Tokenized Stocks, My Recent Trade Wins, Fake War Headlines, Robert Leshner Interview, $200M Crypto Hack - Threadguy: May 6th, 2026

Threadguy opens with the easiest trades being the best ones, ties it to a Market Wizards zen-monk excerpt, then lays out why every influencer is about to pivot to financial content. He walks through how Walter Bloomberg got him at 4am with a fake Iran-war-over headline, why he's holding his Zcash trade through the chop, and brings on Compound founder Robert Leshner. Leshner gets into the Compound exploit lore, why he left to start Superstate, and how every product gets a Napster era before grandma uses it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:04

Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Yo, what the fuck is good? How y'all doing? How y'all feeling? How are you all living? It is a beautiful Wednesday. It feels so good to be back. The market's up. SP new all-time high. Bitcoin somehow still over 81, despite the number one, maybe number two, close to number one holder saying I want to sell. I mean, I don't know. There's motion everywhere. Motion on my Zcash, motion on the on the Pavel Durov coin. There's motion on whatever garbage you hold is probably going up. If it's not, you probably shouldn't hold it for much longer. We got a sick stream today. We have Robert Lesnar, OG, coming on in like an hour and 15 minutes. And we're gonna shoot the shit until then. We got Chris Camillo next Wednesday. We got uh maybe Mike Novogratz next Tuesday. We got Airmas. My GOAT just told me he's down. Uh look, man, I don't know what to tell you. Like, God's looking out for me right now. It's awesome. It's fucking awesome. We have so much to cover. We have market closed in 15 minutes. We have Ryan Cohen going on a god run, scorched earth for eBay right now. We have, I don't know, war updates. War is over. It's not over. New SP, all-time high. I got my first two topics today are crypto resurgence and crypto macro, which is unbelievable. We have Korean stocks, new ATH, circuit breakers everywhere. Leshner OG, if you don't know him, he's like the godfather of DeFi. It's just like life's awesome, man. I don't know what to tell you. Life's awesome. Is I had this whole rant yesterday to Tulip King and DNA and Malcolm, where I was saying that the easiest trades in my like the best trades in my life were the easiest. And I don't exactly know why that is, but it always feels like the trades where you're really like like as much as I like to glorify trading like it's war, the trades that feel like war are the worst ones every time. And so I was glorious I was I had this convo last night on our stand-up or whatever with Mount with our team, and I was just talking about how it felt like the best trades were the smoothest. And then I'm reading this book, Market Wizards, and there's this whole excerpt about this trader who is the only guy who has ever told Jack Schwager you cannot use my interview because it's too much alpha. But he let him keep like three paragraphs, and the whole paragraphs are about how this guy is this like Zen monk, and how trading should be like shooting a bow and arrow with the with where the arrow like shoots itself and he goes in this whole ramp, but it's pretty crazy. I just like opened to I just opened up random pages and just read, and it was exactly the conversation I was having, and it was pretty fascinating to read it. Is there's really not that many good traders in the history of the world, like there's not it's it's relatively small group, all