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RWA Tokenization
Recorded: April 4, 2025 Duration: 0:52:21Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, industry leaders Vangelis, Chris, and Tom explore the transformative potential of Real World Assets (RWAs) in the crypto space, emphasizing the rise of tokenization, the importance of stable coins, and innovative projects like Nautilus Asset Management. They highlight emerging trends that signal a shift towards integrating traditional assets with blockchain technology, paving the way for new growth and yield opportunities.
Full Transcription
Great. Thanks for your patience, everyone. Let's get started. So my name is Vangelis. I'm on the research arm at say labs is a PhD in math from
Cambridge computer science background and crypto as well and today we're super
lucky to have Christian and Tom Ceres let me start with a quick intro about
Chris so Chris is the CEO and co-founder of Plume. As a lot of people know,
he founded in 2024 to redefine how people use and think about RWAs. He leads the team as a
seasoned executive who previously served as a principal at Scale Venture Partners.
With a distinguished career in tech, he held key positions, including VP of product at Rainforest QA,
director of product at Coupa Software,
and successfully founded Xpenser, later acquired by Coupa.
I think it'd be best to...
Like, it's so hard to do justice for both of you guys
because you have very rich backgrounds.
So let me pass the ball to tom to
give us an intro about yourself tom please and you know how uh your journey is apart um gosh so uh
vangelis good to see you actually so everybody knows vangelis was uh an intern
Vangelis was an intern for one of our companies many, many years ago.
He helped us write a seminal white paper back in 2016, 2017.
Yep, end of 2016, beginning of 2017.
Yeah, on the future of blockchain-enabled supply chains.
So very RWA relevant.
That was when we were doing work with Merck Pharmaceutical
and some of the aerospace companies and stuff like that.
FedEx as well, too.
Anyways, my background, Silicon Valley,
as far back as 2008,
had a great opportunity to raise capital, to build the largest political
fundraising tech platform in the United States. We scaled it to about 70,000 political operations,
power presidential campaigns, all the way down to dog catcher, if you will um sold that company in 2014 uh along the way i crowdsourced the first ever
internet series a back in 2012 we raised eight million dollars in 10 days on the internet which
is pre-crypto well maybe not pre-bitcoin but certainly pre-crypto um and that was pretty
awesome um that was in a collaboration with um uh angel list um and Naval at the time when he was building AngelList.
So it was really cool. I got to really see the power of more liquid markets online and
things like that. And then I spent about a year hanging out at BCG doing digital innovation work
for all the big companies, you name it, basically all of them.
And then built Animal Ventures,
which is where I met Vangelis.
We kind of carried along a lot of that same work.
We did a lot of prototyping stuff with early,
like everybody from the parody guys
who wanted to do Web3 to Fabian Vogelsteller
who wrote RC20 Web3.js, to Dominic Williams,
co-founder of Dfinity Network and the Near guys, hung out with a bunch of those lots of early crypto people.
Mostly balance sheet investing at the time.
Kind of really thought, hey, when ETH hit a thousand bucks, well, maybe we're good at this.
And decided to form an offshore vehicle because that was basically how you had to do it back then.
Raised a bunch of money from very early people who were taking a big bet on us and big bet on crypto.
Deployed capital into about 63 projects.
Most of most of the ones that you've heard of.
I've been doing that, put that fund into realization mode about a year ago.
So, you know, it's just kind of hanging out for the next three to five years
while it goes into realization.
And then building a couple of new companies today.
One is Nautilus Asset Management, which is going to be really focused on digital asset stockpiles and tokenized treasuries for maybe initially state and municipal governments that could translate over into family office tooling and things like that as they begin to think about treasury management in a new way
which is very involved with you know i think real world assets are going to be a huge part of that
because it's so relatable to a vast majority of those users and then the other one which is a
little bit more label labor of love because i love sailing is a project called musta, which is kind of focused on fractionalized yacht ownership
and trying to create sort of a tokenized time capability
and experiences as a service
that sits on top of that tokenized platform.
So those are the two main things I'm working on today.
And then otherwise, mostly coaching a lot of founders
and hanging out, taking on little things here and there.
Awesome, Tom.
A lot of things to unpack there.
And yes, for the record, it was your videos and Bettina's, of course,
that actually got me to reach out back in 2016, 2017.
And I kind of started my journey.
So we go back like years ago.
I know.
We definitely inspired a lot of people, which was fun.
Absolutely. Great. I mean, Chris, would you like to tell us a little more about yourself,
your story, and then Plume? Yeah, sure, sure. Tough to fall. I'm not nearly
accomplished, to be honest, and nor is eloquent. But I'll keep it quick. Look, I'm mostly, like I
said, I'm mostly a founder, doing a bunch of random things.
I got started sort of out of school, mostly because I had did an internship at Foxconn before.
I remember thinking, God, this is fucking terrible. You know, I don't do that.
And so I was like, well, what else am I going to do?
You didn't love the Foxconn life, huh?
