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New Wallets, New RWAs, New Yield | CORE SZN 🔶
Recorded: Aug. 14, 2025 Duration: 1:01:48Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the burgeoning yield opportunities within the Bitcoin ecosystem, highlighting the upcoming launch of LST BTC and the introduction of new NFT collections tied to real-world assets. Participants emphasized the importance of maximizing returns on idle assets and the potential for institutional-grade yield products to become accessible to retail users, signaling a promising growth trajectory for Bitcoin DeFi.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Hello, hello, hello.
Happy Thursday, everybody.
Just give us a moment to get everybody up on the stage.
We're going to let some more viewers filter in as well.
We've got a great space for you today.
Core season's in full effect.
We'll get this space going in like two more minutes. Thank you. Thank you. All right, all right.
Let's get a quick test going first because Twitter's being a little glitchy today.
Can all the speakers turn on their mic for a sec?
Just give a big what up.
Give a big GM.
GM, how we doing?
GM, GM.
GM, GM.
Diamond Rock? I'm here, brother brother there we go all right we're ready to set this up let's do it hello everybody welcome to the bi-weekly core season space as you can tell looking at the
speakers we got a stacked lineup today i know we just did the gms but let's just uh let's do some
intros right around i'm dylan uh running the core account right now excited to talk about some yield today
excited to talk about wallets and then we got two protocols up here that are new or
at least launching new features on core so i'm excited to talk to them as well
and we're gonna nev up on stage right now too yeah kieran you want to take the mic next
sure i'm kieran og core contributor really excited to jam on all things core
core season upcoming lst btc launch and a lot of these fun flagship daps
we've got some people here really well equipped to talk about them.
Nev, glad we got you in here.
You want to give a quick word?
GM, GM, boys.
Give me a little bit.
I'm just adjusting to the new brackets that were thrown on my teeth.
But yeah, as far as everybody's aware nev uh you
know one of your canadian-based cms kind of just here loving core doing anything that's core related
um i delve a bit into the defy side kind of mess with a bunch of daps on chain really just mess
with the eco and kind of see where we can earn that boosted yield really built big or pull in
that juicy apy and you know try to maximize my my defy portfolio that's kind of what i do and
that's the uh the alpha that i drip to you guys all right perfect we're definitely talking about
bitcoin yield defy yield a whole lot today um rich you want to give a quick intro
hey y'all, one of the initial
contributors here at Gore. Super stoked to chat all things ecosystem with you guys.
All right. All right. Then we got two of our builders on with us today. Diamond Rock,
we'll start with you. If you guys were here for last week's space, you already know all
about him. But for all those that missed, take the floor. Hey guys, JD Gagnon here.
Diamond Rock is the X moniker.
One of the founders of BIT,
super stoked to be a part of
and talking about core season.
Let's go.
All right, all right.
And then we got Ben from ASX,
one of the OG builders to core.
He's been here as long as anybody.
Ben, take the floor.
Yeah, appreciate that intro.
I'm Ben, co-founder of ASX.
We've been building for like two years at ASX.
And then also co-founder of BSC News,
who really provided, I think, a lot of early coverage to Core.
We got real into Core early,
so happy to actually be a builder here as well i'm excited for the conversation yeah yeah all right let's do this let's do this so let's
talk about let's just get right into yield all right thanks to core season we've had like i don't
know 10 new protocols launching on core or something so i've just been trying to track
all the yields it's getting like overwhelming now. We got Molten.
We got Coland.
Coland just added their subscription boost too.
And we got Volta, B14G obviously.
There's BitFi.
And now we got Bits as well.
We got DiamondRock here to talk about that.
And we got the RWAs from ASX.
And then of course we just got our classic dual staking.
So Nev, you're already talking a little bit about a little bit about yield what's been like your go-to play these past couple weeks
um i don't know give us the juice what's the highest apys you're seeing so that's like a very
loaded question and the reason why i say it's loaded is because really i'm running loops on
multiple protocols to kind of really optimize my yield
and kind of boost that portfolio.
Now I'm utilizing a lot of AMMs that are on chain.
I just, and to be fair, Diamond,
you know, started delving into your platform.
I do really like what I've been looking at
in terms of like my position there
and what I'm trying to optimize with it.
But realistically, like i'm
full-on dgen so i'm using uh d5 protocols and amm similar to colin to kind of get that boosted yield
including the subscription i'm then also in addition to that kind of using asx's platform
to purchase and buy a bunch of um you know rwas that are loan loan backed NFTs to kind of earn a passive yield in their native
tokenization and then take that and collateralize that or restake it for that auto compounding
nature on their platform. But I've actually been digging into Molten a bit as well. I know that,
you know, they're not here, but I've also been digging into Molten and kind of looking at their
strategies and their LPs and seeing if there's any way I can work around their,
their IL to really build and boost my APY there as well. So it's, it's, it's difficult. My,
my position is very chain centric here on core at the moment. And the reason for that is because
I'm really, really, really loving the boosted APYs and the BTC by narrative here.
Yeah, and I know me and you have been talking a lot about these Coland subscriptions.
So just to break it down for everybody, you pay like $30 of Coland, CLND, and you unlock a subscription boost.
There's two boosts.
Wait, wait, wait, Coland.
I'm going to pull Kanye here, okay?
I'm going to let you finish.
But I'm about to drop a juicy thread out,
and I don't think you should drop any alpha just yet.
Okay?
We got to tell the people, bro, we're live.
We got 90 people here.
We got to tell them a little bit.
All right, all right, all right.
I'll let you finish then.
Follow Neb, though.
Apparently, he's going to put this all in thread form.