things considered, and so they all like connect. And so I'm reading this market wizards, and he's referencing guys who I read about in the More Money Than God, who's referencing people that I read about in the other. It's pretty sick, and you know, I'm obsessed with the pits, and so my favorite trader right now, who I didn't even know who he was two weeks ago. My favorite trader right now is Paul Tudor Jones. He's a dream guest on the stream, and I read this one excerpt, it's one page I want to read exit fire. You know, I love the pits so much, right? I'm obsessed with the pits, and I'm thinking about it, I'm like, damn, the pits like in the 80s. It's like that's like 50 years ago, and a lot of these guys are old, a lot of these guys are in their 70s. If they were young back then, they're in their 70s, 80s. I've never interviewed a pitch trader, and I don't know how many pits guys we're gonna get to interview, like in my life. We need to lock in on it. I read this excerpt, and uh, it's one page I want to read it, fired me up this morning. This is how we're gonna set the stage. Um, so Jack Schweiger says, When I arrived when I arranged to interview Jones, he scheduled a time within market hours. I was a bit concerned about this because I knew Jones was a very active trader. Sure enough, when I was ushered into his office, he was shouting an order into one of the speakerphones that directly connected him to the trading floors. This was back in the day before electronic trading, when futures were traded in the pits on the exchange floors. I waited until he had finished placing his order before speaking. I explained that I didn't want to interrupt his trading and suggested that perhaps we should delay the interview until after all the markets have closed. No problem. Let's go. As he was responding to my interview questions, Jones kept his eyes on the large quote monitors spread across the room, intermittently shouting orders to the exchange floor in a particularly forensic style. The trading equivalent of a professional tennis player aggressively returning a volley. By December crude, 300 and even go, go, go. All during this time, he was talking on the phone calls and speaking to staff members popping into the office with market information and questions while responding to my interview. Oh, that's fucking fire you up, man. Are you kidding me? It's it's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. Hopefully, we get him one day relatively soon. Um, couple things. Number one is do you remember when we had that interview about or that segment about what was his name? What was his name? Like the guy who stole all the 40 million dollars from his dad who had the government contract to custody Bitcoin. What was his name? Oh, John Lick. And we learned about how they have these uh milit, these like US Marshall auctions. Well, there's one going on right now and they have crazy shit. This is the U, this is a this is a.gov brother. They have like ridiculous stuff right now. You should these happen, like they don't happen that often. I was thinking about selling some of my bags and going on a bidding war for this with CT movie. We'll we'll track it as it there's still like five days left, so it is what it is. We'll get there when we get there. Second, is I was told we need to watch this before we start the stream. This Mizkift fellow, who I don't really know who this is, is doing a trading challenge with his stream chat for $300,000. I was told I need to watch this on stream. I have not watched it yet. Large?

