Digital Assets and the Blockchain Renaissance with Joe Miscioscia

[Music] Welcome to the HC Comortis Podcast, a podcast dedicated to the Comortis sector and the people within it. I'm your host Paul Chapman. This podcast is produced by HC Group, a global search firm dedicated to the Comortis sector. Today we're talking digital assets, Quant Trading and Blockchain Infrastructure. Since we last checked in on the space in the wake of FTX's collapse, digital assets, crypto trading, blockchain infrastructure has gone mainstream. For major institutions and hedge funds having multiple desks, do the rise of blockchain infrastructure, in settlements and payments, not only in the Comortis sector but across all industry. What are the latest trends? What is the talent-demand generated? What is the intersection with the Comortis sector? Our guest is Joe Mishiocha, founder and CEO of the Joseph Anthony Group, a recruitment firm dedicated to digital assets, Quant Trading and Blockchain Infrastructure. The firm was founded this year, leveraging Joe and his team's long career in the sector and HC are proud to be among the group of backers. And from the fascinating insight you'll hear, I hope you'll see why. As always, you can really support the show by leaving a positive review on the platform you're listening on. And as always, I hope you enjoy this episode. Joe, welcome to the show. This is somewhat of a commodities adjacent story, but there's certainly overlap and I think it's going to be of interest to our world. And we're talking digital assets, blockchain infrastructure, Quant Trading, a world that you've been recruiting within for quite some time and very knowledgeable on. And I guess it falls into two large buckets. The first is probably going to be for interest sake only is going to be the digital assets trading world. What the list of developments are there, how that's going, who's doing it, why, etc. And then talking about the infrastructure world, which is certainly an area of key interest to the commodities sector as more and more international trades are being done with the use of stable coins and through these technologies for reasons we covered on the show a while back. But let's start on the trading side. I guess the last time we did a proper crypto dive was with Zeke Fox of Bloomberg and talking about his book Number Go Up and Sandbankman Fried and FDX and all that world, right. And I guess where are we today and how is that different to a couple of years ago. And I'd just love to dive into kind of who's now trading and so forth. Great starting point. And I think obviously when you think of crypto digital assets as a whole, it's been a rocket ship over the past like four or five years really. And honestly, going back to when I first got into the space is just trading out of my college door, Ruben, you know, 2016, 2017 today, it's it's a world apart. I think 2020, 2021 when you were starting to see the real kind of institutional boom across the space, just seeing the trading opportunity. A lot of the kind of large scale multi managers, tier one hedge funds of the world, I think we're somewhat hesitant to like get their feet wet into the asset class. Part of that given, obviously, the compliance kind of aspects and regulatory constraints that a lot of different countries and regions we're trying to figure out and are still doing so, but better clarity overall in terms of how this is regulated as a field as an asset, because of that you're seeing more and more groups, obviously, build out desks, whether it's CFI specific, something a little bit more easy to run on a day to day and easy to kind of tie in with regulation, but you're also starting to see a lot of interest in terms of like super niche trades within crypto as well on the DeFi side today with you think like tokenize marketplaces, especially within commodities and push towards 24/7 trading there as well as like in the traditional equity space, you're starting to see a ton of overlap is essentially these these market tunnels converge, which I think is helped obviously push the space forward quite a bit over just, you know, the past six to 24 months, so to speak. Yeah, okay, what does CFI mean for me? And then can you exactly tell it does what products these sort of the hedge funds are trading and then has this is also now within banks, what institutions are trading this is kind of like a normal a normality now. To start with the CFI DeFi difference, CFI just refers like centralized exchange trading to think like a Binance, a Coinbase, an OKX, a Crackin, similar to how traditional exchanges work, you work with them as a singular counter party. Once you start getting into DeFi, you know, decentralized finance, it comes quite a bit different where you'll see a lot of teams where they are, you know, running trades on a on a Salona for example, or hyperliquid, which has been obviously very popular and increasingly so over the past year, where it's a decentralized blockchain, there's no one centralized entity or or firm kind of controlling that infrastructure. It's almost this open source kind of code and development community behind the infrastructure layer itself. Because of that, there's obviously different compliance repercussions and risks involved just inherently in those trades. But across both, I mean, you'll