Yeah, exactly. You know, big surprise surprise you know working working at foxconn
is a bad idea that sounds awesome exactly exactly so um god you know so i just got caught up in a
bad crowd and was just kind of you know doing enterprise software um and uh and we ended up
kind of just doing startup stuff out of that um and um you know long story short i did every kind
of shitty idea known to man
um and then at the very end you know all the real hard problems and tough problems in life you know
things like dating and things like food delivery you know and all that kind of stuff you know
classic idiot stuff so i did all of those problems and then none of them worked at the very end of
the day we said look you know we're about to run out of money um and i have to god forbid get a job
now so like you know if we're gonna build it if we're gonna
like do anything i at least like would like it would be building things for other people at least
we're gonna build something like we built something that at least if it's one user and it's just me
that's okay i'll be all right you know so at least i'll feel like we did something and so we just
built this thing and um you know big surprise when you try and actually build something to use it's
like starts to work so it just kind of took off right place right time uh but we did expense
management right mobile stuff we started building internal financial software for ourselves. It turns out
like finances suck and are hard and everything. And so anyway, well, we were one of the first,
I think mobile first and everything. And so it took off, put in the app store and it worked.
And then within six months got acquired. So it was great. And then I was there kind of like,
had a real job and ran a big team and all that. Three years took the company public
after that. And so it was the whole thing kind of going from five to 100 million revenue from 50 to 2 000 people
and one day after we went public i woke up and i realized that a team of like 200 people i want
to kill myself every day um and i'm like god back at foxconn dude you know and so i was like all
right time to get out of here um and so i took off um with uh with the boys basically the founders
of uh of expense with us and we're, hey, let's do another one.
It turns out I was the only one dumb.
Like, yeah, let's just go.
And everyone's like, oh, but I got a big package.
I got to think about it.
And I was like, shit, I already quit, dude.
And so at that point-
A true entrepreneur.
I already quit.
Exactly.
So I sort of figured out what to do with that.
And so I got caught up in two different things.
One is I started angel investing a lot.
So I was like, okay, I've got no job and I've got some money. How do I just blow it all instead?
So I started angel investing a bunch.
And then two is a friend of mine asked me to help run a product
that was coming to come rate first QA.
It was distributed QA platform.
And so you push a button and people around the world
come test your software, right?
So like a verticalized scale AI, verticalized mech Turk,
those kinds of things, you know?
And the thing that's good about that,
I think the thing that I learned at least was,
you know, we realized very quickly
that the community was the value, right?
That was the kind of the product really,
as much as I love the software,
we built the community was the value.
So we asked them like,
so what do you guys want?
And everyone said, look,
there's a regularity to QA that I like
that is not in labeling
and it's not in other things.
So I can treat you like a real income source,
but like, you know,
you keep making me offer up
to my shitty major currency, you know?
And like all these people are in Latin America, Eastern Europe, all these places that like look i read a whole bdc
needs you know like okay one that's just like i don't have to build these off ramps it was a ways
you're to manage let's just do that um and then two is um you know it's sort of like oh that's
a really use case you know something's going on here you know so that and that was right around
d5 summer um and then you know those two kind of things just kind of came together i've been kind
of like in like a known crypto but i can't say i was like really deep in the, you know, those two kind of things just kind of came together. I've been kind of like a known crypto, but I can't say I was like really deep in the game, you know.
And, you know, since then I started paying attention.
And I feel like once you like start doing, I feel like it just rots your brain in a way that you can't do anything else after.
And so like I was just kind of focused on crypto after and couldn't do anything else.
Meanwhile, I started doing a bunch of angel investing.
My angel investing kind of like started to work out.
And a couple of venture firms called me.
I went to go do venture capital for a little bit doing more avs and c's
uh you know um and uh you know it was a bunch of fun uh which means it wasn't fun but uh it was a
bunch of fun and uh you know and like you know we learned a lot of things um but i was still you
know wanted to do you know i still wanted to kind of come back to startup life um and so when the
world went to hell uh after ftx and, there's basically like two views, which one is that this is all scam.
It's all going to zero.
So then people were right.
Or two, that it's massively mispriced and misunderstood right now.
And now is the time to get into it.
And so I'd known my co-founder Teddy for a while through a bunch of folks.
They were actually through Jeff, founders of Say, and a couple people.
And so I'd known Teddy for a while.
We were talking about a bunch of things.
And our orientation at the time was like, I think you i don't know if you guys remember
but the time it was like it's a very bad time in crypto you know it was sort of like there's
nothing going on super painful sort of yeah exactly and and you know even then it's like
i feel like now there's a bunch of stuff everybody was a criminal that then you can touch that
you're a criminal exactly exactly um and it was really we're just doing the same on different
chains we're finding
new ways to rob each other you know it's just hotball the cash rolling around is that kind of
stuff you know i just kind of felt like we're just doing these micro optimizations in d5 versus
actually trying to do something else and so we just got caught up on this like growth story you
know if we're gonna do anything let's grow crypto and i you know we we like living on chain better
so but there's like only so much i can do here and there's a sort of gap between here and the
real world how do we like put those two things together? And it seemed obvious
to me that that was like a thing to do. I went to talk about protocols and RWA is, you
know, I've seen a bunch of Angel and Teddy had seen a bunch of BNB turn on board into
finance at BNB. And we want to talk to them. And I always think the job of the founders
is thought change, you know, and so like, you know, that was really it's like, you know,
I never used it like RWA ship before, you know, I'd like known Cent known centrifuge and they're good friends of ours now but like i'd never used it
to be just a great project actually lucas is super smart dude yeah yeah exactly martin's one of our
angels uh investors and uh you know watching the whole team well so um so yeah yeah so like um yeah
so yeah we never use those things but i realized that like there was change happening at least
there was basically the bets here the et ETF coming in is going to be a positive
thing, right?
America would flip back to pro crypto and number three, the world would continue to
go to hell, which would mean that the stable coin would continue to go up, right?