SPEAKER_01 5:39

We 30k? I think we can do 30k. 30k? Alright, so we're gonna click buy. All right. So now we're gonna click buy. Robinhood desktop is terrible, huh? We could do a limit. So right now it's trading at $378.31. So you guys are voting uh if we should buy or skip on AMD. Wait, this is cool, dude. Solutions. Nice job with this shit, bro. You're you're in? We did it. Hey, good shit, chat.

SPEAKER_02 6:04

You're in your first It's not a great sign. It's not a great sign.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

Trade, congrat Whoa, you're already up! You're already up! Hey, look at that! Look at that! You're up three, you're at 301,000.

SPEAKER_02 6:15

That is not the best sign, actually. Um also they're up a lot. What's the tape? 378 AMD. I think they're up a lot. It's 421. They're up a lot. What you're gonna see here, the thing about the last leg in the euphoric stage, which we've definitely entered in stocks, is that it goes a lot higher and harder and longer than you think. Stock indices literally up only, starting to look not real, almost uneasy feeling. Usually I start to feel this much sooner than an actual blow off the top, though. That is something to call out. But what I think we're about to see is every influencer, content creator, streamer, the final pivot is financial content. It's gotta be. It's got it's just it just is. It's financial content. And again, like I said, it goes on, I think a lot longer and higher than you probably think. But we're gonna see everybody go to it. And so it's gonna be very good for us. This entire cohort is going to be actively trading, they're active traders, and it's just going to further the type of things that we're able to buy on this mega church attention, tunnel vision, single assets, get this like reflexive move. When the higher they pump, the further they go, and the higher they pump, the further they go. And I don't know, we're just gonna follow it closely. This is uh interesting sign here. Let's go, let's go! Market close just happened, and it was a fucking electric one. If I do say so myself, bam! SPY closes at 734, an emphatic all-time high up 1.43 percent on the news that the war was over, and then the news that that was fake, that the war actually isn't over, but it might be over soon. It's the 15th time we've gotten that headline. Every time we get it, it goes up. SPX as well closes at 7365. It's an all-time high. And I mean, this is just one of the craziest charts you will maybe ever see. I don't know what to say. Every day it goes higher. QQQ is up two whole percent. IGV, the worst index ever, the worst ETF ever created. This vehicle should cease to exist, down half a percent. Uh, the semi-ETF, disgusting. Every day it feels frothy, every day it goes higher. Um, the Dow ticked 50k for the first time since Pam Bondi, and it looks really good. NASDAQ up 1.3. Look at this thing. NASDAQ is up. Um, and then last but not least is the cost be, which is insane. Uh, Bitcoin is 81.6. Again, I'm sorry. Uninspiring. Uninspiring. Um, the VIX is about half a percent. Zcash, quantum resistant private bitcoin is at $561. It's up nine percent on the day. Tawn has made this list, although it should be on the alt list, is trading at two dollars and forty cents. Give or take, it's up 23% on the day. Hyperliquid 43 looks pretty good. ETH, uninspiring, boring, flat, lame, 2350. Solana the same, although maybe he's gonna have a little bit of juice here, but I don't know why you would sling Solana right now. Monero flat, BTC D flat, and then 10 year is down, 30 year is down 1.7 and 1%, respectively. Gold putting in a decent candle, and silver putting in a really nice one up seven percent, dollar down half stretch is edging a hundred. You know, when it gets to a hundred, the money printer turns on for Sailor, and it's not there yet. It is not there yet. Energy, oil, everything down a lot. Uh, crude is down seven, Brent is down eight, a hundred dollars. Awesome. Remember, remember the other remember the stream the other day when I said, Are you longing this chart? Right here. It looked longable, but straight down only since. Um, funny enough, remember this chart? This TLN. I haven't talked about this in a in like a week. This is what Claude told us to long as Bloom Energy Beta, TLN. I don't even know what it is. It's some energy Talon Energy Corporation is up a lot. Looks really nice. Um, Ford 10 up 7% today. Defense, uh RTX up a little bit, Lockheed up a little bit, then Palantir is just getting crushed. Beat earnings too, getting crushed. Our fertilizers and chemicals are down. Tulip King, what are we thinking? Big tech just put in an unbelievable day. AMD $700 billion stock is up 20% today. It's a $700 billion company. It's up more than Taunt today. It's up more than Zcash, it's up two back Zcash 20% day. ARM is breaking out of a crazy one. Look at this. Get out while you can. Uh yeah, you I don't know. It's fucking parabolic. ARM up 13. Rocket Lab, all the space names have been doing pretty bad, but Rocket Lab looks good. Dark guy shitting on crypto. This is nothing new, even though my whole network's in crypto. Um, ASML, nice day. Nvidia putting together a very nice day. This would be a fun relong Mando Strat over 212, I think. Um, you would like to see NVIDIA really make a move here, and things could continue to get crazier than they already have. Outside of that, Oracle puts in a nice candle. Intel, just a monster. 