But basically, if you pay that 30
we gotta talk about it i'm trying to get it out there okay geez what do you got nev what's the
loop so realistically you're gonna auto compound your what you should be doing on cold end right
now is just using their their fancy loop button right which is looping core and sd core and you're going to get a seven to eight percent yield just on that loop
by itself right it doesn't matter what amount you do there but let me let me be very clear
the boosted yield and subscription is you is you know it's for the first 2000 sd core you have
there we need to do that and we need to make this very clear. Okay. But you're going to get a boosted yield of 44.73% on that 2000 SD core. And you're going to net profit on something
that remained idle. And this is Rich's favorite, favorite like word, idle assets. Why are you not
earning a BTC yield on those idle assets? So for SD core that remains usually idle, and you're probably going
to see about a 0.9 for investing in that subscription, you're going to net profit
after your actual sub costs about 170 USD a year. Why wouldn't you want to do that? I mean,
that's just, that's gains on something that sits in your wallet. Yeah. I didn't even think about
that. And we were talking about this, and you didn't even mention that.
The loop first,
get the ST core through the loop,
then provide it to coland,
get that yield,
that boosted yield with the coland boost.
And then, by the way,
it's still earning on the back end.
It's still earning that ST core yield.
Were you saying that?
Yeah.
And then,
if you want to go a step further,
you can borrow against it so you potentially
keep running it keep losing it you can't give them all the dj rich rich you got to reign your
man in here he's giving all the degenerate alpha away come on i mean yeah that's that's just the
start though uh kieran what do you think you've been tapping around with some of the yield on core what are your thoughts man man i'm not as plugged in or to jen as nev but uh but yeah i'm i'm enjoying
the ecosystem and a lot of the different growth opportunities we're seeing um but i also want to
remind people like this is like a speck of sand compared to what we're ultimately going to be
getting because lstbtc isn't even live yet and
lstbtc is designed to be like the base layer of yield that you can layer all these other strategies
on top of so if you're able to use that maple product that's generating about four to six percent
yield on your bitcoin and then deposit add into molten or poland or, and run these wild strategies that Nev is talking
about. I mean, that should really amplify it. And when you think about, you know, compounding value,
I mean, like what's better than compounding Bitcoin. So it's going to be pretty powerful
when LSC BTC drops. And I think that all the different applications that we're talking about
now, the ones that are being locked, that are being launched in the past month or the next few weeks or months, all of that is just setting the
stage and really building a nest for LSTBTC when it ultimately arrives. And the more apps there
are to use LSTBTC, the more opportunities there are to earn yield on top of the base staking yield,
and the more people are going to want LSTBTC.
And again, I can't emphasize this point enough. Every time LSTBTC is minted by an institution or an individual just clicking a button to turn their Bitcoin into yield-bearing Bitcoin,
that means the core tokens are acquired and staked by Maple Finance, which drives this
flywheel of value creation they can sustainably develop both
the core token into bitcoin's companion asset and then also this core blockchain ecosystem with all
these dApps into this wild bitcoin playground where we actually turn bitcoin from this passive
yes idle nev asset into this active centerpiece of uh an end-to-end financial economy.
That all happens on permissionless rails.
So I'm just fired up about that philosophically, even more than these yield optimizations that
Ned's talking about.
Although those certainly get me fired up as well.
Ouch.
Let him cook.
No, it's true, though.
You got to remember that.
Hold on. I think we're glitch glitching but can everyone hear me i can
hear you there's someone a robot that's trying to talk that uh is interrupting nev i think you're
roboting on us but um no you're right that you know all these different yeah uh dabs on core
have given us this great yield but it's literally just like the pre-season of bitcoin defy like it hasn't even really started yet and lstbdc it's gonna be like week one where it's like all right
now we can really go out there really maximize our bitcoin really go crazy with these yields
even though right now we're already having a great time just because there's so many different daps
now yeah it's not even like pre-season it's like the the first episode of hard knocks
i like that I like that.
I like that reference.
And, Nev, we talked a little about Molten, but we didn't give any APYs.
So I'm just going to list some off.
The Core USDT pool is offering 15% right now.
The Core USDC pool is offering 10% APY right now.
And then they just started farming, which this is the very beginning of their farming.
I'm guessing we'll be getting much more news soon but they started farming in the core wbtc pool which has
now been juiced up to like 60 percent epy so those are all the different pools with um with exposure
to impermanent loss so watch out for that but then on the other side of molten there's all the
bitcoin based pools which are stable yields no impermanent loss and their bitcoin yields so yeah if you guys haven't checked out molten
you're really missing out on the yield front um Neve what else you've been tapping into like Volta
or you know bit five bits dual I've messed around with Volta but I'm really just doing that for that
long leverage right I'm you know everybody's like oh long leverage, right? I'm, you know, everybody's like, oh, play it safe.
Do 25 to 50% at moat.
Now, man, I'm 250 the entire time.
Like, I'm in, I'm all in.
That's how I've always been on perps trading.
And I don't see any other way how.
But realistically, it's just because I'm, you know,
I'm earning these juicy APYs on the back end, you know,
using Molten, using ASX, back end you know using molten using asx using um you know colon
and now i'm delving into uh uh you know bify itself to kind of get those nice passive yields
on idle assets so i can actually you know go full dgen and do that 250x just saying but you know i
like the casinos i like going and rolling my dice
somewhere else right and that's where i'm going to do it but i do also i've bought into volta
itself to earn on those fees um because the maximized apy on those fees is insane the amount
i'm making on emissions through volta and just trading on volta it just doesn't make any sense
either like i'm farming volta as well yeah it's like there's there's two sides you come at it you could gamble
and hit the the 250x basically not gambling it's strategic um or you could literally provide the
yield on the or provide the liquidity on the back end and basically be the casino and earn from
everybody else kind of doing their trades so then then if you got some guy or both,
so if you got some guy like me who throws in a bunch of longs last night
and wakes up today and everything's down 5%,
you could be earning off that.
