The Growing Crypto Ecosystem

What does it all mean for the huge ecosystem of products that have grown up around crypto. We'll talk to the CEO of a company that provides exchange traded crypto products about what he's expecting in the coming year. But first, fill Donna all this talk about crypto winner. Has been thinking about groundhogs? Or do you say will break Groundhog Day? Doesn't everybody? Don't? We all sort of watch and see what happens because we want the winter to end. We do.

And there's very sort of ominous news in New Jersey. Did you know there are local groundhog in New Jersey? Melville Millville mel actually dropped dead right before he was supposed to see his shadow or not. I find that I find that ominous. Yeah, it is pretty ominent. I don't know what. I don't know what that means. But I think we need a groundhog for crypto winners, maybe like an n f T. Like if bitcoins down, you have a groundhog n f T that comes out and

sees the shadow or not? What how would you How would you get it to pop its head out of the ground. It has to be I think it has to be triggered by like a forty percent drop and pick coin and then it comes out, and it could be a coin toss too. I was reading apparently punks a tawny phil the most famous groundhog only has a track record that compares his to his benchmark of a inflip, and he's trailing his benchmark terribly. So I don't you know, I think a good n f T crypto groundhog can

beat him. I don't know. I'm throwing it out there if there's any developers out there listening. It's a weird idea. That's a free, free idea for me that I'm sure no one's no one's probably gonna take up. But I do what I can possibly our guests might have some thoughts on this. I don't know if I'm sold on it, but I want to welcome Honey Raschwand he's the co founder and CEO of twenty one Shares and a Moon, and Honey, I want to thank you for joining us.

Of course, thanks for having it. I want to get into your sort of outlook for for crypto in general. But it's a lot of listeners might not be very familiar with twenty one shares. It's funny because in the US we sort of fixate on, you know, the SEC being very slow in approving uh bitcoin or other crypto

ETFs around the world, though it's flourishing. I mean, twenty shares has a bunch trading in European markets, So up to us a little bit about some of your biggest products where they're trading, how how much assets are involved, that sort of thing. If you can't tell by my voice, Um, I did grow up in America as well, and so did my co founder, and so the fact that we actually built the company in Switzerland was very much on purpose. What we were just looking to do at the beginning

was put crypto in a safe, accessible, known package. Or rapper. For a lot of people, buying e t S is easier. For some people, buying e t S is necessary. And we couldn't find any of these products out there. There were numerous reasons why not, but we sort of scoured the globe. We we We spoke to twenty seven different jurisdictions, different regulators around the world before settling on Switzerland and then using Switzerland as a base too from which to expand.

The first product we we launched was actually a bit of a complicated product. I think people assume we did the Bitcoin ETP first. No, we we first listed the uh what was the world's first and only index one and so it was an index of the top five cryptos represented the market, was just a single share and it was the first time that anything globally had been listed on a stock exchange that was physically back. Now that doesn't mean some people listed things and said they

were physically back, but there's no guarantee. It's not in the product structure itself. These are physically back commodity e tps and we put crypto it. At the moment, I think we have maybe two and a half billion or

so spread across about total products. We're going to double maybe triple the product suite this year, and we cover everything from a single assets like the most popular ones bitcoin ethereum, to some less popular ones or more let's say, more esoteric, younger ones like Polka Dot or chain link or Solana or binance coins. We also have a bunch of index is if you want to buy thematic baskets and that kind of thing. Uh. And we also have the only bitcoin short in an ETP format, and so

we have a single bitcoin short at the moment. It's in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Holland, France, Sweden. I think we announced that we're bringing Australia it's first bitcoin and ethereum ETPs. They're classified as at S there actually uh. And we're going to do the same with brand new region in the next couple of months. And so that's sort of where we're at by both assets as well as number

of products. Certainly, we are the world's largest issue of crypto ETPs and we were the ones that first brought it to market a couple of years ago. Amazing, yeah, just a few years. I mean the company's two thousand and eighteen. You were started, so that's a lot to get done in a few years. We're three years old. Yeah, I think we're three years old. In a couple of months now. I think this this is my third startup. It is the quickest of product market fit. Now. It

