META All Time High, Kalshi Drama, and Crypto is in a BULL MARKET plus Trading Updates

0:02What is up everybody? Good morning. Welcome back to another episode of Full Port. We’ve got a lot to talk about as usual.

1:01Joined with my amazing and lovely guest, Giovanni here. Yes. I’m co-host. Co-host. Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m a little, the coffee isn’t hitting quite yet.

1:11Man, it is a rainy, dreary day. That’s it. I quit, bro. I’m out of here. You know, I’m the intern. We’re going to start referring to me as the intern of the show just to make you happy.

1:22That was bad. That was really bad, actually. I messed it up because we do have a guest coming on today. We have Simran from the Say slash Monaco Foundation.

1:37They’re doing some amazing stuff over there. So if you have interest in tokenized equities, RWAs, perps, anything that has to do with Wall Street modern finance coming into crypto, he’s at the breaking edge of it.

1:51Building there. He’ll be joining us in about 15 minutes. Until then, gee, how are we doing? Good morning. Good morning. Doing great.

2:00Had a great weekend. A lot of drama on the timeline over the weekend. I think there was like, I think there was drama macro. There was drama crypto. So I think we had like a little bit of everything for everyone.

2:13Yeah, you know, I what I love about the bull market when you know it’s really here is the juiciest drama is coming out. Not this like weak petty stuff like we get we’re getting like multi-billion dollar companies having employees feuding on the timeline.

2:30And there’s some meat to the bone there, obviously, Kalshi, obviously taking the headline.

2:34Yeah, let’s start with that, right? Let’s start with, I think, Kalshi over the weekend. Yeah, I don’t know. Do you want to recap it or?

2:44It starts with ICO B’s, which if you’re not aware, is a longtime crypto native user has worked at a few different companies throughout the space and then joined Kalshi.

2:58So I believe a friend was working there and was like, hey, she get involved and he’s led their crypto side, basically stoked the fire with another ex user who then turned around and dropped a entire thread of receipts on alleged wash trading, alleged kickbacks, alleged falsified numbers, alleged, and then you know, showing how like the entire open interest for a singular perpetuals market is being fully run through every eight minutes to get $500 million worth of volume in a singular market.

3:38And it brought a lot of attention. Like usually, you know, I want to make a point here, usually in crypto Twitter and our little echo chamber that we’re in, if you have a break a post that does well within the community, you get maybe 100,000, 200,000 views on a post.

3:52And then inside of it, you start to see these 1 million, 2 million impression posts. He was well into that multi-million dollar impressions.

4:00And it became something that now it seems Wall Street Journal and other news agencies have picked up on it and are like, hey, we’re actually going to go and look at this and we’ll report back with like real, you know, investigative journalism on what’s going on at Kalshi, which is crazy to see.

4:19Um, so basically, I don’t know if I was, I don’t know how quick I was to start seeing this, but I, I blocked ICO beast a long time ago, just because I thought he was putting like during like the Kato yap stuff.

4:34It was just, he was putting up such slop and such unvaluable things that I’m like, I need this off my feed and like more than just muting. So I blocked them. And like, I feel like he’s always been like a shit poster, I guess.

4:49I don’t really know, but like there’s a category of professional poster, you know, professional poster within crypto where you’re just an influencer of people. There’s value to that.

5:01Um, yeah, well, I don’t find it valuable. So that’s why I blocked them. Right. And so I don’t, I wasn’t really like paying attention to any of his stuff. It seemed like he was trying to, to me it looked like he was trying to inverse bra some guy by posting stats that, you know, that everybody’s been calling out as fake for the last couple of weeks or months.

5:22Even, uh, one of the partners, Tom Schmidt at dragon fly has been like kind of going at it with, with Kalshi on the timeline of like, you know, like this isn’t the first time that has been brought up that they did whatever half a billion dollars in volume on like $3 million of open interest.

5:40And like the largest open position is like a hundred thousand dollars. Like, come on. You know what I mean? Like, come on. And like, and, and, you know, I think people have been bringing, bringing up, uh, that they’re not the only ones that have done it, but that may, while that might be true, they’re not, they’re the only ones that are like trying to dunk on people and pretending like that’s real. Right.

6:06And so I think that that’s kind of what stoked that now, you know, I tweeted it this morning. Uh, I re I re I quote, he did something where, um, there was a headline that came out this morning saying that the CFTC is, is, you know, starting a probe into Kalshi.

6:23And I quote tweeted that this might be the most expensive tweet of all time. Right. Cause I think Kalshi, uh, was raising or just raised at $40 billion. Correct. Where I think it was that 10 billion, I think, uh, less than a year ago. So it’s, it’s up significantly over the last 12 months.

6:44And so I just think that like the implications of the events over the weekend and that tweet where the guy was literally, you know, he was basically trying to dunk on, um, I forgot that guy’s name. Ben, I think is the guy named Ben.

7:00Benji, I believe.

7:02Benji, Benji. I think it might be Benji. And, uh, he was trying to dunk on him and he basically was trying to inverse bra him and get, for those who don’t know, inverse bras, like, uh, whenever you ratio somebody, especially in crypto, uh, he’ll screenshot it and put it on there. I’ve, I’ve been, uh, like, I think like one of my whenever like I get on inverse bra for inverse braing somebody, like it’s like, boom, got it.

7:24Like, I think one time I was like, I think I was on like two or three times in one week and I was like, boom, I’m like in the zone. But anyway, he was trying to inverse bra him.

7:33And the guy like came back and was like, no, no, no. And, uh, like reversed Uno card him. And like, just like looking at it is like, there’s so many of like outside of, let’s say, the CFTC and possible SEC investigations.

7:53And I think any and every investor is going to be questioning numbers. And if those numbers do turn out to be falsified, they’re going to, you know, either sue for, um, uh, what, what’s the, uh, what’s the word?

8:11And then assume management for like lying about numbers or, you know, materially hiding them or whatever. Right. And so then in that situation too, uh, there’s probably like a fall guy.

8:21Like I was like thinking about it on my, on my, uh, walk this morning of like my recommendation to ICO beast and probably anybody else on the crypto team is to get your own personal lawyer.

8:35Cause like, I don’t know. The company’s lawyer is not your lawyer.

8:38Yeah. The company’s lawyer is not your lawyer. The in-house counsel will be there to, you know, defend and save the business as much as possible.

8:49And like he should probably lawyer up. I, again, I don’t know, you know, what information he was privy to or whatnot, but like, I think anybody from the outside looking in can obviously see that these numbers are not real.

9:06And, uh, you think this is a thing that we see across the industry. I don’t think it’s unique to Kalshi.

9:11So no, I don’t think it’s unique to Kalshi. This, like I was, to me, it’s almost like, okay, if you look at crypto over the, since like 20, let’s say 2020, cause I think 2017 was ICO boom.

9:24People were like, oh, you can buy this next thing and like, you know, get into valuation. It traded really high, blah, blah, blah.

9:32And so then what ended up happening, I think, especially in like the L one L two boards. And I think we were like talking about this a couple of weeks ago is people would falsify transaction volume, right?

9:43Like it’s very cheap to like, bought like transactions, right? Especially when transactions are very cheap. And so what a lot of L twos or any protocols would do is they would bought a lot of these transactions.

9:55And I was, I was, I was talking about like one of the frustrating things for me at 90 CC when I was trying to raise was people would be like, oh, well, you know, you only have whatever a few thousand members of your community.

10:07Whereas like this protocol is around the same size, same, same valuation. And they have, you know, a hundred thousand.

10:16And they have like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re eating into this, or you’re buying into this porn, right?

10:29Like chart porn kind of right. And so it’s definitely been happening in the space. And I think initially, like, I think initially people fell for it and VCs fell for it.

10:40And I think they got smarter and more privy to it. They just like discount the numbers, right? So it’s like, when people be like, oh, we have like, you know, 100% week on week growth. It’s like, yeah, well, it’s not sustainable because people are farming the token.

10:52So, you know, this is like not a long term, viable business. So I’m not going to give you credit for that. I think on probably like the traditional side, they’re probably not as privy.

11:07And unless, and not to discount it because those guys are probably, you know, they’re very smart investors and probably even smarter than, you know, most crypto investors.

11:16And I, I think that like Kalshi kind of got caught playing the game, right? And it’s like, people bringing those things that have worked in crypto or that worked in crypto really well and no longer work.

11:32It’s like, okay, like find a new person that like will believe that. And I feel like that’s kind of what’s happening.

11:38Yeah. Right. So, yeah.

11:41I think as somebody who’s obviously raised in this space recently for a consumer trading platform, I put that in the same category as Kalshi, which is consumer finance, consumer trading.

11:54I would say the entire space, and this is something that we’ve had to deal with, which is we’ve noticed that it is a norm within the industry for wash shading.