113 up 5% today. This is a $600 billion company. I mean, these these moves are unfathomable. Micron, another one up four percent. Since the air mass bullport at the Pico Top after a six-month hiatus, he is now up 29%, assuming its spot, and it is probably not. We're gonna see him on stream maybe Thursday, maybe Friday. QCome up three. Google, another one, 395. Google is worth 4.82 trillion dollars, and it has almost surpassed NVIDIA. That is now five trillion dollar company. Tesla up two, but you know I hate Tesla. Marvel looks fine, meta, ugly, and nothing else super notable. Cive is a Serenity and some Wiff name. It is down 11%. Let's go consumer stocks, altcoins, and then talk about my Zcash trade. Um, Nebig is up crazy day. I ran crazy day. Circle crypto stocks look pretty good, up six. GME Ryan Cohen is on a tear, is up four percent. IBKR, you know, I love this, is up four, hood up three. It's just Bitcoin bait. I don't really know why you would own hood. I stand by this. Why would you own hood? I don't know. Hims is up two, Nike the worst stock ever, is up two. Actually, no, Figma is the worst stock ever, down one, and Snapchat earnings looks like a miss. It's down three percent after hours. I think it's today. Coinbase flat and P4 posted about Bitcoin. Is that true? Because I'm gonna stop what I'm doing, and I'm gonna pull this up. And what does this mean? Does it bull? What is this? Bullpost? What does this mean? Low energy asset class. Yeah, he's hating because it, I mean, it's suck crypto sucks right now. It's just like so uninspiring. Doesn't move, none of it moves. Everyone's declaring crypto back, and I'm just not ready to do it. Ball, let's go to altcoins, then on chain. Tan leading the way. Two 90s up 23. Venice, monster, absolute monster, is up 20%. This would be a really fun long. Like, this is a generous previous all-time high, but this would have been a fun one. Uh, you could be up like 15% on the safest all-time high break ever. It's a really cool one. I like it. New Year's up 17, but chart looks like shit. Farcoin's up 13, Athena up 10, Zcash up 10, XPL. Tau looks pretty good. Um, Jupiter, nothing else. I mean, why call anything else out on this list? Chip is just a disaster. Let us scroll over to the on-chain side of things, and we will start with. Wow, that actually looks pretty good. That little fucker looks ready to pop. There's only like five crypto tokens even worth being on the watch list. What do we care about on-chain? Bernie? Trash. Cards? Nice. 40. Uh, USDUC got a Binance listing for no apparent reason. It was at two mil and dead. Got a Binance listed that was obviously front ran. By the way, it's awesome. Obviously, front ran. I mean, what is this? Are you kidding me? What is this? All right. I I'll just tell you the story real quick. I woke up in the middle of the night, 4 a.m. I check my charts. I just roll over. I out of bed and I check it and I see instantly notification, Walter Bloomberg, USA Iran war over. I fall back in my bed, and I was just like, God got me, man. God fucking got me. Well, newsflash, USA, Iran war is not over. So here's what we have: a couple things real quick. We're not gonna spend a lot of time on the war, but it's not over. Um, Trump tweets this today, or he truths this. Uh assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to, which is perhaps a big assumption, perhaps a big assumption. The already legendary epic fury will be at an end, and the highly effective blockade will allow the Hormuz strait to be open to all, including Iran. If they don't agree, the bombing starts, and it will be sadly at a much higher level and intensity than it was before. Thank you for your attention to this matter, Donald J. Trump. The bit is that Axios has reported an Iran deal being imminent five times in 19 days. Axios is basically just Trump comps. Um, why does the same story keep coming from the same reporter? His name is Barak Barak Barak Ravid. Deep sources in the White House and Israeli intelligence. Every time the administration needs to pressure Iran or move oil, Ravid gets the call. Is he reporting news or delivering a message? 