So it's kind of the best of both worlds.
And then, like we were saying,
this is just the beginning of everything.
So we got Rich here.
I want to ask him some big brain future questions, talk about the future of Bitcoin yield.
So Rich, you know, we just listed a ton of yield opportunities that have already come from core season.
How many more yield opportunities do you think we're going to see over the next 12 months?
Like different dApps launching on core, just different features like how Kohlen added the subscription.
Obviously, it's really hard to tell,
but do you think this is just the beginning of the yield renaissance on Core?
We might have lost Rich there.
Trying to choose Rich, but it's not working currently.
But Kieran, do you want to talk a little bit more about the future of bitcoin yield maybe like uh which specific dApps you think will be perfect
for lstbtc or things like that am i rugging can everybody hear me no i can hear you sorry i'm i feel like people that the space
is probably just not like i'm seeing in chat that where there's like issues where some people can't
even hear me so i think it's region specific at this moment uh it does look like rich disconnected
though i just brought him back up on stage i think hey can you can you hear me now or no yeah
yeah there we go twitter's being glitchy today.
Okay.
I think I heard most of the question.
It was like, use case for LSTBTC more,
and like kind of more Bitcoin yield renaissance on core.
In terms of LSTBTC, I'll drop a little bit of alpha
in this space.
I think the audits are actually going to get done early,
which we're super fired up about.
Hopefully we'll be able to bring that to you guys,
you know guys very,
very soon. I think it's going to be this amazing underlying yield that so
many different protocols and core will be able to benefit.
Even projects outside of the core ecosystem,
different centralized exchanges that we'll all be able to
benefit from. Stay tuned on that.
It's been a labor of love. Team's been hard at work
with Maple on this for many months.
We're very excited to bring it to you guys on here
extremely soon. I think that is going to help bring about a yield renaissance as you put it. You and
Kieran have been dropping the amazing vernacular on this space so far today. And I think it's
because now when you have this passive yield, you get to build things in ever more complex fashion,
and you can bring more and more products and services to people that they actually want
that meet their different risk and trust thresholds.
And I think that's a big win. I think one of the issues in Bitcoin, as in the reason that
Core exists, Bitcoin has no native yield. So by taking this native yield with you into DeFi,
you can do ever more interesting things, whether it's kind of simple borrowing lending with
self-repaying loans, or it's levered burps trading, you can do all that sort of stuff.
And having LSDBTC as an underlying collateral makes it that much more efficient and that much better. And I think whether it's through the
Core Accelerator, whether it's through amazing new builders like BITS, there's just a new wave
of DeFi energy coming into Core. And I think now is such an amazing time to get involved. I think
you're going to see some interesting TGEs happen soon, but Core season is definitely here. And it's
an amazing time to get involved, start providing liquidity, start trading, you know, start to kind of get used to all
these different protocols. Don't be put your assets to use. As Nev said it, you know,
my favorite thing is, you know, you shouldn't have idle assets. And I think core is a great
ecosystem, whether you're using stables, Bitcoin core, you get so many different opportunities to
go put your money to work today. Awesome. Super exciting stuff.
And then, you know, over the next year,
do you think we'll be seeing more
institutional yield products or more
degen like we were talking about with Volta?
What do you think we got up the pipeline?
So we're going to see a mix.
I mean, I think it's so important
just to kind of think about where Bitcoin is right now.
It's now part of the traditional financial system.
And we've got everybody on Wall Street talking about digital asset treasuries, different
ways to go increase Bitcoin per share, which is some sort of different way to call Bitcoin
yield, if you will.
And I think there's just so much demand for these different products and services.
And Core helps to enable this entire complex.
Be able to talk more about that soon.
But I think you're going to see a variety of new institutional offerings that come to market with Core at the heart of it.
I think on the other side, when you start to get a little more alt-seas and animal spirits,
all that starting to kick off, people want to go put their assets to work. And there's no
better Bitcoin ecosystem to go put your assets to work than Core. And I think we're going to see
not only new protocols, new liquidity, new users all get involved, but I think this is the time
for Bitcoin DeFi to really take off. And it is now going to be okay, if you're a retail person,
you kind of have different ways to get exposure and be able to put your assets to work, whether
it's through these wrappers on NASDAQ, or whether it's directly on chain, it'll be different products
and services out there for these different folks to go do so. And there's just so many interesting
things to go do on core that I think this DeFi renaissance is real and it's coming really soon. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing about
core Bitcoin, everything chain products for every kind of user institutional degen, whatever it is,
you just got to be earning yield, no idle assets. And then rich with, with all this yield on core,
do you think we're going to start to see like some Bitcoin yield aggregators emerge on core, do you think we're going to start to see like some Bitcoin yield aggregators emerge on core or something of that nature?
You're going to see everything.
I think there's like, we're still just at the first pitch of the first inning.
If you're a baseball fan or, you know, soccer, we're in like the first minute of the match,
you know, when we try to make it more international, I don't know the right cricket reference.
But in general, this is just such early days for Bitcoin in terms of actually going to
put it to use.
And there's just so much to go do.
And I think it's just so early that there's never been a better time to go get involved.
But it's so, so early.
And everybody out in this space is really a pioneer.
Hopefully, we've been with Core for many years and will be with Core for many years
in the future. But it's just so exciting because there's so few untapped spaces
in the world that are multi-trillion and we're 1% penetrated maybe. So great time to get involved.
Yeah, I always like to say that and put it in perspective for everyone listening.
This is really the very beginning. You're going to be telling your grandkids about
how when 1% of people own Bitcoin, you're out there in Bitcoin DeFi earning yield on your Bitcoin before anyone even thought of doing that.