wasn't instantaneous. I remember launching in November with at the time five million in seated capital, which we slaved away to raise, having never been in e t F before, and just the price action of crypto. This was a basket of the top five. We launched the first day with five million. On Thursday day two, second day of trading, three point five three point seven millions, and so that was the the drop in just one day. I mean, actually, it took us a really quite some time to get

to an acceptable, respectible level and then from there. I don't remember going from twenty to twenty million to two billions again. I remember being in the range of thirty million, and then all of a sudden, we're now talking about two to three billion. A lot of people have have used it, but I think it just it speaks to the product market fit here. A lot of people were

looking at this. Why a few folks on the crypto side were scoffing at the people that would buy crypto using an e T S or wasn't as exciting adventure to pursue. Everyone thought it was impossible to do, or maybe if it's not listed in America, it doesn't matter.

Various other viewpoints there that we happen to disagree with took a contrarian opinion, and here we are, so, honey, can you actually talk about the regulation in Europe and how that regulation actually allows for your products to exist over there, whereas over here in the US we have a bitcoin futures product and everybody is still sort of waiting for that holy grail bitcoin spot e T F. So when we okay, when we say Europe as it

applies to us specifically, there are two Europe. There's Switzerland and then there's the European Union, and the regulations are a bit different. Switzerland has a very very rich history of costuming and trading commodities like think about swizz gold, baults and that kind of thing, and so it was actually be one of the easier conversations with regulators that that we had was here in Switzerland, because very very quickly they got it. We said, we want to wrapper

for physically backed, instored in our vaults gold. We wanted to have these characteristics. We don't want the ability or power as an issuer to take the money out. We wanted to be guaranteed, and we wanted to trade in this way. We wanted for retail and institutional and they said, great, here is a package. And then towards the very end, I remember say yes, but it's digital, that's the only thing.

And so instead of physical bars, we're gonna, you know, put laminated pieces of paper or platinum plates or whatever within custody vaulting and do it that way. And so the Swiss really understood that they got it. There was also a tremendous amount of political agreement, and not like we're seeing in America where it's a little bit more partisan than I would want it to be, but in

in Switzerland, which is quite part is in itself. Everyone agrees that this the crypto nation and they should have a stake in the future here, and it's a very important thing for them. And so we get we get that treatment, and then we help the country build this entire program of having been the first to do it,

and and so very good relationship there. Europe is a bit different in that there is a passporting scheme and so once you get approved in one European country for X license, oftentimes you can passport it across the rest of the European Union, all the other twenty seven countries, and so that was basically how we've done it, which is why in some areas of Europe where the regulator may not be the most bullish crypto, we still may have listings just based on precedent passporting and doing all

of those various things. But we have a very good relationship with the German regulator. Germany is the largest on me in Europe and that's something that we feel very very good about. On the US and regulations can't comment too much with any specifics. We do have a filing that I think it's public news that we've filed with Cathy Wood and ARC as well as twenty one shares. I guess here's what I could talk about. We filed to files. One was futures and one was physical, and

we have pulled the futures file. We were tracking and trying to see what people were looking for, how people would react to it, and in the end it wasn't the product quality that we wanted from the beginning. We could have listed private trusts with premiums to uh net asset value. We could have done things that have greater counterparty with We could have done things that would have

made us more money. And we've shied away from bad product built in bad product quality because we don't think you can as easily replace any of these things over time and its compounds and all of a sudden you have a crappy company, right, And so we really didn't want to do that. We thought, maybe there's enough liquidity, maybe this, maybe that. But I think that the data across the board shows that sends the futures et f launch.

It doesn't track the price of bitcoin, which one would argue is the most important thing, and then it has myriad other issues as well, given that it's built on futures. Physical is the way to go. Physical is how we've done it so far in probably a dozen countries, and we will continue making our case. And I can honestly say that everyone we're speaking to is listening with open ears and is willing to have a conversation, which is all that you can really expect and hope for here.