12:04Again, transactions are cheap. And the fees that you pay on wash shading is relatively cheap.

12:11There are services, there are companies and there are vendors out there that if you wanted to do this stuff, for 10k a month, you can be like, hey, my protocol just added an extra $10 million worth.

12:23You know, volume across these thousand wallets and they’re all wallets that you can set criteria for like, how old are they? Are they age? How many transact?

12:35Like, it is very complex. And this isn’t unique to crypto, right? Like this exists if you’re going to do email addresses or proxies, this like, gray hat hacker economy exists.

12:50And I do think it comes from like, sneaker bot culture has really, really shaped where crypto has gone. And I believe that this is kind of pulling over of like, hey, we can just fake some of this stuff and make it look better.

13:02The issue is when everybody starts doing it, if you’re not doing it, you’re at a disadvantage to your investors and everybody else that’s looking.

13:11And so it becomes an ethics question at the end of the day.

13:14And I think that also, this is something I don’t know how true this is. I saw this last night on the timeline. And like, I think it’s starting to pick up a little more is like, people saying the FOMO, like the FOMO P&Ls on the leaderboard.

13:33And this is like, adjacent, not exactly the same, but the FOMO P&Ls on the leaderboard are kind of like what I think the casinos were doing, right? Where they would give you, they give influencers some sort of money to spend on the casino and then they hit big.

13:49So then everybody like, goes to casino because they think they can win. And that’s like the same type of concept that’s being used on the FOMO P&L stuff.

13:56Now, I don’t know how real that is, but like, those are like the things that people are starting to say. And I think it’s like, to your point, it’s like the same type of thing, right?

14:04Selling people on that dream, whatever it is, and then capitalizing on it, right? And to your point, it’s like, it’s, I’m sure there’s some like legal, I’m not an attorney, and I’m a lawyer, but I’m sure there’s some legal implications there that people are discounting because they’re like, Oh, well, the president launched a mean coin, so everything’s fair game, but like, not everything is fair game. And I think, you know, I think I saw something yesterday. I think one of the guys from BitConnect was, is being sued by the government for $2 million, for like a million dollars that he owed in back taxes and a million dollars penalty and interest.

14:46And he got hacked, I think. And he’s like, Well, I don’t have the money. And it’s like, Yeah, well, you still scam. So like, you know, I, and that was, I think that was 2017. I think that was the 2017 cycle. So here we are 10 years later, with enforcement action coming out.

15:03And I do think that people are really discounting a lot of this of like, Oh, yeah, like, well, you know, we’re gonna like print and blah, blah, blah, and this and that. It’s like, yeah, but at the end of the day, like, laws exist for a reason. And like, even though the law might take their time, like, it is a little terrifying, I think, for some people to realize the meme of crime is legal is not, it’s a meme, not true. Like, like, the hammer will come down on some people. And we’re seeing, we even saw this this morning, I was talking, you know, I’m very well versed at this point in the tax world of crypto.

15:43And so, several people over the last few weeks have been hit up for 2018 2019 and 2020 numbers.

15:51And I would say most of the people that are still around or participating or still have their habits from the 2122 cycle, probably get a knock on their door at some point here would be, I keep my eyes on it.

16:05G, we have our guest today here in the waiting room, I’m going to pull them in.

16:10Let me see if we can do this without any issues. Wow, it worked. Fantastic. Simran, welcome.

16:20I give a light intro on you as basically at the cutting edge of what’s happening in the world of tradfi.

16:27I think you giving a more formal introduction of who you are and what you do and why you do it. It’s great way to just jump into maybe a conversation on the world of tradfi coming into crypto here.

16:39Yeah, no, I appreciate you guys having me on there’s been a follower of the show so it’s nice to actually be able to join on an episode. So my background started off at Goldman on the commodities desk.

16:50I like to joke I got the first white here in my beard when oil went negative, the rest of pretty much come from trading crypto either a little bit in the trenches, or when I was head of DeFi at GSR.

17:00I have the privilege of working with some really smart folks to help build arguably what I would call as our DBA infrastructure. Right. What does this fundamentally mean? It means half of the half of the team is either sat on the buy side or sell side of many repeatable traditional institutions, whether it’s Goldman, whether it’s jump, or sell down what you’re doing. I would love if you could talk about what it was like on the Goldman commodity desk when oil went negative. I was trading equities prop at that time. And I remember that I was like, oh shit, like a lot of people blew the fuck up because like at that point, like nobody thought that like it would go negative. And like, you know, like it went to like negative, I think $30 a barrel or something, right?

18:17It was 32nd 63. Yeah, negative 3763 is where it settled the day before XPRI. It traded down to I want to say negative 60 negative 70 intraday before settling there.

18:27It was probably one of the most like exhilarating times for a young junior analyst on the on the desk, right? It’s trial by fire in the purest sense of the world.

18:37And I remember the head of commodities calling our desk because we were the oil office that’s great. And it’s like, so how much did you guys like make today? What’s the P&L look like? What’s the damage look like? And I’m like, Ed Emerson, who is the head of commodities at the time, I’m like, I don’t feel comfortable telling you this number. And he’s like, well, it’s just a linear desk, right? If all you were trading was linear products like regular futures, it’d be number go up, number go down, you can compute your P&L.

18:59But when you’re trading options, there’s a lot of convexity, there’s a lot of these higher order Greeks, and you have to be like, well, what is the P&L if this thing changes and this thing changes and this thing changes. And all of a sudden, all your models are just breaking. Because the thing that was supposed to float before that zero, suddenly just blew through the roof, right? And vol is trading at like 1000% Optiver have stopped quoting. It’s much easier for me to trade something one year out in the oil forward curve than it is for me to trade something that’s one month out because no market maker wants to get picked off. Right?

19:28And so I’m like, I’m like, I don’t feel comfortable. He’s like, let’s make this easier. Right? More than five is less than five. I’m like more than five. More than 10 less than I’m like more than 20 less than 20. Like probably less than 20. He’s like 15 it ended up being like close to like 18 million after after you count for all the hedges and everything else. But it was one of those days where I’m like, you read about books, you know, about massive trades about macro traders, but then you get to sit in the seat where something that has ever happened in the history of mankind, where Saudi and Russia are entering into a price war and you have a supply overhang that’s happening, you have demand destruction in the form of a global pandemic, all of these things are just converging together at once in unparalleled way. Right? And it’s like, why did Brent not go negative? It’s because it’s Seaborn. Why did WPI or West Texas Intermediate go negative? It’s because it’s landlocked. It goes through pipelines. Right? And so when you have no place to store it, you can’t just store it off the coast of Africa. You need a place to put it in. Like, we don’t know where to put it. People are literally willing to sell it at a negative price to do so. Right. Yeah

20:28I remember like the memes were, you know, like, I’ll fill up my bathtub, I’ll fill up my pool and like, you’ll pay me to take delivery. But yeah, like, do you think like what were probably like the long, because I remember I have a really good buddy of mine that trades electricity a lot in, I think, Urkot, right? So I think that’s like the Texas area. And he was like, trying to buy, he was like, I’m getting long, like not oil, like the commodity, but he was like getting long, like Exxon and all like, you know, all the oil guys.

20:58What do you think were like the long term effects of that? Because like, I feel like that must have brought a lot of supply off because people were just scared of like, you know, to your point, like we were also in the middle of a pandemic. So people are like, where is the how much demand destruction is there? And what do you think we’re like the long term side of it? Because I think like after that, like oil went straight up for like two years, right? Yeah, no, I mean, you’re even seeing the effects of that even now, right? You’re seeing triple digit crude. And it’s funny, because right after 2020, you had this period of consolidation, the head of GSR commodities research was saying, hey, we’re about to enter into this massive commodity super cycle. Whether you look at AI, whether you look at the energy complex, you name it. And then when Russia, Ukraine happened in 2022, that was suddenly right around when I left my role at GST to go and join crypto full time. Like that’s effectively when people were initially calling for triple digit crude, because the market was so under supplied at that time. Right? And so structurally, I would argue that there’s still the geopolitical factor. There’s still

21:58an overwhelming under supply in the market, which is why you’re seeing crude traded where it is right now. Right? It’s not just macro politics. It’s not just geopolitical risks that’s been priced in, in terms of upside call skew. It’s also people saying, hey, like, is there actually enough oil to go around? The short answer is yes. But it’s like, are we actually pulling it out of the ground? Right? That’s the other thing that I think people often forget where it’s one thing to have these massive oil reserves that are sitting there. It’s another thing to be able to pull it out of the ground. Right? You see this with copper every now and then. I think there like, hey, we’re entering into this massive copper shortage over the next few years. And it’s like, people have been saying this for the last 60 years. And every time anyone ever says this, somehow there just happens to be more copper to be able to pull out of the ground and to be able to supply into the market. So I guess like, it’s funny, I like, what do you like, do you follow the copper market very closely? Because like, like, I, you know, like, I mean, fcx is like at all time highs, right? It’s right near all time highs. I think copper is also at all time highs. But to your point, right? Is like

22:58some new technology comes out, somebody finds a new mine deposit, right? Like, all of a sudden that that has an impact on price. Like, what are your thoughts there? I guess on copper, if you have any.

