big announcements of your service being used by some of the biggest firms in the world and would love to have you back on in the future. But thank you so much for joining me.