And we will along with the rest of the community try and work very hard to bring America an easier way of accessing with the cryptos. Well, honey, I gotta say, if you have to live through a crypto winner in the middle of a regular winner, Switzerland seems like a good place to do it. I hope, I hope you ski a little bit, uh while you're there. I'll tell you this. Recently, the blizzards in New York are far secure whatever interesting. Alright, so we are getting we are

getting the shirt in. But I wanted to sort of gauge your mood and and what you sense as the mood of the industry after this this nasty sell off in in crypto that we've seen since November. Um, you know, obviously the space was just flourishing. I I know, you had really ambitious hiring plans. You're gonna hire more than

a hundred people or something like that this year. And obviously that's that's the story you hear all over the place, people really ramping up and and and really interesting projects and a lot of venture capital coming in, and and on and on. Does this price action change the temperature at all? Does it change the mood in the industry? Make you sort of second guess any plans or anything

like that. Uh, you know, how are you thinking about it? Look, I think this is a very very interesting question because by all means, Crypto is not the only one that it faces these kinds of things. Like I think, I remember when I when I did my first startup, I dropped out, I moved to California. It was the Sequoia Capital's rest in piece good Times power point presentation, because that's how the market was. And like I remember my first round that I ever raised was on a today

relatively small cap. I think it was three or four million. It was three million the first time, four million the second time around. And it's it's it's a very very very different world. Of course, it changes the scene. People are more careful. I forget who said this. It was. It was a seat station investor. I think it might have been Michael Deering. And it's it's the most perfect way.

I think during downturns, we all know a Kleenex box, and based on whether we have just opened it or if there's only four kleenex is left and it's nighttime, our use of the Kleenex is going to radically change. It's the same thing here now, and so I think all of a sudden, companies that were more casually doing a million dollars sponsorships for conferences of mostly crypto insiders are probably rethinking. Some of these companies that were not on solid footing. Well, you know, now now we see

who's swimming without any swim trunks. Now a lot of sunlight is the best disinfectant here, and so I think it makes everybody more careful, which is probably why the data shows that downturns are better times to build companies. Not everything is going well, you have to make sacrifices. You have to think about this or that, which is a new paradigm ship for our industry. But you are honest with yourself. You're intellectually honest with yourself. You've seen

this coming. If you're careful, you've seen this coming. If you're in crypto, that's for sure, because you know we we do these normally and will continue to do them for for quite some time, and you care for it. So we still have all of these hiring plans. We have forty or fifty open positions. Were a hundred and twenty five people now up from twenty. I think or

so about a year ago. But we've been, you know, an intelligent squirrel during the bull market and really stored up to make sure that we not only are safe now but can can be opportunistic in case something comes up.

We were widely profitable, we remained pretty profitable. But I think the extra attention to detail is something that I certainly missed during the bull markets where everyone's a genius and I wish the prices were higher, I always do, but I know they'll be higher a year from now, and I would much rather be in this position than

than anything else. It's also all cyclical, and relatively speaking, every metric you've said so like bitcoin or ethereum dropping by half as compared to what date, because I think, you know, a year out, we're all up, we're all beating the SMP. Well, I haven't sold any crypto for years, so how how am I? And I think we have to really consider all of these things, especially in an area like crypto where a lot of us are very

very trained holders and it's part of the culture. Something interesting that I actually noticed is a bunch of research reports that I've been getting in my inbox have been pointing out that there actually have been slight inflows into a bunch of crypto products over the last couple of weeks, and and even if there are outflows, they're really miniscule. And I looked at the bitcoin features E t f S, the ones offered in the US, and they've seen no

outflows at all. And I'm just wondering why you think that might be, given that there is so much attention at the recent draw down. I think it depends on the person, because every every person sort of in crypto for a slightly different reason. Those that are investing in crypto because of political risk, what has changed. Nothing. Those that have invested in crypto because they're worried about increased inflation. What has changed. Part of the equation has changed, which

is why the prices have moved. But largely that thesis, if you're a long term holder, still applies. Those that have invested in crypto as a VC case, like a lot of I think tokens can be looked at as VC project. Of course they're going to hold that. That's the whole point, and so I think that's how we have to think about it. Really, A few of our competitors have customer profiles that are far different from us, and they're inflows, outflows. Activities as a result, even in

the good time, are just different from us. We don't really attract too many traders. We attract long term holders. Our AUM tends to be among the stickiest in the space as a result of what is predominantly family offices, private banks and fund managers that hold the ball of the au M of the product, and the healthy dose of retail that give it act. But you know, I'm not surprised by the data. Our data shows the same.