23:09So short answer would be, I mean, COMEX is trading like up 50% year to date. I think it’s very important to always discount from an inflation adjusted perspective. So we are hitting all time highs, even if you look at like the real price, inflation adjusted. But that’s just reacting to the like the current regime of things, right? Obviously, you had these supply chain constraints, anything that was doing the freedom for moves, anything that was being consumed by data centers, etc. Might have been not priced in. But when I look at the overall, like industrial demand, China is like the biggest consumer of copper, but by far, that obviously, you’ve got conductors, any electrical materials that are used in buildings and data centers around AI demand somehow is still relatively marginal compared to that. So even if we are under pricing in the overall shock that AI might have when it comes to copper consumption, I still think there’s sufficient enough supply to be able to more than offset that demand over the next like five to 10 years. Right? I was actually even looking at this last night, where like, right now, I think like, what is it 23 metric tons of this is like produced or something along those lines. And I’m like, this is like a ridiculous amount when you look at the overall history of how much has been produced over the last like 60 years.

24:18Oh, interesting. So yours color of copper here is what you’re saying?

24:22I would be I would be a seller of copper. Sure. I mean, gun to my head. I’m not actively looking at the market. I’m not actively looking at like, where I was reading versus anything else. But I would probably be a seller area.

24:33All right, cool. Well, no, I appreciate you like sharing war stories and stuff. I and I know I definitely would love to, to get into what you’re really focused on over at say and you know, I think like your background and having that background from stratify is really important in understanding, you know, how markets work and how that’s going to port over to crypto, right in general, because I think personally, like I’ve been really excited about what I’ve seen on the tokenization side, especially with like, I think, like, I think that’s a really good thing. I think that’s a really good thing. I think that’s a really good thing. I think that’s a really good stock tokenization and bringing all that stuff on chain and, you know, that 24 hour trading and I think we’re seeing more and more, right? Like you get events happening over the weekend. And, you know, how does that affect, you know, I think last weekend was the AI stuff where AI stocks opened down on Monday because of, you know, all the AI CEOs and, and then there were a couple of headlines this weekend where it seemed like the escalation was going to go up in the Middle East. But, you know, it turned out to be a nothing burger. But like being able to trade

25:3324 seven, I think as a trader personally, I like when I first started to hear about this, I’m like, fuck man, like you’re gonna have to always be on, right? Because like, I think that was always the thing about Friday 4pm. Like, see you Sunday night at six, right? No matter what happens.

25:48Right. You got to pause. You got you can actually live your life.

25:52One of the things I like to joke with some of my colleagues who are still in frat buy and like, you guys still have a close, right? We don’t we don’t have a close. There’s no concept of like at 2 30pm on the oil desk, I would bring a cowbell to be like, okay, energy closes in our marks are in we push settles, you can now price whatever you want to price off of those marks.

26:10We don’t get that benefit in 24 seven markets, right? And even now, the fact that traditional markets are beginning to embrace 24 5.47 just means that effectively people can now more accurately pricing the underlying risk of things, right?

26:23Previously, when let’s say there was something happening on the weekends when traditional assets weren’t being traded on the weekends, right? What would you do to be risk off? You would sell Bitcoin, right? You would sell crypto because it would be only asset class that you could realistically trade. That was like a risk off sentiment in that size, right?

26:37Now you could actually trade Tesla. Now you can actually trade S&P. Now you can actually trade gold and other things over the weekend and actually react to those geopolitical headlines as they unfold. But actually going back to the kind of commodities angle that you were mentioning earlier, one of the things I’m quite interested in is really, how do we give people access, market access to things that they never previously had exposure to, right? So you have a friend that trades electricity.

26:59Right now, if I ask a random josh no off the street, right? Do they have exposure to electricity? They may not think about it, but the answer is yes, right? I’m sitting in a lit room right now. If you’ve ever charged your laptop or charged your phone, we all have exposure to electricity in one form or another. How do we hedge against its price? Right? How do we speculate on it? If you ever want to look at a very volatile asset, I encourage anyone who listens to look at the price chart of Urqop or PJM West and tell me this motherfucker doesn’t move, right?

27:26And so it’s like, how do you actually give people access to that in a market that’s fundamentally evolving to be 24 seven? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to answer with Monica. And that’s why we’re building it.

27:36Yeah, can you please for the viewers that aren’t aware, the relationship of Monica say what you guys are aiming to truly do on top of what you’re building? Because I find it fascinating. And we enjoyed obviously spending time with you in New York for the last few months talking about it.

27:53Yeah, so the orgy story is very much I was head of DFI at GSR in charge of integrating the market maker on a bunch of different DFI platforms. And at some point, you take a step back and say like, what is the next mountain I want to climb? What is the next dragon I want to slay? And the thing I keep coming back to is I really enjoy trading. The best trading infrastructure has always been built by traders for traders with traders, right? Whether you look at FTX, whether you look at Hyperliquid, whether you look at interactive brokers, which was built by people who were originally pit traders back in the commodities days, right?

28:23And so at the end of the day, who better to build for a 24 seven market and for traders who live and embody that 24 seven market than people who’ve done it before. That’s kind of what the genesis of Monica came out to be.

28:35Sing was one of the early believers of Monica gave the original funding and gave the original backing to say, Hey, why don’t you come build it here? We want to be the blockchain built for trading. We want you to be the trading product that sits on top of it.

28:46And so that’s kind of how Monica came about. I happened to meet friends of friends again who come from rather premier institutions. And we said, Hey, why don’t we just put our heads together, come build this. And that’s effectively how Monica came into being. What Monica is fundamentally it’s a central limit order book, spot perps later prediction markets very much focused on RWA’s right?

29:03So of course, we’ll have some crypto assets that are readily available. But the name of the game is how do we fundamentally change access and give people access to markets that they never previously have, right?

29:12Why do SK Hyex, which is a 43 year old company just become accessible to US customers in the world’s largest ADR offering for 23 and a half billion dollars, right? Why did it take 43 years for that to happen? Because of integrated market access, right?

29:27But if you look at the amount of foreign investment in US equities versus US investment in foreign equities, it’s a point to one ratio, right?

29:33So the real question is how do we give people in India, in Korea, in China, and all over the world access to the greatest capital markets in the world, right? That is the problem that we want to fundamentally solve and do for our generation, you know, our generation and next generation, what Robinhood probably did for us, right?

29:50Which is like how do you fundamentally change what the landscape looks like? How do you fundamentally give people access to a market that were previously unable to tap into?

29:58Do you think we see a lot of obviously the dumbed down version that is companies from India, China, these other countries want access to the American capital system.

30:11And Americans are more than ever looking to speculate within the financial sector. It seems like a perfect marriage. What do you think the second order effect of that is where obviously it’s going to happen at this point?

30:26Do you see that feeling more innovation, more finance, more return? Like what do you see happening as that collides?

30:35Yeah, so I think there’s going to be good things that emerge from it and probably not so good things that emerge from it if I’m being very intellectually honest, right?

30:43I think this gives people a chance to, dare I say, escape socioeconomic grounds that they probably couldn’t escape before, right?

30:51If you look at any country that experiences hyperinflation, you’ll see that web adoption tends to be much faster there than in traditional other developed markets.

31:00Why is that? It’s because for these people, this is a chance to, dare I say, escape the permanent underclass as we’ve often joked about online.

31:06So that’s one benefit. And I view that as a massive pro. The other side of that is like, as we begin to see this hyper-financialization of the world, do things become financial instruments that probably shouldn’t be?

31:18Prediction markets are this one thing where it’s like, aren’t prediction markets and sports betting just the same? We could spend the entire day talking about this, right?

31:25If you look at what’s happening with Kalshi and the noise around that, with parlays, how much of the volume is true versus not true, has this truly gained mainstream adoption?

31:32Or is it just all a marketing ploy? That’s not my job to desert.

31:35I would simply say that in a world where you have very simplified payouts, right? Whether they’re binary or whether they’re in perp form, you give people a chance to speculate on markets that they previously didn’t have access to.

31:48But you also then kind of sow the seed for hyper-financialization and kind of removing a lot of other controls that might have previously been in place, right?

31:56Does everything deserve to be a financial market, right? Should I be able to buy and sell life insurance like it’s just any other market?

32:03Should I be able to put a hit out on someone? Probably not, right? Now you enter into moral issues, ethical issues.

32:08Now, obviously, it’s not my job to tell people how to live their lives, but I do think there’s these various edge cases that you have to consider, especially if you want to be a responsible citizen of the world and responsible member of financial markets.