760 million in oil shorts placed 21 minutes before the April 20 Iran announcement. Who knew? Yesterday, Trump paused the naval operation in Hormuz. Markets rallied, but zero US ships crossed the strait on Tuesday. Iran says they have not even begun yet. Does this sound like a deal? Iran wants five years on enrichment. US demands 20. Is that a negotiation or a performance? The thing I'm gonna say is it's never been more the case than it is right now. Trading oil, I'm telling you, is bro, it's a it's an IQ test. It is, it's an IQ test. Longing oil here is just like you're you're playing against you're playing a broken game if you're trying to do it. 3 40 a.m. crude oil shorts worth $920 million are taken. Flat, flat, flat. 430, 450. I woke up at 450. Axios reports that a deal to end the Iran war is imminent. Down only. 7 a.m. crude oil shorts profit 125 million. Then the announcement closes. Then the announcement comes out that eh, actually, we're not quite there yet. It's an IQ test, brother. It's a complete IQ test. And I wouldn't touch it. I would not touch it. You could not pay me to get back in an oil trade. But what you could pay me to stay in is this token right here. All right, you want to hear my thesis? I I I was sitting up last night in the middle of the night, 6 a.m., staring at my wall and my ceiling, and I'm just thinking about it. And I'm like, you know, I made this tweet today, so the easy buying the bottom is the easy part. I think the hardest part about trading, by far, the hardest part about trading is letting your real winners ride. Letting your real winners ride. And GCR has that tweet, and he's like, you gotta think of your Ponzies like prize fighters, winners win, losers lose. And I am just looking at this, and I entered it for a reason. Okay. The reason I entered this trade the way that I entered it with conviction and size and just balls on the table is you look around once again, like the stock market added one trillion dollars today. Okay, Bitcoin is worth 1.6 trillion. Stock market added a trillion dollars today, okay? That's a 1.4% move in the SP. These charts, the biggest companies in the world, are up unfathomable amounts of money. And so it really just came down to me where I'm like, all right, everyone everywhere is hilariously rich, okay? But they're not just rich in semis, they're not just rich in semis because the semi-profits rotated to photonics, and the photonics profits rotated to Korean stocks and the Korean stock market, and everything everywhere across every sector rip, rip, rip, rip, rip, rip, rip. And I look at crypto as historically one of the most reflexive pump, pump, pump assets of all time. But the problem with crypto is it's found itself in this really weird spot where it has become relatively uninvestable outside of a couple pockets. And I really am feeling this right now. Like, I you should not be excited about Bitcoin right now with Bitcoin price action. You just shouldn't be. This chart is a joke, it's pathetic. Last Friday, Google added 33% of the Bitcoin market cap in one session, bro. That would be Bitcoin, that would be Bitcoin to like 120K today. Today. And so you look at crypto as this reflexive, can really rip liquidity valve type of asset class. And I just feel like there's a couple spots. There's a couple spots. Bitcoin could, should, and would be one of them. I have 33 33% of my net worth in it. I'm not gonna stop holding it. I'm gonna continue to hold it. Zcash, or let's go, hyper liquid first, is obviously one of them, right? I think that's like confirmed, obviously one of them for obvious reasons. And then Zcash is just like, I love it. I love it because it it is one, it's like eight billion dollars, it's pennies. Two, it has like freshly shown it's an ability to pump like no other. It has the institutional love where the people are doing the dats, the Winkel Voss twins are coming in. Like it has this privacy narrative, which I think is giga undervalued, and it is the antithesis of the Bitcoin narrative. Uh, the problem with Bitcoin is like Bitcoin, one people are mad Bitcoin is public, two, people are mad that Sailor has a centralized amount of Bitcoin, he owns way too much, and three, everyone's upset with the quantum problem. And so you look at Zcash and forget completely if it works or not. I'm not in the business of does the tech work? I'm in the business of narrative. I'm in the business of narrative and trading charts. And the narrative in the chart says it fucking works, it's quantum resistant, it's everything Bitcoin's not. I just looked at this thing at $350 or whatever and said to myself, I just think this is a once-a-year type of setup. Everything everywhere has ripped fathomable amounts, everyone everywhere has gotten so rich on every sector, and crypto hasn't moved. There's only a couple things to buy in crypto, and I'm down to do my dick on the table and see what happens. Yo, Mr. Robert Leshner, welcome to the stream, man. How are you?