It's it's it's a little too soon, but I think we've come close to maybe inflows in the last thirty days, which is very good. Actually, you know, a couple of days of outflows, but overall for the month, net inflows and the outflows weren't nearly serious. You're in an industry that talks a lot about in ten years we will be x and as a result, you get a lot of people in the industry that invest with that time horizon.

A lot of people are trying to get rich quick, but they tend to be uh, sort of flushed out in these market movements. Honey, I want to rewind a little bit to something you said that I've been thinking a lot about, and that's sort of the partisanship. Uh no, when it comes to politics and crypto now here. You're a guy who's you know, flown around to how many jurisdictions twenty First of all, I wish I had your frequent flyer miles. They must be you can probably get

a trip to the moon at this point. But but I'm curious, you know, tell me if I'm wrong in sort of simplifying it to the to the idea that it seems like the conservative side, the right side of the political aisle is very much sort of pro crypto, hands off regulation and the and the left side is more cautious at once tighter regulations, more restrictions. Is that too simplified of a way to think of it, or from your experiences, is that sort of what's going on.

I think that's not a bad summary. I haven't thought about it under those models. I think it's I think it's fairly interesting. I I I've always looked at this as even earlier than that, in that none of the commentary that I'm hearing on the bearer's side, left or

right makes sense. So it there there's an element there of you know how, at the very beginning of crypto, we were getting a ton of this is only used for drugs, and at some point we were getting this is only going to be used by criminals and terrorists, and that narrative has largely died due to data, to the anecdotal evidence, due to monitoring on exchanges, the professionalizing, etcetera. And I would say the same thing here as well.

A lot of the comments that I'm hearing are about this is going to exacerbate income inequality as an example, right, and so very that's very clearly something that is a commentary from the left. That's that's unhelpful. And I'll mention one on the right as well, just to be fair.

But it's unhelpful mostly because it's not true. Right. My co founder of Failure loves crypto in part because of female and women empowerment in the developing world, suddenly having access or being able to have access to finances, which has proven to be better for families overall. Anyone anywhere in America elsewhere can suddenly plug into a financial system that is global in nature. There's there's a ton that the left with love about crypto. It's just not properly explained.

On the right, I think I've heard some things about how this is quite negative for the United States, it should be squashed. Maybe China or Russia are behind this in order to destroy the dollar or to control it or whatever. It's very clear based on Russian and Chinese actions that they are similarly confused, right, And I think it's just it's a bit early. But to me, bitcoin

is is pretty American. It's what's one of the most American things I would say has ever been invented build on sovereignty as a concept, let alone sovereignty in the digital age, which is which is both American individual liberties and freedom combined with American ingenuity and innovation. Right, this, this thing, this entire asset class is super American, which is why a lot of people that happened to the Americans are in the industry and a lot of American

dollars are in the industry. But it would be a shame if America missed out on this, and I think America can really benefit from this in myriad ways. One is the bitcoin mining and we've been seeing what states like Texas are doing to incentivize Chinese mistakes ultimately of destroying the their own mining industry. But we should see

the same thing. Right now, American exchanges don't seem to be as competitive as global exchanges based on revenues, based on market share, based on kind of products, and and and I would I would argue that we have been falling behind on a couple of things. We've been doing well on say mining and a few other topics, but overall, I wouldn't say that it is the best place to do DeFi best place to be crypto And you know,

boy should it be? And we make that case privately UM as a company, h and we will continue to do so. I forgot already what were you used to describe some of the I think it was esoteric products, So you had mentioned Salona, Polygon, a bunch of other e t p s. So I'm wondering which of your products you're seeing the most investor interest and why that

might be. We look at two metrics. One is just generally speaking, what are our biggest products, and those tend to be the usual suspect Bitcoin, Ethereum, the basket, etcetera. We also get a lot of attention with bringing accessibility to ask that are even in the West generally inaccessible. I don't know if they launched it yet, but I don't think so. And I think for the longest time polka dot has been wanted by coin base and just

not there. I think they they in the end listed it, but there was a time period where we were the only way to access polka dot in the West. Certainly that is the case for Binance, which is a very good product for US finances by far the world's largest exchange, and mostly people in the West really don't know too much about it, like as on a retail level, and we are one of the few, maybe only way in a regulated fashion to purchase this asset in the West,