32:21So fascinating. It seems to be a recurring theme that we see culture, ethics and technology more than ever colliding into.

32:31It’s possible. We’re making things possible that were never possible before.

32:34We actually need to. Who’s going to decide how we use this tech or do we draw the line?

32:39Is the politicians or is it the techno lords of America and the globe?

32:47Which is a scary thought to think that at this point, it almost seems like the Elon Musk, the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world are the true leaders versus the politicians in some cases.

33:00But yeah, a fascinating world where we’re going to see, I think, new markets go to new consumers.

33:06And we’ve seen this before, playoff crypto, where the ICO boom, we saw lots of money be made, lots of good stories, but also equally lots of very bad stories.

33:17There will be opportunity galore as this happens.

33:20But it does seem like the SEC, the CTFC are taking action versus Congress, who is kind of not doing much right now.

33:28Can’t agree on much right now.

33:31There’s certainly a bit of an impasse from a political landscape perspective, right?

33:34We’ll see what the midterms bring with them.

33:37I think what’s interesting is you have a precedent that is arguably more active in financial markets than any predecessor.

33:44I think I was looking at it where it’s like Nancy Pelosi, who’s hailed as one of the most successful congressional traders in history, advocates like double digit number of trades per year.

33:55And I think the current president is up to like triple digits, if not quadruple digits.

33:59I think like the number of financial transactions that they have to disclose legally.

34:02And I’m like, how is there not a very clear conflict of interest?

34:06How do we expect anything to get asked in Congress when you have someone at the helm at this rate?

34:12Love the guy, hate the guy. But at the end of the day, like he’s part of a broader system.

34:16And I think you have to respect the fact and understand the fact that, hey, there’s a lot of competing interests here.

34:21And so is this the best representative of the industry?

34:24And if not, what needs to happen in order for us to get there?

34:28Right. Like you would have thought that clarity not passing would have been a massive bear bear event.

34:32That’s clearly not what happened. We’ve just repriced it off and said, hey, this is actually not the end of crypto.

34:37This is maybe just a step back in terms of the U.S. being a home for what we thought would be the next evolution of digital assets in the U.S.

34:46That’s clearly not happening, but now we’re just going to move offshore probably.

34:50Well, I think what what helped with that, right, is the fact that the SEC and the CFTC both were like ready.

34:58You know, they both put out like press releases within 48 hours of being like, hey, we have a set of rules that we’ve been working on and we’ve been waiting.

35:05And boom, here you go. So now it’s like, oh, OK, like you don’t have legislative clarity where it’s like, OK, this is the rule set forever.

35:12But at least you know what the rule what probably the framework of the rules are for at least the next two years.

35:18Right. And I think that’s kind of what helped it.

35:21But to Trump’s credit, I will say, and we’ve discussed it on the show where it’s like if the S&P is down 100 bps at any given day, like he’s on like code red.

35:30You know, like save the market at all costs.

35:33Call Jensen, Jensen on stage. Right. Like, you know, like all this stuff, whatever he can do to save the market.

35:51So, Simran, I do want to touch into specifically what you’re building, where you see where you get the most excitement right now.

36:00And I definitely also want to touch on because we’ve had some conversation and I would love to get this on the show.

36:06And so people can hear about it.

36:07This world of tokenized equities and then tokenized equity pairings that seem to have been maybe not as much right now, but a meta of, you know, slapping a meme coin onto an equity and it being the greatest thing since sliced bread.

36:23Your take there. Let’s just dive into it.

36:26Like, where are you getting the most excitement now?

36:28Where do you see the most innovation that makes you excited for where crypto and equities are going?

36:34Yeah. So there’s, you know, two walls inside of me that are kind of competing.

36:38One is the institutional, like there’s the right way to do things.

36:41And if I ever want BlackRock or Citadel or someone else to hold a tokenized equity, there’s a proper way to do it.

36:48The other one is like, how do we get people who are very short term minded and are very, a very short attention spans into the space to experiment, to try new primitives and see what results from that.

37:03Right. So on the left hand side or the institutional side, right.

37:06One of the things I’m excited to announce is we have a partnership with Denari, which is one of the largest tokenized asset issuers in the world.

37:13I think they’ve tokenized over 700 or so equities.

37:16So every member of the S&P 500 plus more.

37:18And for a lot of the folks in the tokenization space who have raised a lot of money, who have a big brand, I would say Denari is one of the most like underappreciated folks in the space because they’ve actually put the fries in the bag.

37:29They’ve actually tokenized the equities. And the way they’ve tokenized it is by actually making it perry pass you with the stock certificate.

37:35What does that mean? It means that if you actually hold the dshare, you can actually get the dividend deal that you would get if you were holding an actual share in your inactive brokerage account.

37:44Right. It means you actually get the governance right that you would have if you were actually holding the share in your brokerage account.

37:48So from an institutional friendly perspective, I love that because it’s not a trust me bro vibe.

37:53It’s not a SPV vehicle. It’s not a hey, take this additional credit and counterparty risk, which no institution would ever want to take because why would they?

38:01Right. They get less liquidity, less benefits.

38:03Right. So there’s that angle.

38:04The other angle is kind of what’s been happening on, dare I say, Robinhood Chain, where to your point, you’re seeing this pairing of traditional markets with very interestingly named meme coins and seeing a bunch of experimentation happen.

38:15And it’s like, well, why did it take this long for it to happen?

38:19Right. Why did the HIMSS boner pairing have to wait till 2026 to pop off?

38:24And what is really the catalyst that’s caused to happen?

38:28What do you think that is? Yeah, I was going to say, what do you think it is?

38:31I think it’s really the fact that you have a new chain, which has obviously the backing of someone who’s got massive distribution.

38:39Right. I mentioned Robinhood earlier during this conversation because I’m like, when I think about the number of users, I think it’s got over like 30 million funded accounts.

38:46By comparison, I think Hyperliquid has like 1.8 million accounts, but that’s not really users, right?

38:52Because a user can have multiple wallets, but you’ve got like 30 million distinct users that are funded accounts on Robinhood.

38:58So from a distribution perspective, you’ve got a lot more entryway for people to be able to come in, experiment, try new things.

39:05And I think there’s this kind of new meta that’s blossoming where it’s like, well, like, RWAs are no longer a concept that was like, you arrived like four years ago, right?

39:15I started hearing about RWAs literally like three, four years ago when it used to mean risk-weighted assets instead of real world assets.

39:21Right. And now it’s like, hey, literally, you can do so in a very permissionless way.

39:24And so when we think about market access, right, at no point has tokenization been so accessible to people and it’s only going to get continuously more accessible.

39:33But this idea of like pairing it with something that is so central to the ethos of crypto, which is, dare I say, the trenches, which is, dare I say, mean coins, I think is the next kind of natural thing of like, well, what happens if you put this thing, which is meant to be just an enshrined conditional thing with this very mimatic thing together in an AMM and to see what happens.

39:52But it was only a matter of time for this to happen.

39:54It just so happens to happen on a new ecosystem that’s undergoing this renaissance and is called back to, dare I say, the 2020 and 2021 days.

40:04Yeah, it feels like two cultures merging.

40:07It also feels like you have two different communities merging where you have the meme coin community, but you also have like, HIMSS has their own, you know, Reddit, subreddit, where you have people that are, they love HIMSS for whatever reason it might be.

40:22But, you know, you have you’re starting to see this crossover.

40:27And as you mentioned, having these other regions that have companies have startup culture that isn’t as defined as like, you know, the startup culture we have in America.

40:37They want capital. They want the upside.

40:39We have our own community of people of capital that are like, hey, you’re raising for in Chinese, you know, AI startup at a million dollar valuation.

40:49I’m in. Let’s get let’s get involved. There’s upside.

40:52I want to speculate.

40:54Same similar thing happening, I would say, on a different side of the risk curve for for like the HIMSS meme pairings.

41:04I do think probably the most interesting things if you start pairing any of these long tail assets with things like the S&P 500.

41:11Right. And the reason why I find that interesting is if you looked at the performance of the S&P 500, I think it was even last year and parts of this year, obviously like meaningful performance.

41:21But if you compare it to the price of gold, like the S&P actually is not that amazing.

41:26Right. So your your choice of numo rare or your choice of both asset is really what kind of drives how much you value one thing versus another.

41:34Fundamentally. And so if instead of holding this long tail asset, I just want to go towards a flight to quality.

41:41I can say, hey, pair this with Bitcoin and ETH, which is like the flight to quality for digital assets.

41:45Or I can say, hey, now I have a broader choice of things that I can pair this with.

41:49And so if I want to fight quality, maybe it’s the S&P 500.

41:53Or maybe it’s some other index basket, which is typically not as volatile compared to this thing.