And become a thing, which would be sort of the Trojan horse for other tokenized assets.
Right.
And so that was kind of the bet that we made and ended up being right.
I think what we did in fact was that Larry Fink would get, you know,
mega horny for RWAs and talk about tokenization every single day on CNBC,
you know, and that's also positive.
But, you know, all these things kind of came into effect and sort of,
you know, now we're, you know, I think, you know,
a lot of people think we're like deep in it.
I think it's still very early in the game, you know, but, you know,
I think it's one of the, I think it's one of the more exciting places. It's still super early, crazy early.
Yeah, 100%. So I think there's a ton to do here. And so I'm just, I, you know,
I'm hyped about all of it. And I think, you know, you know, we're not already maxing by any means.
But I do think that like, I think there it's an addition, you know, versus some people think of
this like, let's just bring trad stuff and like make trad stuff crypto. I think of it more as
how do we bring, how do we bring the real world on chain, right. And use this in a crypto native
context. Right. And sort of, you know, I think, especially if you look across, if you look across how do we bring the real world on chain, right? And use this in a crypto native context, right?
And sort of, you know, I think,
especially if you look across history,
you know, it's very simple.
When there's a new medium
or a new technology platform, right?
You know, the thing that leads the way
is not a carbon copy of old thing onto the new thing.
You know, it's usually some new thing
that takes advantage of the native architecture
of that thing, right?
So like take mobile as an example.
The thing that really drove mobile, right?
Was Uber, was Airbnb,
because you have location, you have push notifications,
you have things you couldn't do before that made it
a different thing.
And now I can sure I can read the news on my phone too,
which I could do on the web, but on desktop.
But that was the thing that really
really made it click for a lot of people.
And so I think to me, tokenization has the same feel,
which is like, sure, we can just carbon copy,
tradify, ship, put it on chain, and make fun admin easier.
But that seems like a massive unutilization of what you should be doing with this.
But when you can fit it into a crypt native context and blur these two worlds together
and give these things new features and new things that you couldn't do before,
outside of its access and operations, then it begins exciting.
And then we can actually do new things that really improve them at a fundamental level
versus just, again know, again,
saving five vips on fun admin.
Who gives a fuck, you know?
So anyway, I'll stop there.
No, this is great stuff.
Just to set the stage for the audience as well,
can we go back to first principles a little bit
and first, like, discuss about, like, what RWA is
and what are the benefits by bringing them, like, on-chain?
Like, what are the problems that we've got with TroutPy and what's the clear
value prop so that, you know, we're,
we're sure that this is not like a shoehorn solution.
Would anybody like to take it away?
Yeah. I mean, I think it's a,
if there's an inevitability factor to it more than it is, you know, mean, obviously, you're going to gain a lot of efficiencies out of it. Like, I think that's an obvious thing. I think there's an inevitability factor that it's just going to happen. You just have to accept it. It makes everything easier.
some like micro improvements. You know, if you look at, say, SuperState, what they're doing with
tokenized treasury bills. Okay, great. They've dematerialized a paper instrument and turned it
into a digital instrument, but now it's programmable, right? Now I can build it in a
DeFi smart contract. Now I can do real-time sweeps. I can do real-time NAV, and that's all
happening right now. I can be in and out of a position on a Saturday afternoon,
which is not possible today, not really.
And I think when you start to think about those kinds of things,
that's a super easy entry into the space.
Some of the things that we've looked at,
there's about a trillion and a half dollars
in treasury bills held by states in the US, just the US, right? If you just simply start
dematerializing those paper treasury bills and creating digital instruments that are programmable,
the liquidity that's going to flow into crypto is going to be absolutely astronomical. It's
going to be massive. And these guys are doing really well. I think in just six months, they've gone from zero to
probably almost a billion in AUM, mostly selling to crypto hedge funds. But that's just the
beginning, right? It's going to get a lot bigger than that much more quickly. And some of the
things that we've looked at, like even at Nautilus, where we've sat down with mayors at this point,
looked at like even at nautilus where we've sat down with mayors at this point you know we've sat
down with state representatives um various uh political leaders just talking to them interviewing
them you know most of them are still scared shitless of bitcoin despite the sort of federal
level kind of you know policy talk it'll probably happen at the municipal and state level first
and that'll be scared because they don't know how it works or like why are they scared well when you know you have volatility that drops you know
60 percent risk to take politically i think yeah that's it's political and it's political risk
right it's like i'm going to lose my job if i lose constituent value so there's really easy
ways to kind of go in there and like kind of sell through with very simple instruments that kind of push the yield opportunities for them so that they can go from being, you know, having these huge deficits to improving revenue to closing that deficit gap.
Right. In a way that is not a burden on the constituents, it doesn't increase taxes.
that is not a burden on the constituents.
It doesn't increase taxes, right?
You're actually converting from one balance sheet asset
to another and making it more productive.
So if you go to a lot of these municipalities,
they're sitting on billions of dollars
of unproductive land, parking lots,
like really fucking boring shit
that they can't really do anything with.
They can't really make any money on.
Maybe they're even losing money on it actually.
And, you know, do we,
do we even need to tokenize the land right now?
Maybe not.
Can we just put it into some other kind of current financial instrument to
unlock liquidity,
then immediately move that into more productive crypto assets,
then be like, now great. great, browse all these quantitative AI strategies
for delta neutral opportunities where you can squeeze out another,
you know, a couple hundred basis points or something like that, whatever.