see, you know, your standard kind of trading buckets of arbitrage, cross exchange, ARB, you'll see, you know, traders going after different pricing dislocations or event driven style trading. So your standard buckets, but within DeFi, it sometimes gets a bit more niche where you have essentially like staking yield farming type trades that you can implement, different carry trades that are kind of specific to that DeFi space, as well as teams where they get very niche into like, mev, front running and basically execution based strategies that are very niche kind of liquidity markets, very competitive sectors. And we're seeing a lot of firms, they start more on the centralized side of trading within crypto for groups getting into it. I think it's a little bit of an easier starting point. It's a bit more familiar in terms of the style of trading, almost comparable to, you know, traditional equity market in terms of like how they're operating on a day to day with those counter parties. I think the teams that really dive into the digital asset crypto agenda start getting into a bunch of different buckets and categories. And similarly, with the real evolution of not only prediction markets, but also the tokenized crude trading that you're seeing on hyperliquid with just insane volumes this year, right? I think the first week or two went from zero to billions, billions in volume over just such a short span and seeing a number of teams that see the opportunity there to go and capture and essentially be early movers in kind of this new space. So quite a bit of kind of different things that we're kind of seeing on our side today. Yeah, I want to come back to the tokenized crude trades as best we can to understand what's going on there. But so in simple terms, I'm thinking of, you know, your bulk standard macro hedge fund and they have a digital assets pod or pods, what do they definitely have? Can you just help us understand that sort of setup if you'd like? I mean, I feel quite at sea when I think about this. Do they have sort of a Bitcoin desk and a salon at desk or they, as you say, splitting it by arbitrage desks and then they've got a Quant trading desk? How does that work typically? It depends on the shop. So I mean, you'll see, you know, your pod chops with individual teams that are kind of running their own, you know, book or kind of bucket of strategies, whether it's, hey, we're going to cover futures or options or something adjacent it where they're getting differentiated. Alphas on the desk that are complimentary to one another, but it's not necessarily so broken down between individual crypto ecosystem. If that makes sense, where, you know, one individual team, if they are really trading within DeFi, I mean, they might be trading, obviously on the centralized side as well. So like, NKX, a Binance, a Crackin Coinbase, these kind of major platforms that you're seeing a lot of teams utilize, but then also trading via individual DeXes, like in Orca on Salama, which is an exchange and marketplace there. There's always on hyper liquid directly, which is a hyper liquid basic change and marketplace. It will depend more on the team's ability to connect whether it's, you know, a WebSocket API or some of the centralized exchanges, you know, are they KYC or Coload or whatever the equivalent is on some of these different marketplaces, but I think depending on their infrastructure setup or ability to facilitate that kind of infrastructure network might kind of get the types of trades they'll run. And I think one of the biggest points there, certainly for like US-based companies, given the regulatory environment and, you know, not to get into all the specifics of it, there's some limitations in terms of the type of trade or types of exchange individuals or trading desk can operate on. So you're increasingly, and this isn't new, but you're seeing more and more of these real really global collaborative pods and offshore execution desks that allow them to really tap into the, you know, different types of liquidity throughout the market as a whole. Yeah, I'm kind of fascinated by this. I kind of get the DeFi side and you're starting to tokenize different asset classes. Obviously, a key one of which is crude and that's been a goal for quite some time, other commodities. But just going back to like, you can see it, you know, you've got a commodities desk who are talking about this might sound slightly naive, but there's underlying fundamentals that your analysts can look at. Likewise, equities. You're looking at, you know, one case and ten case and earning statements and all this kind of stuff. There's an underlying thesis. When it comes to trading, you know, a given crypto, is this just purely all-quant trading and to some extent, what do I mean by that? How are they actually sort of basing these trades in terms of, you know, the why, if you'd like, if that's it? Yes, and I think the majority of what I'll interact with, just partly given our positioning as a firm, tends to be a lot of, you know, algorithmic or quantitative desks. They tend to be leaning more fully automated as opposed to more gray box modeling, but there's, there is from time to time a discretionary element or overlay. on the trades and trading desk we work with, just given the nature of these markets and increased