41:58So for people who want to be able to do risk on risk off, it’s a much cleaner trade than having to figure out something much more complicated.

42:06Well, I think also to that point, right, is like I’ve been thinking about the psychology of it a lot where you could just as easily like give somebody USD or pair it with USD or whatever.

42:18It’s just there’s something about the psychology of especially like in this meta recently.

42:23So like Quotrons is a project that I’ve been like pretty bullish on.

42:27And you receive the fees as RWA as tokenized stocks in my account when it could just as easily be like USD.

42:36Right. It’s just like it’s delivered as like NVIDIA or SpaceX or whatever.

42:41And I’m like, oh, like I’m, you know, like I’m building my portfolio while I’m speculating in crypto and the psychological thing.

42:50And like there is no psychological difference, right?

42:53Because like when you compare the price of NVIDIA compared to Bitcoin or Ethereum, it’s basically a stablecoin.

42:59Right. And so like when you look at it from that perspective, there’s just something I think that happens psychologically in people’s heads because they’re like, oh, I’m earning this asset that’s like better than a dollar.

43:10Because when you get a dollar, when you get a stablecoin, you’re just like, all right, cool.

43:13Like this is like my dividend and like let me go on.

43:16But at least for me, there’s been something where it’s like, oh, I’m building my portfolio by speculating in meme coins and I’m earning the underlying stock.

43:27You know, like I have like my 1000X moon shoot that like I’m hoping to like retire my bloodline on.

43:34But then also it’s like I’m building out like my safe IRA almost like on chain.

43:39And I think there’s something psychological there that I have found to be really interesting and exploring in this on chain stuff, because we’re basically like redoing DeFi summer.

43:51But instead, like it’s not like a race to sell whatever the reward is.

43:56Right. Because the reward is like a tokenized equity that you’re like, oh, this does this doesn’t go to zero within the next seven days.

44:03So like I don’t need to instant sell as soon as I get my rewards. Right.

44:07And I think that’s a dollar will only ever be worth a dollar.

44:10But a dollar today or an equity could be worth a hundred tomorrow. Right.

44:14Yeah, that’s very true.

44:15How do you see the the speculation environment changing?

44:19Obviously, the meta that we’ve played in crypto and maybe I’ll turn this towards like the crypto world less than the equities for a second.

44:29We’ve had, you know, meme season. I would say we’re seeing like meme equity season right now.

44:37How do you see things progressing? Do you see speculation only continue to be like people want to gamble more?

44:46Or do you see this flight to the index, you know, portfolio baskets, the less volatility, and people like yourself that are like, hey, like, we’re not just trying to bring meme coins into 24 seven trading.

45:00We’re trying to bring anything in so that you have the optionality to choose between how you want to deploy your capital.

45:08Yeah, I would say the large part of new interest will probably be speculative, for better or for worse.

45:17And I think that is a byproduct of one, the current like inflationary market, right?

45:22There’s a reason why, again, people are willing to take 40 to one odds on on random things or look for their next 100x for 1000x or sometimes it’s escaping their economic situation.

45:33Sometimes it’s just for the utility of it, but both are just mechanisms for speculation, for lack of a better word.

45:39I do think for institutional adoption flow, you will begin to see more probably structured products, index products begin to emerge.

45:46But then you’re kind of meeting like two different ends of the spectrum.

45:49And I think the hope and expectation for anyone building in our space is that we can help bridge both together, right?

45:55And one one time example I like to give is yield max. Yield max itself is a regulated ETF product.

46:02All they do is covered calls. They’ve got about eight to ten billion dollars in assets under management.

46:07Anyone who’s been in crypto since 2020 may or may not have heard of DOVs, decentralized optimals.

46:13What are those? They’re just covered calls. Right? It’s the same exact strategy.

46:16And so it’s like whether you’re doing it as a risk management tool, whether you’re doing it as a yield generation tool, both both sides of the aisle are using the same exact instrument.

46:25The real question becomes how do we help bridge people who are trying to hedge with people who are trying to speculate?

46:31And I think the biggest kind of divergence is typically your time horizon, right?

46:35People who are hedging. If I put on my oil trading turbine, the oil producers are hedging a year out, two years out.

46:41Oil refiners are hedging a year out, two years out versus people who are speculating are probably speculating for the next few days, few hours, few weeks, few months at most.

46:50And so I think the biggest kind of divergence and what makes it difficult to help bridge the gap between speculators and hedgerators in the digital space is really your time horizon.

47:00And I think until we begin to see that shift, it’s going to be hard to build for that convergence.

47:05But my hope is that will never be to get back.

47:08Well, like, but to that point, I will say that, like, I feel like all, let’s say even commodity markets, a lot of these markets, right, they start off with naturals that need to hedge and then speculators will come in because they’re like, oh, well, I like, you know, I like the long term fundamentals of copper.

47:24So like, I’m willing to buy it, right. And it’s like, but I think like all these markets, to your point, it’s like you need to, I think, build both ends of the barbell here because the naturals need the hedgers, need the speculators, right?

47:37Because where else are they going to get that liquidity from? Because, you know, Exxon probably has the same worldview that Chevron does.

47:43So like, you know, they’re not going to be selling to each other, but you need those speculators on the other side to be like, OK, like prices low enough that I’m willing to take on the risk, right?

47:52So, you know, I think that convergence does happen over time. It’s just I think, I think on the natural side of things, they’re much more, they’re much more cognizant of the regulations, right?

48:05And so because they are all regulated entities, whereas, you know, Joe Sixpack with, you know, $1,000 in his interactive brokers, or his crypto wallet is like, yeah, whatever.

48:17And they’re not going to be able to sell the money. And so they don’t necessarily worry about the regs as much as, you know, the big guys do.

48:25So I think once that, once we get that, I think that’s where like that convergence will start to come.

48:31Okay. Do you think about, and again, this is coming up, I had a very interesting conversation last night in D.C. talking about technology and AI, etc.

48:43I mean, I think it’s been a little bit of a convergence. One thing that’s been on my mind is this idea of like, how do we see a trading platform?

48:53What is their responsibility in the idea of like convergence of a consumer taking a trade because another person has done it social trading?

49:02What’s your take? What’s Monica? Is Monica entering the social trading space? Are you just trying to provide the instruments as like a building platform?

49:12Like, hey, where can I see other people trading?

49:20So I think there will be some social elements to what we build, but at its core, I would say the, when I think about the ideal customer profile for Monica, it’s really myself, right?

49:31Like I’m building a product that I myself would use.

49:33And as a byproduct, I would say it’s probably for someone who’s a bit more of a prosumer, someone who’s actually managing a portfolio of positions, as opposed to entering a single position.

49:42Someone who actually thinks about like market microstructure, who thinks about maker versus taker orders. Someone who, whose average trade size is probably not the same average trade size as someone who’s purely in the trenches, but who does have a view that is like driven by a customer, who’s not trading or who does have multiple agents, ones doing fundamental research, ones doing technical research, and they can put a trade thesis together and then execute it in a very cost efficient way.

50:06Right? That, that for me is the ideal customer profile. So we will have certain social elements of it. Part of that actually comes to our asset listing process. And I think we kind of discussed this last time you were in New York very briefly, and I’m happy to go into some details.

50:19Happy to do so. So if I take a step back, when we look at the landscape of like what it takes to list the market, right, and I mean like actually list one, not just be a launchpad, but to have meaningful liquidity and microstructure behind it.

50:33If I go to, for example, a leading venue like Hyperliquid, you need to be have 500k hype to be a proper deployer, right? I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t have what is it $80 million or whatever the current prevailing price is.

50:45Align around in my couch cushions, unfortunately, neither do my friends, right? And if I want to list something on a centralized exchange, I have to go take a listing manager out to dinner, convince him this will be good for him and be good for the exchange, etc, etc.

50:58And then I have to go convince a market maker to say, hey, why don’t you pony up your cost of capital balance sheet and actually quote here, I promise it’ll be worth it.

51:06That sounds like a very painful exercise all around. And so one of the things that we do at Monaco is we want to circumvent that and have this be a platform that is very driven by active traders and opinionated traders, right?

51:17How do we solve that? Well, if I take a step back and say, for a platform, what is the most interesting or most useful metric, right? Ideally trading fees is a pretty useful one, right?

51:27Volume can be, but obviously maker versus taker volume can be very different. And you can have a lot of takers that match with one or two makers. And so for me, the most interesting thing is what is the amount of fees that you’ve paid on a platform?

51:39What we say is your fees map to what we’ll call an activity score. Anyone with an activity score beyond a certain threshold can propose a market on Monaco completely for free, up to two markets at a time, let’s say.

51:51And the benefit of this is so no one tries to claim every market at once, similar to kind of what’s happened with the trade XYZ narrative on the HIV ecosystem.

52:00When someone proposes a market, they also give what we’ll call an indication of interest, which is how much activity do I expect to do in this market over, let’s say, the next 60 days.