Show them very simple, basic DeFi capabilities on those things.
You know, you're going to convert a lot of existing assets very quickly,
and you're going to help the entire Web3 economy
because you're going to unlock enormous levels of liquidity.
So I look at things like that that I think are going to be really valuable
and are ultimately inevitable.
It's just there's an inevitability factor to it.
So I think that's really valuable. inevitable, right? It's just, there's an inevitability factor to it. So, you know,
I think that's really valuable. And then you start looking at other kinds, like, for example,
yachting, you know, you look at like some of the things that we're thinking about over at Musta,
there's a lot of these yachts similar to Uber, right? Uber's original thesis was there's black
cars that basically sit there and do nothing all day, right? It's a stranded asset essentially.
And so the real innovation there was here,
you got this like stranded asset.
I'm going to have one phone and they're going to ping each other available
supply demand, right?
And then there's a formula and you're going to match them.
And they built a fucking massive business out of just doing that.
And I think you're going to have a similar thing happen to a lot of other kinds of assets like yachts and planes
and villas you know no different than airbnb right um kind of capturing a lot of these like
stranded asset opportunities and then creating new ways to enhance yield on those stranded assets that are no longer just sitting there
ultimately. And then from there, you can unlock really cool features like on-chain provenance,
and you can start to kind of pull in kind of new supply demand forecast capabilities using
on-chain agents or whatever. But that's kind of how I'm thinking about the ultimate approach
to a lot of these different things and unlocking a lot of new value that has not been unlocked
before. Yeah. Maybe to add to what Tom's saying, look, I agree with all that. And maybe zooming
out a little bit, like, I was thinking RWA is a little bit differently than I think a lot of
people have described it, which is not to say it's wrong. I think it's all true. The way I see it, I mean, maybe starting,
the classic definition of the RWA, right,
is taking something in the real world, right,
issuing a token against it, right?
And that can be anything.
It can be currencies.
It can be a house.
It can be a T-bill or whatever the hell it is, right?
And the sort of canonical thing, right,
the thing everyone talks about today is a stable coin.
Stable coin is the only, and in my opinion,
still the only RWA that matters,
right?
Everything else is mostly for show still,
right?
It's changing,
you know,
but it's still early,
right?
Just,
you know,
through all stats,
stable is the only one that's,
that's made any real thing work,
right?
And so that's the sort of definition of the RWA in the classic sense,
right?
The way I think about the RWA for its worth,
when I think about reward assets,
I think about it as the way to interact with the real world, right? On-chain, right? And to me, that can be anything.
And so, you know, for example, I think a lot of people sort of group art of tokenization together,
right? And I think it's true. I think tokenization is a huge part of our viewers, right? But I think
there's only one piece of it, right? For example, you know, we do a lot of stuff with real world data,
right? And you can take a lot, like you can sort of represent as represent assets and represent items without tokenizing right tokenizing is like anyone who's
done it right knows the same thing it's slow it's painful it's a it's just such a pain in the ass to
do you know but once it's there it's good it's fundamental it stays there right but the other
side of it is like you can do a whole lot of other things that are sort of like to me like these net
new things out on top right meaning again programmability of assets is huge yes well not not even that
like you can like i think the thing that's always fun to me about these about art of it is like
you can create like these entirely new markets that don't exist today off of uh off of like
data again and like mix things together right like today i'll give you a simple example what
are protocols you can take out like a 20x left long on pokemon cards right um right and like
you don't need to tokenize every card in the world to do that you know you just bring a bring a feed together, prices, normalize and put it into a chart, right. And put into the
sort of crypto experience, one second chart, you know, and let people do what they have to do on
it. Right. And so like, if you do that, I love the Pokemon card one. That's awesome.
That's a great example.
You could begin to, I think you could begin to combine these things to represent different
things. I think you start to realize that most things in the world today are synthetic versions of what people want them to be, right?
Meaning, take WorldCoin.
WorldCoin today is not, like, some people care about this, like, silver orb and the eyeballs and everything.
I think most people see it as a tokenized version of Sam Allman, right?
It's a synthetic version of Sam Allman's value, right?
Which is, like, you know, if Sam Allman gets fired, WorldCoin dumps, right?
Sam Allman, you know, Sam gets rehired, it pumps again.
Sora 2.0 comes out, pumps again.
You know, the mini model comes out, pumps again, right?
Like, if you actually put these things together,
that's actually exactly WorldCoin trades, right?
If you look at Ondo,
it just trades exactly to BlackRock News
because of BlackRock Investor, right?
And then if you look at Nvidia, right?
It trades to AI sentiment, right?
Of course, there's some fundamentals, but like, it really trades to sentiment around that. So I look at these things right it trades to ai sentiment right of course there's some fundamentals but like you know it's it's really trades the sentiment around that so i
look at these things like that to me is like an argument if you look at like shitters right
tramp you know donald trump and boden and and everything out there right even routine or
whatever right every single thing that happens in the world right gets tokenized in some fashion
right but today there's just really inefficient means of doing it right today you know there's
other two ways you find some synthetic version, right?
Meaning you go find the manufacturer of the Saratoga bottles and try and bet on that once the Austin stuff came up.
Or, right, you then go bet on Routine, on Solana, right?
You know, a 20K market cap token, right?
And so, like, those are the two ways of doing things.
Those are really shitty ways to express your ideas.
Because on one side, there's so much baked into this, like, Saratoga bottles water company.