So this really is the very beginning.
And as we can see, the name of the space, New Wallets is right there in the beginning.
I was hoping we'd have the full alpha to drop right here.
But that means it's coming very, very soon.
We can still talk about what it's gonna unlock um so this is the first time this is going to be the first
time that Bitcoin can actually earn yield without leaving cold storage from a
hardware wallet so anyone could take the stage here why is that such a big deal
for the Bitcoin community for those who can't already tell.
I'll jump in here if I've thought actually about this a lot,
which is
I'm an example of someone that has Bitcoin
in cold storage and I don't want to risk it
very much.
I don't want to transfer a Bitcoin to like a hot wallet to interact with
defy that's not part of like my bitcoin strategy i'll do that all day long with other assets
or most assets but being able to self-custody the bitcoin from cold storage into you know a well-audited contract, whatever that may be,
it unlocks that in a way that
doesn't make me nervous for a custody problem.
Because custody is always the crypto issue,
I think, especially at the institutional level,
which someone like Rich would have
a way better understanding than I do.
But if someone's sitting on $100 million
worth of Bitcoin or something,
they're not really wanting to risk the custody piece of that. So I think over time, this is
like step one of, I don't know, probably a hundred steps to make people comfortable with,
like the ETF is the perfect custody solution, right? For people that just want to have a ton
of it, but they don't want to risk like hot wallet issues. Anyway, that's my take.
Right. Right.
Yeah.
And I've spoken to so many Bitcoiners, just like you at all these events and everything.
They're simply not going to move their Bitcoin off their cold storage, off their hardware wallet, which makes complete sense.
I mean, custody is so huge.
So now the ability for them to earn, it's like 25% of all the Bitcoin out there.
Now they can finally start to earn with core staking and there's also going to be the core staking aspect from the hardware wallet
so they could also just easily dual stake and then that gets you wondering like you know what
do these bitcoiners think when when this kind of lets them know that you could earn yield on bitcoin
it enters them into like the core world really how many of them are gonna feel like all right i'll bridge over to bitcoin d5 maybe with stables maybe with bitcoin i'll get
into it um nev kieran what do you guys think how do you think this is gonna like change the psyche
of all these bitcoin maxis who are now earning on their yield you know what i mean i mean i'm
looking at it like i'm now just gonna take my wbtcTC and BTC from my Xverse wallet and throw it back into my hardware wallet and earn, you know, stack sats, right?
Like, I can all do it from my cold storage now.
There's no reason for me to have it in a self-custodial wallet like Xverse.
No, no, no, you know, bad against them.
I do love Xverse.
I've been utilizing their wallet for a long time.
But I'm really un understandable. Like the whole element of this is like, you know,
being in control of my own assets and being able to do that from my own
wallet, like that's a cook.
And Kieran, I know from like an institutional standpoint,
like what's your perspective on that?
Like even stables, even, you know, WBTC, which I hold,
and any Bitcoin maxi holds wbtc as well you know what
are you thinking from that element it's just gonna make everything way easier and it's really gonna
open up the floodgates for a lot of bitcoin that is word of the day idle like it doesn't get more idle than sitting in a hardware wallet and so
if you can have the same trust assumptions the same security of holding it in a hardware wallet
um but also earn this this base yield on top of that i mean like it's just a no-brainer like like
we always say like there's you know it's it's, it's still your keys, still your
coins.
Now your yield.
Um, so I would expect a lot of people to do this.
And I think it also will really interest people who haven't done this before because they
don't even open their mind to it until there's an opportunity to use their hardware wallet.
And so if they're going, Oh, okay.
My hardware wallet now supports Bitcoin staking.
I can stake Bitcoin. I can get, you know, this yield that is, you know, anything, okay, my hardware wallet now supports Bitcoin staking. I can stake Bitcoin.
I can get this yield that is anything.
Any yield is better than the 0% that you're getting currently.
And then also they're going to learn, hey, this ecosystem that I'm joining by staking, that I'm securing by staking, this is pretty interesting.
I'm going to hold on to these core token rewards.
I might even get more core token rewards in order to stake them. And by doing that, I can ramp up my yields.
And then all of a sudden, you're not just someone who has a dusty hardware wallet with some Bitcoin
in it. You're someone with Bitcoin, you're someone with core tokens, and then you're someone who's
using that device and those assets
to start to transact in Bitcoin DeFi. Eventually, maybe you'll become an LST BTC holder and you'll,
you know, venture into platforms like Bits and like ASX. And all of a sudden, like, you know,
we're really transforming the narrative of Bitcoin from, you know, a group of people who are, you
know, kind of just like gold bugs, you gold bugs burying their digital gold into real innovators
and testers of this potential new entire end-to-end financial economy.
So it's pretty transformative when you see the downstream effects
of something as simple as integrating with major hardware wallet providers.
It allows trustlessness to scale beyond what it was
previously capable of so i love that you introduced uh bits into that and i'm really generally
curious about diamond rock's like uh perspective oh he's waving i think rich has something to say
after this uh oh i think he's leaving i think he's got to leave early. Oh, that that's understandable. Thank you, Rich, for your time, bud. Um, I was really curious about,
um, you know, Diamond Rock's perspective on like the auto compounding strategies and kind of
chasing that, like instead of manually chasing that yield, like using, you know, their vaults
essentially to kind of watch that stack grow. Would that be a possibility even from a ledger wallet as well?
Hey, my friend. Yeah, good question. There is a potential for it down the road, but the mechanics of how we're doing it right now require certain like physical contracts in the
real world, you know, stuff that's not on chain. It's actually all US-based contracts with the counterparties and the strategy providers.
So part of that deal is that there's something called an account control agreement,
which is just a way that the custody of the assets are legally managed and held.