volatility that you'll sometimes see within digital assets. That being said, you look at the block towers of the world or these discretionary trading firms that run pretty massive books throughout the crypto space. I think the difference is how they're, I guess, evaluating those positions is much more similar to almost a, I think like a traditional equity trader that's making discretionary trading, kind of like long short type positions, where they might be looking at like much longer holding periods on average as opposed to given the opportunity to really generate alpha or generate returns on a crypto strategy. This high frequency to mid-frequency, intraday weekly bucket tends to be the most popular and successful, just given what we've seen over the past few years. But I'd imagine as the industry as a whole continues to legitimize and essentially move into this almost equal playing field where it's no different than going and trading rates or credit or equities or whatever it may be, right? I think that'll open up the the amount of different types of deaths and kind of niche ideas that you'll see these trading teams implement in live markets. Yeah, it's fascinating. Okay, so and maybe you can weave in prediction markets here, but kind of one basic question, you get into this esoteric to the defy world of trading, this even to me, this sounds very basic, but I'm interested in the answer, how do you guarantee you're going to get paid if you win essentially in that world? Does everyone stake the money up front like you would do on a holly market, etc? Different blockchain ecosystems and exchanges will operate you know, somewhat differently behind behind the scenes in terms of how the infrastructure actually you know, cements these transactions, but I think the beauty of smart contracts, which make up blockchain and you know, crypto trading that's done natively on chain is there isn't this trust factor. It's a very straightforward hey, if we do X, we receive Y or it's very easy to kind of track where those funds and money is moving from from one ballot to another. So when individuals go in and create these trades or you know, infrastructure to create albumic trading opportunity, it's typically something that's coded in, you're not necessarily dealing with a counter party in the same way you would in some traditional markets where you're waiting to be paid or you're sending it in boys or whatever the kind of process may be there. It's typically something where you know, look, if we win on a trade or lose on trade, those funds are either depositator or withdrawn directly from our wallet or our team's treasury, if that makes sense. So it's not something where the risk is on the counter party paying you, it's typically the biggest risk that we'll see is from the actual bridging. So moving money from let's say Ethereum or like EVM, which is you know, a blockchain, a layer one to a salon or you know, years ago, it used to be Cosmos today. It's you know, hyper liquid. You're seeing all of these different types of blockchains that are built where they have somewhat differences in terms of the infrastructure, you know, the underlying kind of piping of how the systems operate. But in moving from chain A to chain B, there's this complex bridging process that takes place and you know, every few years you see these massive crypto hacks and it tends to be at that essential, like that point of failure as opposed to kind of the similar counter party risk that you may have in terms of, you know, will they deposit funds if things are held up? It's typically on the bridging side. The issues we see with counter parties tend to almost be more on the centralized exchange side of things and you know, looking back to, you know, like an FTX or Alameda or some of these groups that have had issues as a firm and then because of that have delayed payments to investors or individuals with money tied up on those platforms. As opposed to the, you know, defy side of things, it's a bit more straightforward. There's hack and there's different infrastructure risk. You're not dealing with a person on the other end if that makes sense when you're executing those trades. Okay, so when you're thinking, and this is weaving in the recruitment side by finding this fascinating, so you take it again, your average pod or whatever it might be that's kind of engaging in that wants to have all of these capabilities under their belt. What are the key buckets of talent that they're looking for and that not just on the trading side, but also kind of on the infrastructure piece as well as be able to this whether that's regulatory compliance, etc. And where do they get that from and how different does that look to your average kind of equities desk or credit desk, whatever it might be? Yeah, so I mean somewhat similar. I think years ago it would have been a much different answer where early crypto was a lot of a called DGENs and you know, individuals that came from very untraditional DSO. You had the wave of DGEN traders and developers. That degenerates. Correct. And then this is going back to almost the NFT days and there's all this hype around the space where you had individuals that were very very smart. They might they're a MIT grad or post grad sitting in their dorm room or apartment after graduating and just running