That's not a good way to express your view on like this particular trend and two betting on a token
that has a 20k market 20k 20k liquidity pool is also a very dangerous way to express your opinion
right and so like to me it's how do we sort of express our way to interact with the real world
in a crypto native context and field right which is it's permissionless openness it's composable
it's programmable all those things but it's a crypto native version and that's combining
the idea of pulling real world data and tokenization together. If we look at any market in the history of time, the only way it's ever become liquid
is you take real things and physical stuff, and then you combine synthetics on top. You combine
derivatives. Derivatives provide liquid, and that's how you make things actually liquid. And so to me,
that's how we bring this world together and how we actually make it. And in fact, it's actually
much faster to tokenize these fake right and tokenize these synthetics and
derivatives uh overdoing real tokenization so like to me that that is like the interesting thing about
doing this is like when you start to combine these things you can really start to do new things
interesting things today um and i think all those things around the tokenization around unlocking
liquidity programmability all those things are true and so i'm not i i think that's the basics
i think people don't talk about this stuff so i love the idea of combining both these things around unlocking liquidity, programmability, all those things are true. And so I'm not, I think that's the basic.
I think people don't talk about this stuff.
So I love the idea of combining both these things.
And that's what I think,
that's what I think is a really powerful story around all this.
Yeah, I think, I mean, that's a really good point. Like, you know, like we're even looking
at the tokenization of time, right?
Especially like, right,
like that's a really interesting concept.
I, you know, actually five or six years ago,
I remember somebody pitched me tokenization of airtime, like cellular airtime.
It's just a novel concept.
We have skyrides doing some of bloom, you know, all, all those kinds of things.
Very cool stuff. Yeah. And then like, you know, having a lot of like,
born on, born on chain data events, right.
That's going to make data provenance better.
It's gonna make for prediction models better.
It's gonna make a lot of these on chain agents better
when they're actually on chain
and not an off chain tied to a token, right?
Actually on chain agents.
And, you know, like when we think about like, you know,
I don't know, I can talk mostly
because I'm spending a lot of time thinking about that, but you have this like physical asset and, you know i don't know i can talk mostly because i'm spending a lot of time thinking about that but you have this like physical asset and you know you start looking at the way a lot
of these boats are monetized uh in terms of like you know utility and supply and demand of the
finite amount of time available for that yacht to move it around and use it.
And today it's like pretty much like static tables and static pricing tables.
There's no like real demand forecasting whatsoever built into it.
It's just some guy at some charter company who's got a hunch that shoulder season is going to be here and peak season is going to be here and they're
doing their best based on 10 years of um you know tacit understanding of how it all works
but you if you start to think about well if i've now fractionalized the ownership of the asset so
it's more accessible to more people and then i have some kind of time tokenization layer that sits on top of it.
And then I can tap into the equivalent of Oracle data feeds for macroeconomic things like tourism
is increasing in Croatia this summer, hotel bookings have increased, weather forecasts.
Now you can start to think about the tokenization of that time much differently.
You can have real supply demand forecasting of price associated with that tokenized time,
which is just going to increase the value of that underlying asset and generate more yield
that you just can't really do today.
And then the more that a lot of this data begins to have sort of born on chain events over time, the better and the more predictive it's going to become over time, especially once these things start to become more autonomous as well.
So everything that's been said so far has been very positive.
So what are the downsides here what
are the risks i was a million um i'll make also just saying this and and i think most tokenization
is stupid today most of it is not ready right it doesn't mean it won't happen right but there's
a sequencing that has to happen with these things right so i think there's there's several levels of risk with this stuff and the several bad things about it number one is it's
expensive right it's just like a pain in the ass anyone again anyone's done it knows it takes a
bunch of time and it's a headache to do and it's expensive as hell right both time and cost number
two is I think the sort of subtle cost of it and the risk here is like we've always been told
everyone always says you tokenize something there's actually there's more there's like it'll you'll
find some value on the other side it's mostly not true right today right most times you tokenize
things there's no one on the other side to buy your token you know like that's the reality you
know especially you know meme coin stuff yeah exactly exactly like even last cycle you look
at all the stuff you we were
sold this story that if you let's put your patek on chain which let's just like you know ignore
the fact that no one's doing that shit but let's just you know if you were to go do that you know
no one's buying the fractional is fractional shares of that it doesn't make any sense you
know it doesn't map to the user base on chain it doesn't map to the consumer that actually
doing something right why would i go through some kyc process to own a 50 you know 100th of a of a of a patek right i'd rather just
hold fart coin honestly you know um it's gonna be faster easier and i'll probably make some money
and if i don't at least it's funny you know yeah there's like a lot of things that are just
particularly not useful yes exactly that i think that's that think that's the risk here with this type of stuff. I think for us to
build this market, and then of course, a more fundamental risk is on the other side. Today,
this stuff is all centralized. You have to really trust who's holding this on the other side. Who
knows if it's just nonsense, right? The card that you're trading some rare card, right? Who knows
if it's even there? If it's even real, it's even good. Sure. All of those types of those types of things. So I think those are the things that you have to like do. And look,
I think if you go back to a fundamental example, right? Like trading equities used to be this way.
Trading equities used to be slow and painful and they used to send you a physical certificate
owning shares of the company, right? Over time, we put those into a vault, right? And we put a
bunch of rules around it to make sure it's all done correctly, right? And we can trust it. And
then people forgot, right? About the risks of doing these things fake certificates
you know never going to get delivered all this kind of nonsense right and then now today when
you trade equities robinhood doesn't actually like hold the equities for you they just license it by
another company right and then they just change the name of the database that's all it is right
and so like it makes me think about that gold debate where they were debating about whether or not the gold was still in Fort Knox.