And you currently can't do that from a hardware wallet or from the user's hardware wallet um so there's a world where that evolves we just have to get the lenders
uh in this environment a lot more comfortable with the technology that allows for that
so definitely doable um not really the opportunity to do that at scale right now because for a platform like Bit,
you know, we're about keeping the yield as consistent, what's actually fixed, essentially.
So keeping the yield fixed at scale, that's really the key is to be able to get to sufficient scale
without dilution or hard caps or anything like that. So, yeah, of course, I echo the benefit of self-custody.
I think it's the original philosophy from which Bitcoin was born.
And so a lot of the people that have larger bags of BTC,
most of them didn't buy $100,000 per coin.
Most of them bought it, obviously,
quite some time ago, just held ever since. And some of those early philosophies are pretty strong,
especially in the early OGs of BTC. So I think there's definitely a huge unlock
for LST BTC being able to do that. And as a pioneer in that regard, I think
it'll open up other opportunities downstream for platforms like this.
Yeah, this is why I appreciate your perspective on it, because you're combining that safety net of institutional custody with that transparency, which is so nice.
I love hearing founders be fully transparent of what their narrative is and what their product is.
So it's really good to hear that from you yeah and you know we talk about core is the bitcoin
everything chain from like the blockchain side the defy side but you know we kind of have the
same kind of story going on on the yield side where it's no matter how you want to hold bitcoin
we want to have a way for you to earn yield whether that's in the hardware wallet or there's the bitcoin staking uh etp in europe you know trying to get different etfs going in
the us um then there's just the classic dual staking right from your hot your hot wallet so
you know the bitcoin everything chain it goes further than just the defi just the blockchain
like having ways for every single person no matter what they're comfortable with to be able to earn
that bitcoin yield um with whatever custody they have.
So it's just about slowly unlocking these integrations day by day, you know, getting
in the right rooms.
Rich probably had to leave because he's going to go talk to some congressman or something
about trying to get Bitcoin yield to them.
Like, who knows?
But it's just going to take some time day by day.
But as you can see, it's getting built out.
So, yeah, let's go past the hardware wallet
that announcement's coming very soon potentially you know very very very soon so you guys will see
but let's talk about asx for a bit we got rwas on core people all right we got real world assets
we're talking apartment complexes ben i want you to uh take the stage and kind of kind of get people
caught up to speed break down the whole original lord before we get into this maximus the yieldiest
yeah i like how you uh in your graphic you just went ahead and avoided that part of my name and
just said ben which is totally fine yeah i was uh i was feeling funny one day and i just changed my name which i think i want to
change it back but then you like lose twitter's annoying you like lose certain things you know
keep it keep it i i mean i am focusing on yield yield is maximus and i'm a i'm a huge fan of
the movie gladiator which is why my mask on there is the one that Maximus was wearing. It's all,
it's all tied to gladiator actually.
If you,
if you're interested,
that's the origin story of the oldest Maximus,
but now we can talk about what the origin story of ASX,
which is more important probably.
Yeah.
A little,
a little,
it's maybe a little more important,
but yeah,
let's,
let's get into it.
Yeah.
ASX is a whole first and then get into the,
you know, the first RWA. Cause I've been staking my ASX before there even was an RWA. a little more important but yeah let's let's get yeah asx the whole first and then get into the uh
you know the first rwa because i've been staking my asx before there even was an rwa so yeah
take it back to the very beginning oh speaking about auto compounding my art asx i gotta go
back and do that hold up yeah go do that right now uh all right yeah i'm gonna pull nevin to
this conversation a lot not in the origin story because, you know, I met Nevin later, but I'll keep this part as brief so we can focus more on the RWAs.
So in about 2020, 2021, I was and still am running a yield focused DeFi fund.
And then also I had BSC News and like my whole life was crypto at that point, which I think like a lot of us,
that was probably the case. And one of my brothers owns a real estate company.
And so I just started like, you know, for lack of a better term, I, you know, I put a bug in his
ear and I was like, we need to tokenize real estate. You know, no one's that, no one was
really doing that in 2020, but it's like, I I I was so down the rabbit hole of DeFi protocols and all that stuff.
I was like, we should just build a real estate DeFi protocol.
And it took probably a year's worth of conversations for him to even understand DeFi.
I think like that's an understandable position because, you know, he wasn't he didn't pay much attention to to crypto so it's like i'm trying to explain what a what pancake swap is and it's like it
like sounds silly when you explain it to like a normal person quite frankly so anyway i finally
break through and he's like okay this is really cool let's pursue this so like 2021 we're like pursuing this pretty hardcore and then like the market
tanks ftx collapses we kind of just like paused for lack of a better term you know and like
the whole world got crazy kind of you know from market standpoint and then you know for
we kind of circle back and like, let's just do it.
Like, if we're going to do it, we need to just pull the trigger.
Right.
So it was like kind of that moment.
It's like, we have all this research done.
We've talked to developers.
We've talked to lawyers.
We've done whatever.
So the whole point of ASX from the beginning was to tokenize the real estate in some fashion,
you know, and it was a matter of do we do it as a token, as an NFT?
There's different routes. The legal work took forever. That was really the biggest holdup. So we launched the token side of ASX before we were fully ready for the, um,
you know, the, the real estate stuff, but there was all the real estate stuff was kind of the
focal point. It just took a whole nother year of like the legal contracts,
legal agreements, different jurisdictions. And so that's kind of the org.
That's kind of how it, how the whole thing came to life.
And now obviously we've launched our first collection and now we're working on
our, our next property. So we can kind of go from there.