52:09We take all of those up, add them up together, work with our network of market makers, Oracle providers to be able to facilitate this. Now, a few things.

52:17When we take into account your indication of interest, we prioritize how much activity you’ve done on the platform before rolling 30 to 60 day window. Why?

52:25Because I want to value someone who’s quite active in the ecosystem more than someone who just has an opinion because opinions are free.

52:32They’re like assholes. Everyone’s got one, right? So we want to prioritize people who are active opinionated.

52:37Two, what is the benefit of proposing a market outside of just being able to trade in it?

52:41Well, if you propose a market and you deliver the volume, we effectively give you revenue share coming from the taker fees of that market in perpetuity as long as that market doesn’t get to you listed.

52:51Why? Because you were early, you proposed the market, you were active, you held up your side of the bargain.

52:56We want to make sure that you’re properly incentivized for being an early adopter and early mover in the space.

53:00Three, I can now take this indication of interest to any set of liquidity providers and say, hey, you were worried about justifying the cost of capital.

53:08Now I can give you actual indicative demand for how much demand there is for this given market. Right.

53:12Or how do I keep people honest and hold them accountable? Well, if you said you were going to trade X amount of volume, you ended up going next nothing.

53:20We effectively slashed your activity score. And the only way to improve that is by either trading more volume on the platform, generating more fees or by proposing another market and actively trading on it.

53:30Right. So what this fundamentally does is say, hey, you don’t have to have a hundred million dollars or 50 million dollars who’d be able to propose a market.

53:37If you’re active and you’re opinionated and you’re early, you get to propose this market and you get to reap the rewards of it.

53:43And it can be very trader driven process. Right. We can take care of the market makers. We can take care of the infra.

53:48We want you as a active member in the ecosystem to tell us what you want to trade, when you want to trade, how you want to trade it. Right.

53:54So the way I envision this happening is obviously we’ll initially launch with 30 to 40 markets.

53:59Then from there, we want to have trading groups and trading networks say, what did they fundamentally want to trade?

54:04Why do they want to trade it and work with us to help facilitate this in a very active way?

54:10It’s a very unique approach. We have not seen this almost like foreign board-esque way of launching new venues to or new assets to trade.

54:22It’ll be exciting to watch that play out. I love that you’re democratizing this instead of selling to the highest bidder or selling to the wealthiest bidder.

54:33I mean, I feel like first of all, like the solution is very elegant, but I feel like this is kind of what HYPE was trying to say they wanted to build. Right.

54:43Like they want like they were like, oh, we’re going to democratize access. But now it’s a whale game. Right.

54:48And so to your point, this is I think this is one of those things where it’s like you can build the market as long as there’s demand there.

54:54And you’re committed to doing volume and stuff too. Right. So it’s very interesting.

54:59And the other thing is like I effectively want to disintermediate the role that trade XYZ or any of these other deployers were doing and say, hey, why don’t we just have the traders who are at the other end of this trade be the ones that are actively proposing markets?

55:12You don’t actually need a middleman. You can simply have people who are active who are trading millions of dollars say, hey, I want to trade electricity perps, build this electricity perps, or facilitate this. It’s our job to facilitate.

55:25Maybe I’ll play a little bit of like the bad guy in the room here. Not even but like, I’m sure there are people that are thinking right now, everything’s going to be on chain.

55:34Like, why not? Like, why do people have to decide? Is this just a disconnect of like, well, there’s not enough money to go around liquidity.

55:41Like, we can’t just like list everything day one. You have to choose it. Is that is that the reasoning for that approach of still like choosing, like letting people choose?

55:52So it’s more driven by the fact that on day one, we’re probably not going to have 100 market makers and not like, you know, we’re not going to have 100,000 daily active users on day one. Right. So as the protocol scales up, I want the roadmap of it to be driven by people who have a vested interest in seeing the protocol succeed.

56:09Right. And so fundamentally, right, depending on what narrative is playing out in the broader market, that fundamentally drives what market becomes interesting, right?

56:17People weren’t talking about trading oil on HIV three markets until the Iran conflict broke. Right. People weren’t really talking about trading memory, or you can pre IPO markets before there were certain catalysts that brought mainstream attention to them.

56:30And now all of a sudden, people wanted to trade those things, right? So there is a cyclicality to this and not because not every market will be equally interesting to all market participants at every single time.

56:40And we simply want you to be driven by people who do want to trade in that market and want the incentive for doing so.

56:50Fascinating. So if all of a sudden, Canadian maple syrup was like the hottest market in the world and everybody wanted to trade everything around maple syrup.

56:58And they were like, Hey, listen, Monica, we need maple syrup markets.

57:03Let’s get you some maple syrup, buddy.

57:05I love it.

57:07Let’s get you some Canadian maple.

57:09It’s so funny.

57:11I mean, you basically just need an Oracle, right? That’s basically all you need.

57:16Also, what does it take to list the market? It takes an index price. It takes a bid and it takes an offer. That’s it. Right.

57:22So by virtue of our distributed network of Oracle providers, we feel pretty confident that we can list in most markets.

57:28Now, obviously, there’s always going to be something far more esoteric that takes a little bit of time. But again, that can be demand driven, right?

57:34If we have a bunch of people that want to trade that market, we’re more than happy to help facilitate it and prioritize that with our network of Oracle providers.

57:42I guess so, like, just a question, because I’ve been going down, like, the rare earth element markets and these markets are miniscule, right?

57:51Especially compared to traditional gold and silver and copper.

57:58I guess, like, the issue then becomes, right? Like, let’s say there’s like some the equivalent of like a London fix that comes in like every day as the strike price.

58:07But then as let’s say, like, how do you keep the market honest? Right? Because like the thing that keeps the market honest in physical markets or I guess in the paper physical markets is that you have to take delivery at some point. Right.

58:19Like, how would you be able to keep it honest if let’s say there’s some small rare earth element that people wanted to do? And let’s say it’s trading at whatever $1,000 a kilogram in the equivalent of the London fix.

58:34But like, how do you like, how do you like, keep that honest so that it doesn’t like drift away? And it’s just kind of like people because I feel like we’ve seen that a little bit on the privates. Right.

58:44Where it’s like they just like go out of whack because there’s really nothing like to hedge it back down to to parody.

58:50Yep. So the choice of market making participants that we have is also driven by people who dare I say are very active in RWA markets. Right.

58:59And when I saw RWA markets, I mean, the actual underlying markets, right? People who are actually trading on the LME, actually trading on the CME.

59:06And can dare I say internalize the risk. There’s a slew of folks that are out there that are tourists in the states that say, hey, we can trade this as long as listed on another decentralized exchange.

59:15For me, that’s less interesting because I’m like, that just means someone else has to list that market before us. I want people who are one, willing to actually personalize the risk to can actually warehouse the risk.

59:24And three, if it’s physically driven, be able to offer to either in the physical market or in the paper market in a very meaningful price.

59:30So that’s from the choice of market participants that we have. But then on the other side, we’re also baking to account different aspects of market microstructure that we can leverage from the likes of CME.

59:41Right. The number of times I’ve heard the phrase hogs are limit up or limit down because the price of the underlying futures market moves more than x percent, which caused them to go limit up or limit down to halt trading is more times than I can clearly count.

59:53Right. This is what I was sitting on the desk with Goldman.

59:55And so we can take into account those same things of limit up, limit down circuit breakers to make sure that the price is not diverged too far from where the underlying market price should be as a function of where the fixed income is.

1:00:07Great. There’s all these lessons that we can genuinely take from TradFi and then adapt for 24 seven world rather than having to recreate the wheel every single time.

1:00:19Yeah, that is the benefit. That’s the benefit of coming from that background.

1:00:23Yeah. Yeah. And I would say you’re certainly in a better position than something like myself who does not come from a TradFi background where if you’re like figure this out, I’m sure I would come up with something that would not work because I because there already is a system that works that you’ve lived and you’ve seen you.

1:00:38You even know probably the shortfalls to some of that where if you were to tweak it, you would know how to tweak it correctly.

1:00:46Well, it’s like there’s many solutions. There’s many ways to skin the cat with many solutions. I think the question is like what is the solution that is most appropriate given where we are in terms of market evolution and who are going to be the first 100 or 1000 people that are going to be trading this.

1:00:59Right. At the end of the day, like there’s 8 billion plus people in the world. Do I think there’s, you know, every 8 billion person can be trading on every platform in the world. Probably not.

1:01:06Well, and so this is a byproduct of also knowing your audience. And if I happen to be my own audience, if I’m building for traders like myself, we can speak a very similar language and build around that, I think.

1:01:16Yeah. Well, Kalshi might report they have 8 billion traders but I’ll leave that for the CFTC to decide.