Yes, exactly.
That's the question.
You have to open the vault and there's nothing in there.
Is it really there?
Right, exactly.
And so that's the issue, which is like you just don't know these things.
And so today it's centralized.
If we look at, again, the two R&B that matter today, it's the stable coin.
There's one called USDT, one called USDC.
USDT, we don't know what's under the hood. That's the risk. that matter today right it's a stable coin there's one called usdt one called usdc right usdt we
don't know it's under the hood right that's the risk right now it's proven to be very strong i'm
not finding them at all i think they're i think it's great it's clear they have 80 for a market
share for a reason like it's not a joke right and then you have the other side which is circle
right which spends a ton of time doing all kinds of audits and stuff to show you that the assets
are still there and so so just to show the burden of proving the stuff and getting these things to
actually get traded,
you know, in a way to kryptonite people
who are used to seeing them on chain
and having the asset, you know,
that's a whole thing that is still kind of like
done very poorly today.
And so, you know, again, we need, you know,
Robert of Superstate like to really do a good job
of like making this thing transparent and clear
so people can trust this stuff.
But that's the risk today, right?
There's both a risk for the issuer, right?
To bring things on and then a risk for the consumer, right? Because they don't know. And we have to bridge those two things together, right? There's both a risk for the issuer, right, to bring things on and then a risk for the consumer, right, because they don't know. And we have to bridge those two things together, right,
to kind of get to the right place to build confidence and trust in R&Bs before it can
really take off, you know? Yeah, I would say like the other risk factor would be that, you know,
guys like us sit here, we have very crypto native ways of viewing the world. Like once you
drink the Kool-Aid, I think you said this earlier in the very beginning, I ways of viewing the world. Like once you've drank the Kool-Aid,
I think you said this earlier in the very beginning,
I can't see the world any differently.
I kind of only see it in this very crypto native way now.
And I really thought about this.
I try to do a lot of writing and experimenting
with different formats of writing on my sub stack
because I want people to try to like understand this concept more easily
because you know not everybody sees the world in that kind of crypto native format and so I think
it's actually our responsibility to try to figure out a way to normalize the language and normalize
the content for regular people normies if you will 100 um i gotta run real quick sorry guys but
thanks so much for having us today it's a blast and uh please would love to uh to continue anytime
thank you so much chris bye sir thanks chris yeah i don't have a lot more time either but
uh happy to stay on just a little bit longer yeah of course we can go for like a few more minutes and then uh tom
whenever you gotta hop no worries at all um i mean great stuff so i mean from i mean from from
what we're seeing based on the data stable coins are the number one use case for rws right now
uh do you expect that this is going to kind of uh but like are you expecting that other
assets are going to surpass stable coins in the next 12 to 18 months or
in the next 12 to 18 months very unlikely um yeah for sure well and it's a really important part
of the entire ecosystem um you know i think that uh hopefully we have more stable coins, right?
More stable coin companies, more stable coin issuers.
There's definitely a lot of people that are pursuing stable, like new stable coin companies right now.
I've actually seen quite a resurgence in that.
You know, there's a project out of Switzerland called GoldDAO that's working on gold-backed stable coins, uh things like that which i think are really interesting as well too so you're kind of taking you know gold as a real
world asset fractionalizing it and then turn around and using that same fractional asset to
kind of bring a new stable coin concept to market um so i think we'll probably actually see quite a
bit more of that as it gets kind of the larger blessing, if you will, from the U.S. government's already going to move forward with it.
Like that's probably the very first thing that they're going to do.
Once that happens, it's just going to get substantially larger.
And then I think from there, it's kind of looking at assets that are already relatively safe, like treasury bills and gold and those kinds of things.
Land may take a little bit longer just because there's so many nuances to it.
Once you start to get into the legal element, it's like less about, sure, you can tokenize land or building, you can represent it on chain.
But there's a lot more legal things that you have to hop,
sort of hop through.
But that's,
you know,
ultimately going to come as well too.
So I think,
you know,
commodities,
diamonds,
gold,
T-bills,
maybe even perhaps even equities will happen before even land does.
But, you know, that's kind of the way I'm looking at.
But stable coins are just going to get way, way, way more massive.
It's just easier, frankly.
It might even be like kind of a nation state protectionary measure, right?
Because the reason the United States has power is powerful is because of the U.S. dollar.
of the us dollar right they control global sanctions because of this thing and when and
Right?
They control global sanctions because of this thing.
if anything they're gonna have substantially more power if it's programmable dollars right i can just
simply turn off your money right and like that's you can't turn off money today like if i have a
dollar bill in my pocket i can still use it it. But in the digital world, it's completely useless,
and it can be programmatically driven because I ran a red light. Right. And so like that is the
kind of thing that you might start seeing more nation states invest more heavily in stable coins
because of the sheer disruptive nature can cause on a global scale, and the power that can kind of
come from it. i think once politicians
start realizing how powerful that really will be uh and and i and i think china has already kind of
like really have they've been investing in stable coins gosh for almost 10 years now right they
they were doing that stuff a long time ago cbdc is right yeah absolutely forever they've been
working on these things yeah yeah and and it's it's also the fact that I was reading that is it 14th or 17th largest US bond holder are the stablecoin issuers, which of course helps keep the interest rates kind of low for borrowing. And then, of course, it's easier to export the US dollar
to a lot of countries.