SPEAKER_00 20:56

Mr. Thread Guy, I am doing well, dude.

SPEAKER_02 20:58

I'm excited to have you. I uh you know what's funny is I um I wanted I listened to you with Haseeb on the shopping block, but I don't know that much about your lore. And so I just hear your like modern takes. And so I was doing some prep and I listened to Up Only episode, which was like a high stakes one because you were like 15 hours out of this exploit in one of the compound contracts. And yeah, dude, it was a wild list. I thought you handled it really well for what it's worth.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

That was like five years ago, but yeah, that was that was like ancient history when it comes to DeFi. DeFi has had like 10 lives since then.

SPEAKER_02 21:32

Yeah, 10 lives. I mean, and then what April is like the worst month for exploits ever. It's like something's something don't change, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:39

Yeah, I mean, it's funny, like DeFi is constantly going through this ebb and flow of being resilient, battle tested, and more trustworthy than C Fi, right? To it being, you know, fragile and unpredictable and less trusted than C Fi. And, you know, it's this constant ebb and flow that's been happening. Happening pretty much all the way back to like 2018, 2017, really. And it never ends. You know, like in 12 months, we'll be like, nope, DeFi is like so much safer than anything else. Like, that's what you have to use.

SPEAKER_02 22:11

The thing that was so crazy about it to me was that you were dis I'm not technical at all, but you were discussing the the bug, and that it was there was this exploit because there was like a greater than sign was missing and or equals to. And it's like that specific. It has, you know, thousands like hundreds millions of dollars are getting airdropped to somebody because there's like one character in a contract that was overlooked.

SPEAKER_00 22:35

Yeah, and just to break it down for the people listening that like don't know what we're talking about, real quick, you know, it was like 2020, 2021, maybe maybe 2020. Yeah, uh, maybe 21. Um, but basically there was an upgrade of the compound protocol that you know somebody in the community had written. Like one of the early things about compound as a protocol was that like the actual development of it was sort of like out crowdsourced, right? Where it was like, hey, anyone can like add on to this thing, which is very different than how like most teams are like building DeFi protocols today. I think a lot of people have learned from this. But it was distributed development, which is like hard to like QA, right? Even with auditors involved. Um, and there was an upgrade, everyone reviewed it, it looked good, you know, it passed, it was implemented, and there was like this like incredibly hard-to-find bug that started like basically like miscalculating how many like reward tokens people were gonna receive. And so like most people like got zero, and like some people randomly just got like buckets of tokens. And you know, it was patched, you know, as quick as it could be, but like for like days it was like spitting out all of these tokens, and things were going crazy. And this was like the human era of like DeFi security, right? Like back in the day, you know, we didn't have AI. Like you literally had many different teams of people like analyzing smart contracts and reading through them and like hypothesizing the risks and hypothesizing the attack vectors, and like it was very different than now, where I think we're entering like a very automated era of like attack and defense. Thank you for the explanation. And I I didn't give you a chance to do this.

SPEAKER_02 24:15

Can you give us like a quick lower intro into uh who you are and then we could talk about some of the fun stuff you do now?

SPEAKER_00 24:21

Yeah, so people in crypto generally know me for like one of four things. Um, the first is in 2017, I began work on the compound protocol. This is before DeFi was a phrase. I was actually in the group chat when we came up with the word DeFi. Um that's no, yes, swear to God. Who came up with the word DeFi? It was actually Brendan, one of the founders of Dharma Protocol, which was like a 2018 era early DeFi protocol. And somebody, he just ripped DeFi and everybody was like, Yes. He was like, We need to come up with a name for what like all of these like what we now call DeFi founders are building. He was like open to suggestions, people were like tossing ideas out there. There was some bad names. It was like OpenFi. It was like there was like some like weird ones, and like a couple people latched onto DeFi and they were like, Yeah, DeFi, like that's the name. Like, and like ever since this was like 2018.

SPEAKER_02 25:10

That's all I've never that's incredible.

SPEAKER_00 25:13

Yeah. So people know me as like one of the first people to like explore what we now call DeFi. Um, I built compound. Second, some people know me from Robot Ventures. It's an early stage venture capital fund that's been active in this space since 2018. Um, we do lots of like pre-seed investments. Oftentimes it's like a founder's very first check because you know, we just like founders, we're not, you know, oh, you gotta show like tons of traction. We bet on people. Um, third, people might know me from the chopping block. It's a podcast that I host in the space. And fourth, I'm the founder of Superstate in 2023. Um, I left compound to start Superstate. What we do is we tokenize assets, we bring them on chain. And the sort of catalyst of that was, you know, as a DeFi founder, I looked around DeFi and I was like, hey, the ceiling on how big this stuff can get is actually limited. Because the only assets that we're putting into DeFi are like the same assets we've always been putting into them. It's like other protocols, governance tokens, it's you know, it's like crypto native things that's like an enclosed ecosystem. And my theory was like to really build this up and to like grow as a space, we needed like trillions of dollars of assets on chain.