All right. All right. Yeah. That's a
great origin story. And damn, I didn't know you guys were working on it for that long,
but it's been forever. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the first drop. So the real world selection,
I guess your brother just had different properties all around. Is there a reason why you chose,
you know, the apartment you went with? Yeah.
So we're in this, so ASX specifically because of my brother's company and, you know, I'd
say my background.
And so it's like, I just focus on the crypto stuff, the DeFi side, the, you know, on-chain
web three area.
But what's really nice is my brother, his company owns and manages several hundred million
dollars worth of commercial real estate.
So that's apartment complexes, retail, a whole wide range of stuff.
And our initial strategy was before we try to raise funds towards a new deal, because that has its its own complexity in itself we could actually tokenize
some pre-existing deals and we can you know he was willing to to do that with us so it's like all
right we can actually look at what's performing well what has great yields what has great history
we know the properties so we're in this position to like instead of instead of having a starting
point of like all right we're going to raise money and get into a new property. We got to be like, we're going to raise money and get this exposure to an existing
deal that they already own and manage. And the Mountain View Apartments, it's like, all right,
this thing's just performing year over year extremely well. So that's a great first property
for us. And same thing with the next property, Franklin Jefferson Candlelight or FJC,
similar thing.
It's already owned and managed by them.
And so we can get this exposure to kind of build concept for the first several
properties.
And I think we'll get into concept building, but then when, you know,
they're going to start bringing new deals to us as uh asx could actually become a contributor to let's say a
development or whatever um but those usually have a little bit higher dollar commitment so there's
less flexibility that's that complexity i was talking about so we can you know we started with
properties we know and we watch them perform basically.
Short answer there.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
Makes sense. And then for the NFT holders, like what was the price of the NFT mint?
What APY are they getting on that first drop?
Yeah.
So each NFT was $10.
And on that first drop, the APY to the holders is 7.2%, you know, assuming based on pre-existing
cashflow, right?
So if performance increases or decreases over time, that can always change.
So it's subject to real world conditions, but it's been incredibly consistent.
So we feel good about that.
Let's go.
That's that passive RWA yield right there.
And so I know it like sold out right away right i remember this yeah we sold out it was under an hour i want to say
it was almost like under 30 minutes it was it was really funny uh i was so the because the white
list i'll be honest that was like the most stressful we did
every round within 24 hours so like we just didn't like i was oh my god like my wife was
out of town i had the kids i was like i didn't sleep at night because we were like minting
right and we had to change things every 12 hours or whatever it was like it was awful but it was
awesome at the same time and like the whiteitelist mints just like in the last hour
they kept trickling in you know people kept because there was a maximum of three they kept
kind of like you know there was a big push at the beginning of the whitelist round and then it just
kind of trickled over the next 12 hours and then when public round went it just yeah within 30
minutes to an hour it was sold out and then i could finally like
rest i guess and relax which was nice yeah congrats man that was a big launch and um you know forget
about the past let's talk about this this new one now so what's the story with this one how is it
different i'm guessing it's a new apartment um i see there's some new art for it i don't know give us the whole rundown on this new drop when's it coming yeah so uh it is a different property what what
we really wanted to do well not really one well i mean it's kind of up built in you know each
collection is attached to its own individual property so there's no overlap there for holders
or anything and that actually allows holders to diversify across, like build a diversified real estate
exposed portfolio in Web3, which is super neat. Yeah. So this one, it's a different location.
The first one was actually in Arkansas in the US. This one is in Missouri in the US.
The first one was actually in Arkansas in the US.
This one is in Missouri in the US and the yields even higher.
It's 8.5%.
This has been like a,
this property has been kicking ass for lack of a better term.
And it's we're dropping next Thursday.
So the raise is going to be a bit bigger because we're,
you know, I think the first raise was really a proof of concept raise. It's like, does anyone care about 7.2% APR from RWAs? And I think that
answer ended up being yes, which was fantastic. And so the next one coming in at 8.5%, you know,
an even better yield. And, uh, I think it, hopefully it goes well. I think think we're we're excited and we're ready for it
and yeah the art we have a new artist for this one they they worked with they're a big studio
and they like killed it and the art has a whole story attached to nev as well uh he was a he's
the man but these guys this collection is super cool looking so on top of the the yield and everything you you
do get this really neat uh art piece with it yeah i saw that it's from uh 9f studio right
nev do you have any uh yes any word on how that came about or are you the guy that made that
happen nev uh actually did actually i i don't want to be the person to say that can you guys hear me yeah yeah sorry i don't want to be the person that takes credit for that claim uh spring roll
was actually the one who made that introduction um so yeah i think that uh 9f cooked that that was
a huge uh you know benefit to as. The initial artist we did intro.
But yeah, I can't take a claim to that fame.
That is definitely spring.
I will say this one was spring,
but I'll give Nev credit where he was like,
we got to do a pixelated art concept.
And I'm, again, like my whole background is DeFi.
So I kind of just went with it, to be honest.
You know, I'm'm like i'm more focused
on the yield anyway and so uh it ended up being really cool and the first the first collection
is really cool too this one's just like a step up i think yeah no this one's just way this one's
sick i'm not gonna lie and um yeah then give us like the big picture asx how does this all fit in
what's going on with ASX token?
I don't know.
What are the future plans?
Sure.
So, you know, on the RWA side, we have, because of our kind of our RWA launch strategy, we have the next properties already pre-selected.
So we already know what they're going to be.
And again, they're really well-performing properties,
more apartment complexes, I think is our initial focus. So what we're looking into now, you know,
I would say from our, the beginning, our idea was like, you know, if you're familiar with like,
keep it simple, stupid, right? Like that was kind of our go to go to market product. So the, the NFT was
this introduction to say, we want, you know, this, this product to be easily acquired by pretty much
anyone. Uh, we airdrop the yield. You don't need to stake or claim. Uh, that was a super important
piece to me. And we actually bridged, well, I don't know if the use deployed a preexisting multi-sender on core that anyone could use.