and so you get a lot of attention. The other metric that we look at besides just overall, what are our biggest product, and really it's just the usual suspect is time that it takes to get to a hundred million dollars in a one because that actually shows there are some products that that list and then soar to a hundred millions, are products that take another two years and still haven't hit a hundred uh and on those basically all the layer, all the layer ones and layer

two's that we've launched everything that you could see as either an Ethereum competitor or compliment, depending on how you look at has been soaring, and it's been soaring in the summer, and it's been soaring since we've listed it. And so it's Lana Avalanche Polygone, very very popular launches Cosmos right now because you know, Mikey brought this up bear market even though I think the podcast is the

price goes out for something, right what goes up? Yes, you didn't even know the name right now, but it's okay. But yeah, I think I think even if if you were to look at the bear market right now, Cosmos is and we happen to have I think the only Cosmos product in the world, So all in all, we'll still see strong influence to that point, you know, honey.

Before every podcast, the Albanna gathers up a list of about three d and forty seven questions for for the guests, and uh, unfortunately we never get to all of them, but she has got a good one on on her list that I'm gonna steal because we are running out of time, and it's about basically the notion of institutional investors and decentralized finance. Um, do you see an interest from institutions to get into defy? If that, what will

it sort of take to get them involved. I feel like institutions are just finally worming up to sort of the big cryptos Um. Are they ready to sort of go into the rabbit hole of defy? And if I can tack one more question on that, you know, the barrier tentry is so low that there's so many projects, so many coins going out there is that a hazard to the space when you have so much supply of new stuff coming in, does that sort of water down dilute you know, the potential worth of of of all

the projects. Yeah? Absolutely, So let me answer your your second question first, because that's an easy question. There's about two million apps maybe more on the Apple App Store. There's I think three to four million on the Google Play Store. We're not that concerned about good mobile apps taking off. There's going to be a ton of noise. It is our opinion that there's going to be more tokens,

not less. Because we're starting to see this, you see it, especially with the n f T s. It's very possible that instead of subscriptions, we get n f t s, or we get tokens that represent something like that is very possible that for a bunch of aspects of our lives, we will you know, add on top of it some crypto element, which is quite interesting. And so if anything, we're going to see more tokens, not less. There will still only be the top top ones. Maybe it's ten,

maybe it's twenty, maybe it's five. Uh, and so it still makes sense to invest in the in the big ones, the ethereums and their compliments and competitors, the bitcoins, etcetera. But overall, I would assume if if we really think this will go to a hundred trillion dollars, it's it's not inconceivable for a bunch of random tokens to get tens or hundreds of billions in market cap. And you're seeing it right now like it's super early. We have

defy assets with tens of billions in market cap. Once it goes a step or two more in adoption, those same asthlets would be hundreds of billions or or maybe low trillions if you really extrapolated up, and we would see that something quite similar. Institutions have an incredibly long term perspective, which is very helpful. Here. Institutions have a ton of money, which is very helpful. Here. Institutions move very quickly, and they have an incredible amount of needs,

and so that's not helpful. Institutions are not here. Uh, they're on the way, but sure everyone is on the way to something. I think they still need a lot, especially if you're talking about big pension funds and insurance

companies and the like. The good thing is that they're looking at falling bond yields, issues with interest rates absolutely low yield, sometimes negative, like in Switzerland it's negative seventy five basis points what the bank charges you on your balance, and they're seeing all of that and they need to do something about it. So they are actually some of the best conversations we have. But they are the conversations we have that we know will take another two, three, four,

maybe five years to materialize into anything. And that's fine, you continue to invest in that, but I think it will be a while before this really tips the scale. Which makes this such a unique asset because I'm pretty sure that most asset classes are first embraced by the institutionals. Honey frequent listeners of Price Goes Up know that Mike likes to ask multiple multipart questions. So I have a two part question for you as well. One one is

parts that's amateur. It's amateur, but it's it's big for me. I usually like to keep it just one question. One is it is Mike you might learn from that? Uh. One is we mentioned that you are the co founder of A Moon and I wanted to ask you to talk about a Moon a little bit because the reason that you and I originally started talking is and the reason I wanted to have you on the podcast is that you were telling me about index tokens, and so can you tell us what our index tokens? Describe why