their own trading book out of their personal account and hey, I want to go and join a startup prop group and really scale things. And you saw an odd amount of them actually become very successful I think early on, but it was a very different type of profile at that point in time than what you see today. Today it's love you're getting the PhDs, the research scientists, the individuals that they have five, six years of experience sitting on a quant research desk on the traditional equity space or you know, commodity markets, whatever it may be and then have just moved into a crypto or digital asset sector. But it's essentially being treated from a talent angle very similarly to how traditional quant shops are run in terms of just like where that bar is for talent. And similarly on the the infrastructure side, there is obviously a bit of nuance when you are when you are looking at more contract development or building out defy desk where there is a large on chain component. And obviously understanding what I'm trading on a salon of versus hyper liquid, there's you know differences in market microstructure and now those systems will integrate and you know, such a collaborate with the internal tech we're building. But that being said, a lot of the of those trading desk is very similar where it's you know, do you need a TypeScript dev Python developer or are you building some of the latency sensitive software and a C++ or there's sometimes rust if it interacts better with with team systems. But very traditional engineering type profiles for the most part and then you'll you'll see a small portion of those teams that you know, they may have something like a like a keeper experience, which is really valuable obviously in the crypto space. They've dealt with kind of mev searchers and you know, a lot of on chain tech and are familiar building out that type of system and software. Similarly on the compliance and kind of operational legal side, whatever it may be of these teams, you do see a lot of individuals that are coming from you know, the traditional banking or finance sector moving over to the crypto space. You see some that are obviously becoming crypto native at this point and would consider them so where they've been on a crypto team or within the industry for five, six years and you know, are really experts in this new space. But I think there's so much overlap in terms of, you know, how these markets are regulated as a, you know, financial industry and trading space where you really need individuals that have knowledge of kind of the broader trading landscape to make sure that you're on top of things and above board and in that sense. I want to come on to this and pockets of demand for that talent. But like, can you give us some sense of P&L's scaleless success? I mean, are they competing with the the equity's desk next door and the commodity's desk, you know, on the other side of the office in terms of performance? Like how lucrative is this? Can you give us some sense of that? Trade type will dictate this to an extent. I think there's a lot of profitability to be had, which is I think why obviously you're seeing, you know, a large number of teams that even aren't necessarily crypto native, they're looking to get into this space, right? So when you look at a traditional equities group and I'm, you know, speaking for more of a, you know, a quant trading, I think like HFT, mid-frequency type trading book, you look at like what standard metrics may be, you know, US equities desk. So, you know, look, if there have a drawdown south of, you know, 2%, they're returning to call it, you know, 10% on capital with like a 2.5 plus sharp. That's a very solid systematic strategy, right? Where it's risk-adjusted, you're not dealing with any type of unexpected drawdown or huge volatility, you're able to, you know, maintain profitability on that book. And if you can do that with scale, you have a pretty good trade and trader on your hands. Obviously, you have, you know, the top 1% in the outliers who do very well on the equities aside as you will in any other space. And I think where we're crypto digital assets differentiates a bit is you might see the same type of sharp on a crypto desk, but just much different return profiles where, you know, it's not uncommon to see crypto traders with, you know, 30 to 80% returns on capital. There's much more volatility at times within those traits where, you know, max drawdowns might be all over the place. You know, you might see someone with a, you know, 8 to 15 type drawdown. Obviously, when you start getting too high, it becomes unattractive for, you know, most money managers and funds in that sector. But it's almost the kind of, you know, classical more risk, more reward type scenario that you're seeing in that space. I think, maybe, managers that have been able to navigate that sector well, they have some type of, you know, orthogonal value that they can bring with them to firms and each edge tend to do very well in that sector. It's almost finding this sweet spot of, you know, keeping volatility in check and draw downs in check while we're retrieving in a return profile that's, you know, slightly above average in terms of how it you'd expect it to be on on QuantDes in other sectors or product markets. Yeah. So it's clearly more