It's called disperse.app.
So we actually, our team actually brought that to core.
So you can like, we can, we can send yield to 600 people for 25 cents.
Right.
So that's where the traditional finance,
they can't even touch that.
Like it's not even close, right?
So we distribute our yield to 600 holders
of our RWA collection for a quarter
and two seconds, basically,
which is, you know, insane.
And so what's next is,
A, more properties to come on.
And then we are working on ways to actually further tokenize the NFTs so that we can tie into all the core yield strategies.
And that's something we're kind of working on in the back end right now.
We have high level concepts talking with partners.
But, you know, when we when the purpose of the nft was so we wouldn't
have to dilute the yield right and you have this uh basic peer-to-peer marketplace that works out
really well for it and then once we further you know energize it into tokens it unlocks like an
insane amount of possibilities you know you can lend, borrow against it, you LP it.
There's so many interesting things.
So again, the product itself at its baseline is simple.
Buy an NFT, earn yield.
That's what we're all about.
But then for people that want to go crazy,
like our friend Nev over here,
we're going to give them that ability to do it
yes sir i mean they call him yulius maximus i don't know what other answer i expected more
yeah oh yeah like on last week i i was diving into like how we do this and i i don't know what
happened but i ended up sending nev about 75 messages on discord while he was on vacation, like walking through what I was thinking.
And then he like finally got back to me like two days later.
He's like,
leave me alone.
I've been there.
These things happen.
Just messaging him a hundred times.
All right.
Well,
thank you,
Ben.
Now,
diamond rock.
Let's get you up on stage,
sir.
We've had,
we've had you on before,
like last week, but for get you up on stage, sir. We've had you on before, like last week, but
for anyone new to the project, let's do a quick refresher on what Bits is,
where does it fit in Bitcoin DeFi, why does it matter? Let's get you up here, sir.
Beauty, thanks a lot. Kind of hard to follow all these other big brains and the cool things that
you guys have been talking about, but I'll do my very best. So Bits obviously was born out of a similar problem, I guess, as to the origin
story of Core in that for years, everybody has been talking about or asking for Bitcoin yields.
And until only recently, was the market mature enough to build scalable structures to actually earn yield on Bitcoin in different design styles and different architectures and different protocols.
But Bits was intended to be kind of the contact surface between what works in TradFi and what we all love and believe works in DeFi.
And so it's kind of taking the best of both worlds.
So instead of trying to keep everything entirely on chain, because in many cases that doesn't
scale, I mean, the exception probably being LST, BTC, the way that it's been architected.
But generally speaking, the things on chain
don't scale significantly. And if they do, the yield is not necessarily real, in air quotes.
The yield is still coming from some sort of inflationary token somewhere, whether it's
being converted to USDC or being converted to Bitcoin. that's always a challenge. So we wanted to create something that was, the yield was, first of all, for the first
product at least, fixed.
So we knew the yield, it was predictable.
We knew we had enough lending capacity to scale into the multiple billions.
We knew we had enough strategy provider capacity to do the same so that we can go to market and say,
for hundreds of years, people have been using banking and investment banks and other financial institutions to do something similar. Generally speaking, when you earn yield anywhere in
traditional finance, there is some mechanic of what BITS is doing that is actually generating
that yield, different permutations of a similar mechanic.
And so we said, hey, why don't we take that, lay that over top of what's happening on chain
and provide the same opportunity for people with digital assets.
And so here we are.
So Bits, again, we kind of, Rich and I have been friends for a long time and have been
talking about the future of Bitcoin forever.
And I've really respected what the founding team and the rest of the contributors have done over the years on core.
So it just made sense to team up in a sense and try to bring institutional corporate yields, institutional banking yield on chain and so here we are
yes sir that real yield that institutional yield all in a liquid token too yeah guys you could
just continue to use bits um while you're earning that base yield you can even lock it up to earn
even more yield um so let's let's get a little more into it diamond rock so what happens with
the bitcoin that people supply
or use to mint this bits um where who's the custodian how does that all work behind the scenes i need to add some context to this guys you guys keep saying institutional like this is
something that retail users can't use i really need to make some clarifications here guys this
is for the retail users okay this is not for the institutionals all right this is for the retail users. Okay. This is not for the institutionals. All right. This is
for you, you guys on chain, the active community members. This is how you earn that auto compounding
yield boys. The stuff that I chase, do you think I'm here trying to chase institutional yields
or sorry, chase those institutions like I'm an institution?
No, fam.
I'm here trying to chase those yields as a retail user.
And I just wanted to really specify that because Dylan.
It's actually a really good point, Nev.
And in fact, when we speak about the yields as institutional yield,
I think the positioning is actually not that it's meant only for institutions.
Although it may sound that
way um the the actual meaning of that is that it's institutional grade yield so the same yield that
institutions have been getting for tens or hundreds of years that most of us haven't had access to as
individuals we're now opening up to you know and same same thing with ASX, with the multifamily real estate.
You know, we're now starting to open up these kind of institutional grade earning opportunities that are backed by very sophisticated, powerful and enforceable contracts and all of these other things in the real world.
But we're now making that stuff easily accessible to people on chain, in many cases all over the world,
for smaller transaction amounts than you would need.
You can get into bits with as little as $100 if you want to.
You would never be able to access those types of strategies without many multiples of millions
and almost insurmountable fees for most people until you get to super scale.
So yeah, that's a really good point, actually.
The product is built for individuals, small companies, small entities, all the way up
to, of course, if institutions want to come and deposit hundreds of millions, they're
welcome to do so.
But yeah, that's a really good point.