1:01:28Yeah, I think that’s it. Anything else here? Simran, like I said, I always love talking with you because it’s such a high intellectual level for tradify, meeting, crypto. I love it.

1:01:40Gee, what do you got? Anything that you want to ask Simran before?

1:01:45No, I think this is a very interesting combo. I know when we met in New York, you know, we had the same type of combo and just kind of your view and I thought it was very interesting.

1:01:56I think that I’m really looking forward to what you guys are building.

1:02:00Thank you so much. If you guys are in token would love to catch up there. Otherwise, I’ll see you when I’m back.

1:02:05Yeah, of course, man. And maybe before you jump off a hard shill for where to find you where to find what you guys are building and how to get in touch.

1:02:15Awesome. Yeah. So we launched public testnet we’ve done over I think what the $9 billion of testnet volume without any incentives we’d have order for 180,000 accounts registered.

1:02:25So feel free to check it out at trade.zeroxmonico.com or you can go find us at Monaco trading on x. My Twitter handle is I think zero x urban urban, which is also friendly enough my telegram handle so easy to find me there.

1:02:39And I appreciate you jumping on such a pleasure, such a great conversation so many people messaging me saying this was an incredible combo as well.

1:02:49We’ll stay in touch. And again, just thank you.

1:02:52Thank you so much, guys. Thank you for coming on.

1:02:57Wow. I’m, I’m, I feel like I’m back in college. The last 24 hours of conversations have had have been so high level.

1:03:08Like very, very cutting edge very like on on the things that are going to actually matter over the next 12 months for the financial landscape at the highest level like we’re talking like multi billion dollar decisions, industries colliding with retail.

1:03:28And it’s kind of crazy to think that if we had any of these headlines back in 2000 and 19, 2020, Bitcoin would be at a million dollars like we would see like we would have just like the craziest, craziest gains when some of these headlines were coming out.

1:03:46And I think that’s just a function of where we are in the market, you know, we’re at the beginning of a bull market.

1:04:09So I don’t know. I think the froth will come. But yeah, I mean, I think honestly, like it’s interesting.

1:04:15I think I said the same thing after I went to Art Basel, where, you know, NFTs and crypto art artists basically stole the show at zero 10. And if that had happened in 2021, people would have lost their shit like we, you know, it happened five years later.

1:04:35And like nobody cared. So it’s the same thing. I think it’s just a function of where we are in the cycle.

1:04:42I’m sorry. Maybe I’m reaching a little bit too much there. I do want to make sure we cover your trades that you mentioned before the show.

1:04:51Yeah. I know where we’re going over. We’re over an hour now. But like I want to kind of go over a couple things from the weekend on the macro side where Meta, Meta Muse really started picking up over the weekend.

1:05:08So, Gapta, oh, I guess it opened down and then just went straight up yesterday. All time high yesterday, all time high today.

1:05:17I think the implications of this are, you know, one is I think Intel also Intel and AMD also were on a rocket yesterday. Yeah. And, you know, maintaining that right of because, you know, and I’ve been like saying, I’ve been saying this now for a couple months that when you use these agents, like, like the man for compute and inference is going to go through the roof because you’re going to start using it for, hey, like right now I think people generally use AI for what’s the weather? Where should I go?

1:05:51What should I pack for my picnic? Right? Like stuff like that. But then the next step is buy the stuff for the picnic. Right? Like, and make sure it arrives before I go on my picnic.

1:06:06And that requires not only GPUs for inference, but also CPUs because you need like a local CPU in order to do this stuff.

1:06:17You do an actual processing at that point.

1:06:19Yeah. To do the actual process. And so this is where I think, you know, Meta really caught a bid because it was the first, let’s say like consumer grade, where you didn’t need to be very technical at all in order to utilize this stuff. And like, basically people were saying this is like reskinned open cloth for like normies. And I think one of the things that I saw is that people are starting to get scared is like what Meta’s showing you.

1:06:46I think, I think it was Ben Thompson that might have written it is that, and he’s the founder of Strattery, which is a great like tech forward podcast. The guy’s like a brilliant mind.

1:06:59I don’t listen to his stuff as often as I should, but like, I love his stuff whenever whenever I do listen to him talk.

1:07:06And I think he was the one that said how it’s kind of showing that you don’t need frontier level intelligence to have really capable AI agents, right? Because Muse is not front, you know, Meta is not frontier level, but it’s really starting to catch people by storm.

1:07:21It has access to all your Facebook stuff, your Instagram.

1:07:25So it has memory becomes, in my opinion, and this, I think I believed it, but I don’t think I index as hard as I did. After last night in the conversations I had, the way AI was laid out is essentially if you have this database of just everything about you, everything you’ve done, everything you’ve thought, everything you’ve said, and then even the relation.

1:07:50And the example is maybe stop thinking about this as like, you and I are both single males, right?

1:07:58We aren’t thinking about this as like a mother of like two kids who’s like, ah, like little Joey got sick last week and he ate this food and we ordered this and this is what we ate from our fridge.

1:08:09And you know, he was has been playing soccer and he heard his ankle this way. When she goes through the doctor, what does that actually look like when she’s using AI, and that AI is basically becoming a memory machine of like here’s all the context, everything I have, boom, can provide something that a doctor and she knows like little things that might not even be in there.

1:08:31But like that requires so much storage that I think that I think as much as you’re like, hey, compute matters right now, the memory side is going to become just exponentially more needed.

1:08:44And that’s only for, you know, ones and zeros and data. Think about this when it’s photos and videos, we have video context.

1:08:50And I think even meta now is in a great position of they have all of this data about what have you posted? What have you said? What if what images do you have? Who are your friends? What’s your social graph look like?

1:09:01And they know how to do this to make it, dare I say, addictive, right? Like coming out of the all in podcast, they literally front confronted the head of I guess she was the head of AI or head of consumer at meta.

1:09:16And I mean, like, look, you got just got fined $17 billion for making addictive item platform and engagement stuff for kids.

1:09:26Aren’t you just going to do the same thing for AI this cute little muse character make kids addicted to to using muse.

1:09:34I dare I say I feel like they’re going to go down that route again, I’m just making things addictive to use in some way that and using like your memories to make it feel like it’s the best experience possible.

1:09:48That’s why I don’t want to move off of anthropic right now is because it has all of my contacts.

1:09:54So that’s why I have everything stored on my Mac Mini. And I want everything done on my Mac Mini because that is my central brain. And I can plug and play whichever model I see fit at any time. So it’s like, I do a lot of stuff on rockpot, like that’s my quick stuff, you know, I’ve gone through my stack like multiple times.

1:10:15And I’m like, you know, when I want to do like really strong work or, you know, get some opinions on technical stuff or stuff that’s more difficult, I’ll fire up Astra and stuff like that.

1:10:25And so I’m just like model agnostic. And I think the whole the whole reason why I haven’t been using muse and I mess around with muse a little bit over the weekend is because I don’t want to like set this up and have port my memory on there and then be like, okay, when the next one comes out, that’s better.

1:10:42I need to move over to there. So, you know, I’ve been I know I’m in the minority on this. I think most people want that ease of use of like, hey, I just like plug it in and it works. And I think that, you know, meta I think rock has also done it like I think x to Elon’s credit is has done it maybe it might be a little more technical, but for sure, like I definitely think that, you know, this is very interesting times, right?

1:11:07And I want to highlight news that came out yesterday that led to me putting on a trade that I put on yesterday afternoon and I tweeted about it was so Amazon blocked access to the meta muse agents yesterday because they said they didn’t have any They didn’t have a deal in place or they didn’t have permission or whatever. So they blocked access to meta muse to buy stuff on Amazon. So I looked at that and I’m like, huh, like who’s the only person that I think are the only company that I think can actually compete with Amazon at scale, it’s Walmart.

1:11:45And I you know, Walmart has a very different type of business than Amazon does. And I’m like, this is like a great way if I’m like Walmart in the C suite at Walmart, it’s like, hey, how do you get some of that AI multiple and become like an AI company is like, you know, partner with somebody like like meta and be like, hey, Amazon won’t let your agents shop on their site.

1:12:06Guess what, we have the same low prices because like it in in terms of competition, like, I think the only real business that can compete with Amazon in terms of cost and speed is Walmart. Right. And so, you know, like I know Shopify and meta made an announcement yesterday afternoon, where, you know, Shopify was going to integrate with meta news agents.

1:12:29And use agents. That’s great and all but those are like, I think more small businesses. When I’m buying toothpaste or socks or deodorant. I don’t care if I buy it from Amazon or Walmart. I want I want it as fast as possible as cheap as possible.

1:12:44So I kind of think, you know, I bought some September I bought calls for one year out on the bet that am that Walmart doesn’t stay asleep at the wheel here. You know, it’s it’s gapping up a little bit today. But also, it’s, you know, it’s had a pullback from the highs.