volatile. There's some extent it's less efficient than a very stabling the equities desk and it's more specialized. How do you go about building, you know, in the commodities world, you build an edge through obviously proprietary analytics, if you're a hedge fund, if you're a trading house by a massive global physical footprint, but over time it's arguable that as those markets have become more efficient maintaining a mouse trap without having to spend lots of money on an asset or bending more in a wall for for compute versus your sort of competitors, it's hard to maintain that. You're talking to a team and they might be interested in moving whatever. How do you capture an edge, a lasting edge to generate those kind of returns in this crypto space? It's a really good question. I think if I had the perfect answer, I'd be trading and not in my own shoes, but I guess to put it in the perspective of traditional markets and I know I've used equities of Bons' example, but to do that again, you look at why are the jump trading in Jain Street to the world? And Susquehanna is super successful and they have a massive infrastructure edge. They have a lot of data at their fingertips that they can go and leverage. The market access, the execution services, the co-location is exactly where it needs to be. They have the right prime services and security lending if needed, the service and support. They have the correct analytics and risk management teams in place. Similarly on the crypto side, there's a huge difference between, hey, we're running a crypto desk and we're just logging on to this DeFi market or whatever exchange in trading. Then a team that's like, look, we're doing it at volume. We have better feet tiers with those exchanges. We're using APIs or co-loc directly to these markets. We're using a web socket. There's levels to the infrastructure. That's not always needed to be transparent. If it's not a latency-sensitive trade or there's different specifics that dictate what those needs are. But similarly on the data side, and I think this is almost where you'll sometimes see some of that edge emerge within some of these teams. Look, there's alternative data sets or firms within the crypto markets that provide, here's what's going on. On Jain, off Jain, throughout the larger space, almost the Bloomberg terminals of crypto, that's what you want to call it. We'll see some teams where they go a step further and they build out the in-house data scraping tools and essentially research pipelines where we might be looking at more niche sentiment data. In crypto, where there is a lot of market volatility that's driven by consumer sentiment or trends that are happening throughout the larger industry, certain teams have identified niche pockets of either news sources or individuals that think that speaks and they affect the market user your mind to imagine who those individuals are. And how do we essentially weight that sentiment data and use it to make informed trading decisions? So I think there's levels to teams that figure out a correct way to implement those types of ideas or underlying strategies within the portfolio that tend to capture a bit more upside and kind of edge that tends to be sustainable. But similar to any other space, you still have these alpha decay cycles you're constantly optimizing and revisiting the not only the infrastructure, but the trading ideas and strategies themselves to make sure you're continuing to beat the market and operate at a high level. 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What are the different, I guess, industry participants that are now trading that sort of suggest this is we has gone mainstream? Today, it's almost everywhere, right? You'll see, it's like your tier one multi-managers that have either internal crypto teams, or they have funded external teams or desks to get some type of exposure to the space. And I think that's increasing more and more every year just in terms of what that appetite looks like. You think of the DV chains, the Breven Howard digitals, the Selenic capitals of the world that have been very, very successful and essentially spun out of more traditional firms and funds. And I think that's something that we've seen a ton of over the past five, six years. But today, I think there's a lot of firms that we've seen where they are in equity centric firm. They're doing like US or global equities. They might be doing China A shares, whatever it may be. They're seeing, Robin Hood is tokenizing their marketplace. The New York Stock Exchange is going to be 24/7 trading. I don't know if the specifics are around that actual build out. But thinking about what does it mean to trade in a 24/7 market? And I think with the idea of crypto, where it's to my knowledge, the original 24/7 marketplace, it's constantly moving and you get these volatility cycles with different days that you'll see. So the US market hours versus Asian hours and does that create volatility just on a day-to-day basis. You're starting to almost see similar effects or early stages of what that looks like even in an equity sector. And I think because of that, teams are looking at, look, we're already running a, I don't know, I mean, reversion. Wait, wherever the trade, it doesn't matter what it is. Can we now implement this on a crypto market and do we