Thanks for bringing that up.
Yeah, a lot of people talk about up. Yeah. I just, I,
a lot of people talk about institutional yield and I just wanted to kind of really break down that barrier and kind of simplify it for the masses.
Right. Cause like the average user doesn't understand that we're talking about
providing them that institutional yield as an average user. Right.
Right. So essentially, Diamond, this is based on like my knowledge of your DAP.
So essentially diamond, this is based on like my knowledge of your DAP, you know,
You know, you stake BTC and essentially you receive BF BTC and you start earning that yield while still keeping your liquidity self-custodial.
No, it's BITS token.
Oh, sorry. BITS token. My bad. Sorry. I apologize.
It's BITS token. Yeah, so fundamentally that's correct. So what you're doing is you're staking or depositing your BTC or BTC wrapper.
We accept wrapped Bitcoin and CBBTC, so the Coinbase wrapper of Bitcoin, as well as soon to be probably within the next few days, mainnet Bitcoin as well.
But whichever deposit asset you choose, they're all essentially canonical.
What happens is those assets are then moved into a tri-party custody agreement and a wallet managed
by an institutional lender. Now, the institutional lender is one of the largest companies in the
space. They're really weird about being public about it, but they are a many
multi-billion dollar business. And we have contracts with them with respect to custody
that are governed by the state of New York. And if you know anything about finance in America,
the state of New York is probably the most particular about enforcement. So we're obviously
very confident in that.
What happens with the lender is they then hold the Bitcoin there
and lend a strategy provider, a certain amount of USDC against that Bitcoin.
The strategy providers have to, again, also under the same contract arrangements
and very strict margin management and hedging and so on agreements on their part.
They have to use the proceeds to earn yield in a very, very short-term risk-adjusted way.
Now the strategy provider here is Hidden Road Ripple, which is essentially one of the
is essentially one of the other largest companies in the space.
other largest companies in the space. The amount of
The amount of brand recognition that comes with a company like Ripple and Hidden Road,
as well as the balance sheet, is what's essentially backing the strategies that they're employing.
So it's very, very risk-adjusted.
It's, again, fixed, and it's governed by as much of the institutional kind of quality of yield that you would hope for in traditional markets, but now on-chain.
Right, right. And this is why we call it the institutional yield, just because it's got that institutional compliance, that institutional custody, institutional yield profile.
But guys, this will be be the BITS token
will be available on Molting
for you to swap into like this
Neve is right it's not just for institutions
like us DGens can also
be getting that passive Bitcoin
yields for sure
so DiamondRock we got a couple minutes left
I want to talk about the future
what is the future of BITS looking like
or maybe even the future of Bitcoin DeFi if you want to talk about that I. What is the future of BITS looking like? Or maybe even the future of Bitcoin DeFi, if you want to talk about that. I don't know. What are you excited
about going forward? Holy crap. You gave me an open mic in three minutes. Good luck, sir.
I'll be going for an hour. But honestly, I think the future of BITS and Bitcoin DeFi or Bitcoin
Finance, I think we'll see a general increase in yields, even the way
that Bits is doing things, as we can bring the cost of borrowing down and different things that
scale. Excuse me, of course. I think there's many other ways, and forgive the imagery here,
but there's many ways to skin a cat. And so I think that even though BITS is in some ways pioneering kind of the institutional
traditional finance yield structures, I think there's going to be a lot of other participants,
a lot of things that you can build on top of BITS, structured products, leverage,
products, leverage, looping, hint, hint, wink, wink, to start to really, and again, a relatively
risk-adjusted way, maximize some of those yields in a meaningful way. We also are going to get to
the point of a fixed rate stables deposit. I'm going to leave that there for now because that's
coming a little bit down the road, but it will be quite attractive and it will have as low risk as you could possibly imagine for anything ever in DeFi to have real fixed yield.
So super exciting.
I think there's a lot of promise.
I'm stoked for LSTBTC.
Ultimate goal down the road would be able to have LSTBTC be the BITS canonical base yield.
down the road would be able to have LST BTC be the BITS canonical base yield.
So we're obviously watching closely and super excited about the architecture
and the rollout of that product.
All right. All right. Low, low risk, fixed yield. I'm excited for that.
We're wrapping up the space right now. It's almost 12 East.
12 East.
So anybody else have any last words to say before we, before we end this?
So anybody else have any last words to say before we,
before we end this?
Minton RWA NFT next Thursday.
Love you all.
Diamond rock,
you're in there.
Any,
any parting words to the court?
she's it's core season baby oh yeah
damn it you stole or was that kieran
that's been my phrase on on x lately too it's core season baby uh but yeah i think there's so
much exciting stuff happening honestly all at once here um on on core and for Bitcoin in general, I mean, all time high yesterday,
super exciting. And there's a lot still to come. So keep your eyes peeled to all the core channels,
all the, you know, core dApps, pun not intended, the main dApps on core, there's a lot cooking.
So it's going to be a fun back half of the year.
Nev,
any last words to send us out on?
He's probably,
he's probably yield farming right now as we speak.
Too busy to say goodbye.
All right.
Well,
thank you everybody on stage who spoke with us as well as Rich who dipped
out early.
And thank you everybody for listening.
We'll be back in two weeks.
Every other Thursday we're doing this space. Guys, I think the hardware wallet integration might be getting announced today. out early and thank you everybody for listening we'll be back in two weeks every other thursday
we're doing this space guys i think the hardware wallet integration might be getting announced
today so keep your eyes peeled all right big big stuff coming you guys are gonna love it when you
see which hardware wallet it is all right all right i'll just say that all right thank you
guys for being here once again we'll see you guys all next week keep staking your core in bitcoin
keep getting that yield peace
Host
Core DAO 🔶
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