you guys started working on this for our listeners. And really it was the very first time I had heard about them when when I when you told me about them, So all of those details would be great. Absolutely. I think it's all about the end consumer when you think about it. If our mission is to make crypto marks a sessible and what we see ourselves doing is just building bridges into the crypto world, if you want to take that analogy to the limit, then there are different

vehicles for different people on that bridge. And that's sort of how we see tokens overall, just conceptually, is that for some people the product that makes the most sense is an e t F my mother for example, a fund manager for example. But for some people, and this could be either a mix of maybe someone is more technically savvy and technical and crypto forward. But and this is where it's really important to us and how we've

initially thought about it. Maybe they're in a geography where for the foreseeable future, a we will not be listed locally on our local stock exchange and be they will not have access to the markets that we are on. Most people around the world don't have access to the American stock exchange system, and that by itself is the biggest one, let alone the German Stock Exchange or the French stock exchange. And so we want to have a product whether you are in Guatemala or in Germany, and

we want to continue having that. And there are indexes that I can give to you in an ETP format. But if you want to make a themed allocation into say the metaverse or defy or or anything else, and you want this for some reason as a Salona token or an Ethereum token, we should have that product should have our name on it as well. That's the basic summary of why we do tokens and how we think

about it is greater accessibility. You do get into some very interesting things though, with respect to like what kind of products you can build in tokens, because it turns out that when you start doing this, you'll then see there's a lot of things I can do with tokens that are impossible to do with the t f s, and a couple of the other way around, but mostly

tokens are better in a lot of technological ways. You could build products that incentivized long term holding by air draw up in the feedback at first certain period of time, help and various things that you know you could not do independently. And so there's all of those aspects to it, which is how we broadly organize it. Think about it. Tiden up your straight jackets. It's time for the craziest

things we saw in markets this week. Well, the way I organized and think about things is in crazy things. I don't know that's an awful seguet, but I'm trying here. But let's get you. Have you start us off, what's the craziest thing you saw in markets this week? Well, as you know, my recent favorite topic to talk about, which you and I have discussed, is football. So my weirdest thing actually is a story about football. The Bloomberg headline said, Lucky Better wins dollars with a twenty dollar

wager on NFL weekend games. So it was somebody who bet the Bengals would beat Kansas City twenty four and that the Rams would beat San Francisco T to seventeen. It was a twenty by getting the scores and the winners correct. Wow, that's it's pretty amazing. Nine thousand dollars for a bet. Yeah, but they they're killing themselves for not putting another twenty in the right. Well you wonder maybe maybe that person had a thousand twenty bets on

all various permutations, but I hope. So I like this story because I'm so bad at guessing the outcomes, Like I definitely guessed the opposite for both for all for basically all of them all season. So this this is really striking to me. So no Draft Kings app for you. Do not down that, don't download, that would be dangerous. But that's pretty good. One bill down. I'll give you. I'll give you credit for that, and I will accept sports gambling as a crazy market thing. You know, why not?

Why not? Ino? How about you? How do you you've seen anything crazy in the past week or so. I've done zero preparation for this, so I'll just say content thing that irks me. Coin Base is a bell weather for crypto. Coin based is an incredibly undervalued company. No one really understands coin based on the public markets. You could see this gulf between public and private in how ftx has pund raised this week versus the very public price coin base. At some point, ft x is a

wonderful exchange. It's very quickly growing. It is small compared to coin base, and if at some point the private markets are valuing it higher than things coin based publicly, that should say something. People are overreacting in general. Overall, we see it with crypto prices. We also see it

with crypto public equities. And this is a clear case of like, read that coin based quarterly reports, see how much money they're holding, how much money they're making, what they're actually doing, and you know, tell me somehow that it's worth thirty six billion dollars or whatever. Though the

number that's it's pretty uscinating. I wonder if there's you know, does that tell you something about sort of the amount of private capital looking for a home and and uh, you know something about that side of the market that is out of balance. Maybe? I think it mostly is just a reflection of how short term cited the public market is. And I think you you deal with venture investors who are comfortable holding for five to ten years position,