SPEAKER_02 26:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:22

Otherwise, it could like never really take off. And so Left Compound founded Superstate, and for the last three years, I've been, you know, trying to tokenize assets, bring them on chain to make them usable in DeFi.

SPEAKER_02 26:33

I want to talk about Superstate uh and let you talk about it a little bit. I want I think we did an interview with New York Stock Exchange, maybe it was a good one. Um, but I want to ask, like, you know, I've crypto's been pretty boring for the last six months and some change, exciting couple days here, which we talk about, but I've been trading commodities and AI stocks on hyperliquid. And I'm curious, like, do you feel like what Unit Trade XYZ Hyperliquid is doing has like vamped what you're trying to do at Superstate?

SPEAKER_00 27:01

You know, yes and no, right? So it's proving out a market, which is like people want to trade anything at like three in the morning, right? Like that is like clearly the future. That's clearly what everybody wants. That's clearly where it's going, right? I think people have wanted that for like 50 years. It just has never really been possible, right? People want to speculate and hedge on everything at all times, right? Like that is a very pure demand that people have, right? There's going to be a lot of flavors of that. Like the first versions of this are, you know, with basically unregulated derivatives that are like not KYC days, that like anyone can access. There's like really good qualities of that. Um, I think there's a market for that. I think there will always be a market for that. People also want, you know, what I will call like regulated compliant versions of that, right? Almost every single product starts off with like the Napster era, where it's like, you know, hey, like go totally wild, right? Like, and like that proves everything out, right? It proves the user experience, it proves the demand, it proves like roughly how it's supposed to work. Like almost everything starts off with like a wild west to it. And like eventually, you know, everything winds up with like what I'll call like like the buttoned-up versions of it, where after we prove out why it's so awesome, we get the things that like grandma uses, right? Like from like a risk perspective, from a UX perspective, from you know, credibility perspective, like we almost always get this sort of like you know, mature version of something in the end that like actually like claims the whole market. And I think like trading, we'll call it RWAs or like real world assets or securities or whatever you want to call it, like you will be trading all of that stuff at two in the morning, seven days a week, you know, in your pajamas, right? Just like you already were proving out that you could do that today as a society. I just think that the version of that that most people are gonna use in 10 years is not gonna be the you know, self-custody, like clicking from your wallet, you know, like in a censorship resistant, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no KYC thing. It's probably gonna be the thing that's offered to you, you know, realistically by like, you know, a Coinbase or like a JP Morgan or a whatever. Like both will exist, right? Like neither's going away, but I think we're gonna trend more and more, just like almost every innovation in history, like we're gonna trend from YOLO era of it to the hyper-scaled era of it that like 99% of the world feels comfortable using. The early adopters are like, yeah, I will do like I will jump through crazy hoops, like I will like figure out how to use this brand new system. 99% of the world doesn't think like that. And so, you know, I remember like in the early days of DeFi, like there was no institutions, there was no like, you know, like it was like the early adopters of it were the craziest people on earth. Like the people that were like, I trust the smart contract is not done, right? Like the people that were willing to like use a smart contract with their money for the first time, that was a different breed, you know, and now everyone's like sort of comfortable with it, and like it gets packaged into way more usable form factors.

SPEAKER_02 30:18

I I have a bunch of, but I want to ask you this first because I just thought of it. Like, when you look at where we are in 2026 from where you were in 2018, 2017, 16, group chat coined the word DeFi. Are you like how satisfied are you with how DeFi has evolved? Expect is it beaten expectations, underperformed?