1:13:05And I think it’s got like a nice little setup if it does end up becoming like a retail AI play. Some multiple goes into that, right? I think this gap down was divided to guess was from earnings. Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, I I’m like, yeah, it’s not a big position. But I do think that this is a position that could run, right? Like, you know, I think if it’s going to work, it should probably start working in the next couple weeks. Management will start talking about it. I think other, you know, investors and analysts will probably start talking about it as well. But I just was like, Oh, I think that’s like a very interesting read through from all of this is like, if Amazon’s not going to embrace, you know, because technically, Amazon, I’m sure Amazon’s also working on their own AI agent type of thing, you know, Alexa shopper, right? Or like, whatever it is to make the experience better and using Amazon. So that’s also why they probably don’t want meta utilizing their site, as well as, you know, the Amazon’s going to be like, oh, I think that’s like a very interesting read through from all of this is like, if Amazon’s not going to embrace it, because I’m sure they make a ton of money off advertising and upselling and all this stuff. So I don’t know, I thought this was interesting. I thought the setup was interesting. So I bought some calls. I also want to highlight before we go of Leopold, our homie, like, looks like he’s starting to print, right? Like, he bought a lot of like short dated calls, I think he has the Micron thousand dollar calls. And you know, I mean, this thing looks like it’s getting ready to go.

1:14:36Yeah, you know, Nvidia, well, NBIS, also, like, this is my very technical reverse head and shoulders, right? We kept like that right shoulder so far. And, you know, I think, you know, we break down that trend line above 260 should start going higher. And then where is Nvidia? And video back close towards like post earning highs. You know, this is like kind of what I was saying on the show is like, you know, Leopold probably had that information was like, Oh, this is crazy bullish bought a lot of short dated calls the market like all those all three of those stocks market gap down last Monday has since recovered and is above the highs from before the gap down. And people are turning bullish on AI again, right on the agent thesis, which we’ve been discussing.

1:15:29And I think, you know, we’ve been pounding the table on for the last couple months of like, like the next wave of exponential demand is AI agents. Yeah. And now I think the market’s starting to catch up to that. Right. And for me, it has half felt like it’s played out already because it’s such a normal use for me, like it’s like isn’t everybody doing this and then it’s it’s crazy to realize that nobody is nobody is. And then I think like, you know, I know that these numbers at the beginning of the year were something like less than 1% of people like pay for AI. And I think now it’s like still like 3% of users like pay for AI. So the fact that like, I don’t know how many subscriptions you pay for. But I’m on like three, I’m on four Mac subscriptions. And yeah, like I don’t utilize all of it at this point. But yeah, I mean, it just, I don’t know, I think it’s just very interesting. It’s like the trade is still, in my opinion, decently early. I think there’s a lot of like political stuff that’s obviously coming down the road. Anthropic, open AI, they’re all playing Game of Thrones and trying to like control the fate of the world. We’ll see how that turns out. But I do think at the end of the day, we’re still, you still want to be long compute, right?

1:16:53I get used to I want to be long these names. And you know, I still feel fairly comfortable holding all of these names. And like I said, last Monday, on that gap down, I was like, do I sell some of that risk? Do I not? It’s like, I’ll give it, you know, a little bit to see if new information comes out. And you know, like, I don’t know, I feel I still feel very comfortable. Right? You know, now, I earning season will be starting in about probably three weeks for Q3 earning season. And, you know, all eyes on that. And I’m not I’m not I got to look at when Micron reports, but it might be pretty soon. So yeah, I mean, yeah. And then like, you know, I just want to cover like crypto, in general. You know, I got hit up by a couple people yesterday, asking like, what was up with that move? And I was like, dude, I just think that like, people were overly bearish going into clarity act. And then the Fed raising rates, and then they said, you know, like, it wasn’t as bad as it feared. And, you know, like, we rallied. And then also, I think clarity from the CFTC and the SEC in terms of like, we’re going to do something. They’re doing the job of Congress, and they’re basically stepping in and being like, you know, hold my beer, I’ll do it for you if you can’t like that. I love that. Yeah. And so like, I was like, it’s just like, I think a continuation move where people were digesting that over the weekend. And, you know, risk comes back on.

1:18:23And I’m sure part of it is, you know, it’s outperforming gold. So I mean, gold looks like it’s ready to go too. So I feel like any given day, we’re going to walk in and gold will be up like, you know, three or 4%. You know, rates hanging out near 5%. Not great. Looks like it’s getting ready to go higher. I would say this, I would buy, I would be buying this chart. Yeah. Dollar, dollar looks like it’s getting a little stronger.

1:18:51Yeah, I mean, I just, again, like I think, at this point, right, I feel like all eyes are on the midterms. And Trump is going to do whatever he can to win and to do whatever is needed to see how many seats he can save.

1:19:16And that’s probably bose well for the markets short term. So.

1:19:21I’m like, I’m bullish right here. It feels better than ever to be not only in the equities market, but the crypto market.

1:19:28I’m.

1:19:30Oh, that’s another one. Look at this. Oil down a lot.

1:19:34Oil’s down. I think we see the, you know, I couldn’t see it. But then we had Iran come out this morning. And they’re like, if the US backs off, it’ll take us seven days to open up the straight-up homo-sauce.

1:19:46Again, this kind of posturing one, I low-key hate it because it’s like Iran being like, oh, the only reason we can’t open this is because of the United States.

1:19:59What also, I think that it’s going to take some time for them, probably clear some landmines that they’ve or like sea mines that they put out.

1:20:07But it does seem like this narrative of like, hey, this is how we open everything back up and go back to normal happens.

1:20:16It’s starting to crack out. And more than ever, it feels like resolution could possibly happen.

1:20:24I don’t know. You said this last week. I was such a hater on it, but I see it starting to play out a little bit.

1:20:30Yeah. I mean, like, that’s what I said last week, right? All you need is a de-escalation in Iran.

1:20:35And it’s off to the races, right? And like, we see oil down whatever, 10-ish percent in three, four days.

1:20:44And if there’s further de-escalation, this thing probably hits 80 or maybe even lower.

1:20:50And so I think to me, that’s like an upside surprise, right? Where it’s like, okay, now, if oil, obviously, the lower oil goes, the less inflation becomes a worry, right?

1:21:02And so then that sets the table for going from, oh, we have to hike more over the next 12 months to, hey, we can actually start easing because inflation is softened.

1:21:13And risk assets go boom.

1:21:16And we’ve said it a bunch of times on the show where Trump is a stock market president.

1:21:22He probably has alerts every whatever, 100 points on the S&P up or down to see what’s happening.

1:21:30And for better or worse, that’s like the type of president that we have.

1:21:34And you kind of have to play for that, right? And so I think he knows what he’s doing in terms of like capital markets and knowing how that affects his chances at winning in the midterms.

1:21:47So, yeah, we’ll get midterms still a heavy topic of attention as we get closer to them.

1:21:54But this morning, all numbers look good. Everything looks exciting.

1:21:59You were long into today’s open. I’m sure you’re quite happy.

1:22:04Anything else you’d go over G today that you haven’t touched on?

1:22:10No, I think we covered most of it. There’s probably like one or two other things we’ll probably end up covering on Thursday.

1:22:18But yeah, we went a little longer than I thought we would. But yeah, overall, great episode.

1:22:25A great episode. Fantastic guest. Again, thank you to Cimarron.

1:22:31And yeah, I think we’re going to have a lot to talk about come Thursday.

1:22:36And probably, in my opinion, my projection here is that we’re probably going to see the entire AI sector significantly higher about that show.

1:22:46And if I’m doing anything after the show, I’m probably buying Micron.

1:22:51All right. Cool. I love it. I love to hear it. I’m still I’m still very long Micron.

1:22:58Oh, hopefully we’re both richer on Thursday show as well. That would be the best the best case for all of us.

1:23:07But gee, another great show. Thank you.

1:23:11I also want to highlight, you know, as we’re as we’re bouncing, you know, we’re on YouTube, we’re on Spotify, Apple podcast, X, getting all those things up and running and those accounts going so like follow us wherever you know you listen to podcasts or whatever your preferred podcasting platform is.

1:23:33And feel free to give us some feedback.

1:23:36I feel like I’ve been like pretty happy with our numbers. So, you know, I think that we’re growing steadily and looking forward to to building this into something bigger.

1:23:46You have this morning 2.3 thousand listeners or viewers on X. Incredible. One of the top shows.

1:23:55Follow and a retweet mean the world to us. So thank you.

1:23:59If there’s ever anything that you want to see us do talk about get in touch.

1:24:02We do not take your participation in the show for granted and it means a lot to us.

1:24:10All right. Yeah, awesome.

1:24:12Yep. With that said, we will catch you on Thursday 1030 a.m. Eastern time. Same place.

1:24:18Same topic. Same great content.

1:24:22See you then. Cheers, everybody. Peace.