So it's definitely something that can be used
as a financial kind of weapon to an extent.
Well, for sure.
And not only that, but you can use viral dynamics,
or you can use network effect,
which you kind of have in some ways
with through the current sort of us dollar system there's sort of a network effect to it
um which is what makes it powerful from a sanctions tool um but that power just gets greater
when it's programmable i mean just absolutely substantially more powerful yeah it's programmable. I mean, it's just absolutely substantially more powerful.
Yeah, it's easier.
It becomes a standard.
Like, what's happening, I think, and, you know,
if you go back to first principles,
which I think is really critical,
like, just go look at ERC-20, right?
Bobby and Dolby Scheller with Vitalik worked on ERC-20.
They created a standard,
and standards are what drive a lot of different things i mean we've still been operating on the same erc20 standard
since it for when when did that come out 20
gosh when did the urc20 come out like 2017 maybe was it. Yeah. I'd have to go back to the GitHub repo and see when the final commit was.
But yeah, I think they created a standard that was effectively what,
like nine functions or something to create a token, check balance.
And then everything kind of was like, really the narrative was,
is it ER erc20 compliant
and because it was now all these different apps could now interact with this thing called a token
and now look at the whole the whole world is operating on this like one standard um basically
and so i think you know you start thinking about things more as standards.
It starts to show you the power of standards.
And I think there's a lot of people in Silicon Valley and certainly in like tech worlds that understand the power of technical standards and what that can mean for their business.
You know, even Elon Musk saying, well, we're going to take all of our charging station patents and we're going to open source them so that the whole world can use them.
They're just benefiting their own business.
Granted, the whole world too, but now they're driving the standard
for how you charge your vehicle.
And maps, right?
Google Maps and different things like that have become standards
that the whole world builds on top of.
And so I think that's one of the cool things that crypto provides the world is you can really create these like digital primitives.
You can create these digital standards that everybody can kind of compose on top of.
And you're going to see a lot more of that come in the sort of real world asset.
Maybe there's going to be a stablecoin standard at some point.
Right now, I don't know if there is or if that makes sense, but there might be. a real world asset maybe there's going to be a stablecoin standard at some point um right now i
don't know if there is or if that makes sense but there might be um somebody will create the standard
stablecoin potentially we all use very likely very likely yeah yeah yeah um okay and then like
what are your personal uh favorite use cases for our rwas what would you like to kind of see coming on the most
you know i think so when i think about what we're doing with nautilus
you know zoom out a little bit further obviously i'm a believer in web3
i want as much liquidity as possible to flow into Web3 because that would have massive systemic, you know, systemically help everybody in Web3.
And that's just kind of how I think, right?
I think about that, you know, more broadly.
and think okay you know what are the types of use cases that would unlock you know enormous amounts
of liquidity to flow into the web3 economy uh more broadly and so i so i'm a huge fan of superstate
and what they're doing with tokenized treasury bills right if you can turn 1.6 trillion dollars into digital programmable treasury bills
probably nothing yeah right like that is going to be so massive collateralized lending will become a whole new pair that'll be a paradigm shift um you're going to be able to sit with a state
treasurer who can you know execute small business loans based off a collateralized position of digital, you know, U.S. treasury bills for small businesses in their state.
Like, that's a very simple use case.
I could go to the state treasurer's website and borrow against the state treasurer, state treasurer-e, right?
state treasury right um and so i think and i can have real-time nab published to my governmental
home page um i can have true transparency over budgeting and different things like that which
i think is going to be a big push um coming so i look for the things that are really simple
really basic that are basically relatable um because even Bitcoin is not very relatable
to your average person still to this day.
I mean, people are starting to believe it.
And it's been this really long journey
to get people to believe in Bitcoin.
Having that to indeed.
Yeah, totally.
And so I think the more we can kind of focus
on these assets that are very relatable, that people understand, where you're just like, all I'm really doing is dematerializing.
It's just another point in time where you're dematerializing, right?
We had that moment in time in history where we went, as Chris was saying earlier, we went from paper vaulted systems, right?
Like literally have a piece of paper the bloomberg terminals right there was a massive
conversion from paper to electronic um and then we became comfortable with that and now there's
going to be this kind of massive conversion from centralized databases and electronic to
uniquely held digital assets that essentially represent the same thing. And so I think the more we can bring these kind of really simple use cases to the institutions
that really hold all the liquidity in the world, right?
I mean, let's face it, like that's kind of like you go to these sovereign wealth funds
and these big state treasurers and pension funds.
You look at, I'll give you a really useful example, in the state of Texas,
the University of Texas system has an endowment called UTEMCO.
And in the 1800s, the state of Texas gave, they sort of broke it in two parts.
Part of it went to higher education and part of it went to sort of, they sort of broke it in two parts. Like part of it went to higher education and part of it went to sort of
what's called elementary, middle school, secondary education.
They basically said, here's 20 million acres of land.
And then they said, here's 20 million acres of land to the university.
Now figure out how to make money off this land.
And then that,
the yield from that land basically funded and to this
day still funds public education in the state um which is crazy and of course they got that land
and they said wow there's minerals under this land and there's geothermal power and there's
wind power and there's cattle grazing and there's uh gravel and water and all sorts of different above ground, below ground,
commercialization opportunities around that, commercial leasing.
And you now go look at, say, the permanent school fund in Texas, right?