and that's not the case in the public markets. Crypto is going to go whatever the price of bitcoin is right now, which I am proud to say I do not know. Crypto will go below this price. Crypto will go above this price, but in a certain time period five to ten years, crypto will materially be above wherever we're at now in terms of adoption, in terms of price, in terms of usibility, in terms of a lot of other things. And I just think that bet is harder

to make in public markets overall than in private markets. Right, that makes a lot of sense. All right, I'll give you my crazy thing. Um, I'm fascinated with domain names in web three domain names m because I'm old enough to remember back in the original dot com boom, all the domain names squatting that went on, people thought, if you bought the right domain name, and in many cases

they're right, it ended up being worth a fortune. So kind of a similar thing going on with crypto domains um and the idea if you're not familiar, I think that, and honey, correct me if I'm wrong about any of this. But to me, the main appeal of having your own crypto domain is, you know, you can put your wallet at that address, and then it's a lot easier to say, you know, send me some crypto to this Mike dot ether or whatever. Then here's my you know, super long

uh wallet address. What is it like forty forty numbers and letters or however many it is. But so I was looking at the Salona name service yeah, bonfida yeah, and a little bit different than the Ethereum one. And that they they will allow you to buy a corporate name. Yeah, you know, so you can buy Like I was, I'm looking at their leaderboard. Number four is Starbucks dot s o L. I guess went for about interestingly, which seems

low right interestingly, right right interestingly. A corporate name is not the top of their leaderboard. So I want the two of you to hear me out here and try to guess what is at the top of it. Bill, Donna, if you had read my little contribution to the Crypto newsletter this week, you would know this. But I think that might if I'm with any luck. That's the one thing you haven't read, uh this week. I read it three times. Give us a hit. The top priced domain

name for Salona is an emoji. It's not even a word, it's it's an emoji. So so guess the emoji and guests guess the prices a tiebreaker, you go first of all, Donna, Well, I feel silly because I read your column three times, but I was sweeting it for grammatical errors. Would you tend to make a lot? Nothing gets full dot and we're excited than finding it a type something I've written? Yes, yeah, So am I allowed to say poop emoji just for fun? It's that allowed on the podcast. I'm going to go

with that, and I'll go with ten thousand. I guess, I don't know, just double the Starbucks alright, hotty Starbucks. So boomji was actually one of mine. Because ship coins are a thing. I'm amazed. It's not Oh wait, wait, never mind, I'm giving them giving away that. I'm giving it away, the secret diamond hands. I gotta give it the honey. It's it's just the diamond and and sixty thou dollars. What a guess. Wow, he's off bite neither one.

If you is allowed to ever sell me do why people will be contacting your people about there should be a hand in there, diamond tomoji the hand. Well, apparently the single character ones are the most valuable, So yeah, diamond hands would probably be up there too, I would mention. I think, um, that makes sense. I don't think I won that. I said, diamond hands, Yeah, close enough, close enough, better better than the disgusting one vildonna. Just at least

I didn't curse, honey, curse. It was my number one choice, number one choice. It's a vertical in our space. It's an important to us at class at this point. But all right, well we'll see, we'll say maybe that one you may or may not have that ticker reserve. I think we just broke some news filled out. I think we just broke some news. Yeah, I think we did well. I'm kidding. But but if I'm not kidding. I will do this right now. Fantastics all right, We'll have to

check back on the leaderboard for the Salata domains. I have a feeling maybe someone will. We'll hear this podcast and bit up that that discussing emoji that but you should you should buy it as a gift. You should be doing that. I'll see. I'll talk to our compliance people, see if I can get that get that whatever she wants. I'll air drop the poop emo g T. I don't know that that sounds disgusting, but honey, really fascinating conversation. Can't thank you enough for your time. Hopefully we can

do it again some day. Thank you so much because a black Thank you, honey. What goes up? We'll be back next week. Until then, you can find us on the Bloomberg Terminal website and app or wherever you get your podcasts. We'd love it if you took the time to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts so more listeners can find us. And you can find us on Twitter. Follow me at bring Anonymous. Bildonta Hirich is

at Bildonta hi Rich. You can also follow Bloomberg Podcasts at podcasts, and thank you to Charlie Pell to Bloomberg Radio. What Goes Up is produced by Laura Carlson. Ahead of Bloomberg podcast is Francesco Levie. Thanks for listening, See you next time.