SPEAKER_00 30:37

Yeah, the answer is yes. Um sick. That's all that's my take. Yeah, like here's my take from about eight years of DeFi, right? And this goes to my earlier point, which is like people's opinions of it ebb and flow, right? In 2020, sorry, I'll start up from the beginning. Like 2018, no one trusted it. Okay, like when we launched this, when like you know, certain protocols were first launched, like nobody would wanted to like interact with the smart contracts. It was considered a little bit crazy, right? Like you had some like really early adopters of compound v1 and uniswap v1 and like curve and like all of these things, but like these were the crazy people, and everybody trusted a centralized thing more. They all trusted Coinbase more, yeah, right. By the time 2020 came around, people were like, DeFi hasn't had any issues, really. It has like started to scale, and by this point, it was sort of like max experimentation. Like I like I would say DeFi summer, like 2020 and like 2021 was in some ways like a local maxima, like of a global, very good mark for DeFi, in that like nothing had really gone wrong, like for the most part. Like there were some rugs, you know, and some bad things that happened, right? But for the most part, people saw how like resilient it was, and people were trying new things all the time. It was like nonstop people like launching protocols that no one had ever seen before, where it was like massive experimentation and like really a lot of confidence that it can work. And so, you know, everyone's optimism for TFI was just like through the roof, like through the roof. Then everything C Fi collapsed. I mean, like Terra blew up, and then it took down Three Arrow's Capital, and then it took down Celsius, and it took down BlockFi, and it took down Genesis, and it took down FTX, and it took down like all these other things, right? And people were like, DeFi is a scam. Like, you can't trust anyone who like holds your money for you. The only thing you can trust is a smart contract. And that was a really interesting era. It's like bear market 2022, 2023, where nobody wanted to trust centralized thing. And like, I think DeFi in its like creativity was almost at an all-time low. People weren't like trying new things, but everyone knew that smart contracts could work at scale for creating a financial product and a financial market. And you know, for better or for worse, like the post-Trump election era, it's like the comeback of C Fi. I mean, like, C Fi is on a reverse story.

SPEAKER_02 33:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

Right. Like C Fi has been coming for the market like unbelievably aggressively for you know about 16 months now. And I think in some ways, like, especially with the vulnerabilities that have been happening, I think like DeFi, the ratio of like optimism for DeFi relative to C Fi is almost at an all-time low, like since I've been around. Like, you know, the momentum that the C Fi guys have is really high, and like the sort of angst around DeFi is really high too. Really high, really high. And like I think DeFi will come back, like, because at the end of the day, we're going to enter in an era where like a new protocol written with tailwind of AI that's like as secure as it can get against any possible threat. Like, we're gonna have like ultimately scalable, ultimately resilient protocols, which is what people want in the first place. I just think DeFi has a slight disadvantage right now because all of these contracts were written in like 2018, 2019, 2020, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25. And now you have like mythos that's like, oh, I found a thing that like Well, you don't even know what it is, really, right?

SPEAKER_02 34:05

It's like it could, you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:07

Yeah, like the ability to find vulnerabilities now is like higher than it's ever been. And like the developers haven't caught up yet, but they will catch up. They will catch up. Eventually, we're gonna have like this wave of like, you know, I don't want to call it like 3.0, you know, because like it's weird to like create versions of DeFi, but like we will have a wave of DeFi probably in like a couple years. We're like, yeah, you can build a global system that's always on, that always works, that's like super safe, that you can't steal from, you can't tamper. Like it's a really good backbone to do stuff. But you know, I think like it's gonna take a while. That was fucking beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 34:43

Robert Lesnar, you're a movie, dude. I'm I'm I'm happy you uh it's funny. You're spending my DM from like eight months ago. Um you know what?

SPEAKER_00 34:51

I only check my DMs like every eight months.

SPEAKER_02 34:53

Yeah, I look forward to our next one in 2020 uh to seven. But dude, you're a must be. Thanks for coming on, man. I'm I'm I really appreciate the time I'm rooting for you, man.

SPEAKER_00 35:01

Yeah, appreciate it. Please.

SPEAKER_02 35:02

I'm looking at the stream. Um stay tight, stay locked in on live every day at 345. If you are new, and let's fucking have some fun, man. I appreciate you so much, and thank you all for pulling up and thank you all for supporting. I'm running in. I'm out. I'll see you tomorrow. I will catch you when I get to you. Please, I'm going to bed. I gotta go take a nap. I'm fucking tired. I'm going to bed. Good night. Good night, good night, good night, good night, good night, good night, good night.