It's got, I don't know, $70 billion under management, right?
It's absolutely massive you go look at you temco
and they've got i don't know probably more like probably in 100 billion because i actually think
they got more land um in their vehicle but you temco basically funds every venture fund on the
planet like you go to any of the top the a16z you, you go to all these guys, they all go to UTEMCO to get money, all of them. And so now that's funding innovation, it's funding public education. The net, if you go down to it, it's land that was put into a vehicle 200 years ago, basically, that they then figured out how to, you know, extract yield from and then that yield compounded over time and got bigger and bigger and bigger and now it's funding education it's funding innovation
um and so like i look at a lot of stuff like that and i'm like man dude you start thinking
about the tokenization of land and then what kinds of impacts that's going to have long term
in vehicles that can now extract even more yield because the sole responsibility is to extract yield
from that one real-world asset, and that's it.
Absolutely great point.
I mean, I have a very recent example.
I sold my house, kind of buying new one somewhere else,
and i went through the process of course greece is not the best example we're like
and I went through the process.
Of course, Greece is not the best example.
We're like corrupt to the bone.
corrupt to the bone yeah but yeah but still you know um it's somewhat representative of europe
to an extent and so it literally took uh probably eight or nine months something like that easily
nine months yeah maybe maybe ten if you put everything. And so if you think about it, like throughout the time, I had to close a house down.
I couldn't rent it.
I couldn't have it as a productive instrument to kind of get healed somehow.
And so if you literally put that into the equation to see what's the risk reward, then
the APY drops significantly if it takes to a month so all of a sudden having a more liquidity
uh cheaper crypto rails to do things and make things faster literally changes the economic
kind of you know risk ratio of of an asset and that then changes the velocity of kind of money
and and it brings it can change the whole equation all of a sudden you
might find many more investors that are interested in these assets coming on and this is real and we
saw that back you know years ago when before the gold ETS gold was trading at a much lower price
prior to that and the reason was not because there wasn't any demand
there was this latent demand but lately there was friction there was friction people couldn't be
bothered how would they get gold then once we get the edf on all of a sudden gold starts kind of you
know ripping uh and i think yeah and i would say it's the same thing, many assets. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's actually a really fair point.
Your point about friction really matters.
One of the things I learned about my time in Silicon Valley is, you know,
I hadn't spent 10 years there.
They're absolute fucking ninjas at eliminating friction.
Really ninja about it.
You know, like if you go back to the early days of Facebook, you know, like if you go back to the early days of Facebook, um, you know, so I was there
when it was like Facebook versus Orquit versus Snapchat, like it was a social networking
wars.
Uh, and it was a great time being in Silicon Valley, by the way.
Um, and, you know, you look at, uh, you know, one of the most incredible innovations, this guy, Dave Morin, who runs like Slow Ventures now,
he was one of the co-inventors of Facebook Connect, right?
So when you wanted to go sign up for an app,
here's my name, here's my email,
like here's all these like fields I have to fill out
and I have to go through this like step function
to like move through different stages of the signup flow and they're always optimizing like the relationship of the steps
and how you flow through to like dramatically increase your click-through conversion rate
from page view to account acquisition right and they introduced this idea of facebook connect
right and they introduced this idea of Facebook connect and so basically and
this is what you now log in with Google Twitter whatever it's like so normal
even just coming into this broadcast so you was logging with Google but back then
it was brand new as a concept and they launched this thing Facebook connect
next thing you know everybody on the planet is logging
into apps through facebook connect because it took like eight seconds and of course they wouldn't
otherwise they wouldn't otherwise that's the thing totally and and you wanted to do it as a founder
because you your your conversion rates just went like just straight up hockey stick.
And you didn't have all this like drop off in your signup, you know, your signup funnel.
And if anything, it just made, you know, acquisition faster, easier, and more efficient.
And I think the, you know, Silicon Valley, like really understands that concept extraordinarily well, better than most people in the world.
And that's what makes them really good at consumer apps.
But then that sort of presented a separate longer term problem, which was platform risk.
Well, now the whole world is built on Facebook.
And now essentially the whole world is built on Facebook.
And then Zynga.
Yeah, exactly.
Zynga died right we talked about this
one a lot platform risk became the new risk and and and same goes with you know amazon aws right
huge aws goes down half the world goes down uh right like we've always easily easily yeah and unfortunately maybe half of crypto as well goes
down well this is another problem that crypto doesn't fully wrap their mind around yet like
you know yeah this is another problem a lot of people are looking at distributed compute um the
guys over at definity have been working on this problem for an extraordinary long period of time.
They've actually done a lot of really novel innovation and sort of eliminate that sort of compute platform risk.
For sure, in many ways, there's sort of like a decentralized AWS and many other features on top of that, too.
But that's a very misunderstood project people should definitely dig into that one a little bit more just because the sheer innovation that they've
done is absolutely insane um but yeah like that's another major risk category uh for the whole world
um so yeah anyways i probably have to get ready to hop here in a sec. Yeah, of course, Tom.
It's good to see you, Evangelos.
Like, fuck, man, like you're all grown up.
Makes me feel like an old man.
Absolute pleasure, Tom.
It's been a while, and I hope to see you in person soon as well.
If you're around.
Oh, yeah, we're going to make that happen.
Love to catch up. It's been a while. good to meet you yeah quite a few thank you so much
awesome appreciate it man cool well thanks guys y'all have a great afternoon everybody watching
have a great weekend all right