see similar opportunity in these sectors? So I think because of that, given that the regulatory environment has become a bit more clear, obviously not entirely over the hump yet in that sense. I think there's still a number of policies and things to hash out the federal level, depending on for US, UK, whomever. But I think because of that, you're seeing more and more teams get comfortable with, can we put some capital into this? Can we have a team or is our cross asset, futures, traders, able to maybe get some exposure to this space, even if it's, hey, we'll just have them trade crypto, kind of derive products on like a CME or through like a, you know, a dera bit or a bit of a different counter party that they're a bit more comfortable with. You're seeing at every level from, you know, large hedge funds to small prop groups and family offices and the cell side as well. I think their exposure is obviously much different than the buy side in terms of how those desoperate, but looking at even, you know, the JP Morgan's of the world, we're starting to look at, you know, do we use a Bitcoin BTC as a collateral and, you know, what does that look like for the long haul? You're seeing, you know, the black rocks and brace scales of the world put out these ETF products that are derived by, you know, underlying crypto and digital asset products. So there's, there's a huge appetite, I think, for the space, I think, or more teams are starting to just view it as they would any other asset class, but then becomes the challenge of, you know, are you the correct firm that has the infrastructure and capabilities to be one of the top performers in this kind of newer sector, if that makes sense? Yeah. And part of obviously what is driving that legitimacy is as it has a real world functioning global finance, right, which we're going to come onto, which is actually, you know, more, more global transactions go through blockchain infrastructure, you know, you stable coins, where those benefits of fixed risk and so forth and immediacy and all this, you know, good stuff that means a lot in the commodity trading world, having your money tied up for three days in a international transaction can be really meaningful. Just before we get to that, and I think that's where I sort of certainly our clients are going to be, I imagine, quite a few interested in your views on how to set up that piping for one to the better world. Just on the tokenized crude trades that are done on hyperliquid, these sort of perps as they're called, yeah, another, another good crypto phrase. I guess what do we know of hyperliquid? What do we know of these transactions? And, you know, is this really kind of the start of a great interest in a broader tokenization of different commodity contracts as best as you know? I think it's huge for this space. And, you know, looking at hyperliquid and looking at like WTI and Brent crude contracts, you're seeing daily trading volumes, you know, surpass a billion, billion and a half where it's, you know, it's frequently making, you know, oil the second most traded asset on that platform behind like a Bitcoin. Do you think of Bitcoin as it's been almost this kind of holy grail gold standard of crypto and the digital asset sector for years and kind of almost the entry point for a lot of firms and individuals for these crude connoisseurs. to become that well-known and trade it in just this quick of amount of time is really incredible. And I think too, that surge in volume is really driven. You have this, I think, increasing geopolitical volatility that's happening at this macro level for individuals to be able to come on and look at, look, we can trade this as a 24/7 market for these perpetual futures contracts. That's huge, right? Like a traditional exchange of CME, you know, they're closed at the end of the day, right? But is there opportunity to go in and continue to trade and generate returns? Of course, companies are going to go after that. I think there is a big challenge today, and I think HyperLiquid's done a fantastic job of this. But I think as that type of trading expands, and not just specifically kind of crew, but you think of similar opportunities within metals or Nat gas deaths across kind of the larger commodity sector, thinking about the structural costs, potential friction that transpires internally as those deaths are built out, commodities firms that are looking to get in on this opportunity, but figuring out kind of the weeds of a digital asset sector on top of just the understanding of the commodity crude markets. I think that's the biggest next step, and from the tokenization side in particular, you're seeing these special purpose vehicles where you can move instantaneously from tokenized to the real world asset. So we found a great liquidity opportunity in a traditional space. We can convert our tokenized product back to standard crude, and all of a sudden go and take advantage of that trading opportunity versus some trading deaths in teams are going through counterparties, like a Gaussian digital, for example, where you actually have to call up and have a conversation with a counterparty at the exchange directly, and sometimes there's this kind of conversion process that can take a few days when you're moving between tokenized and real world asset. It's definitely sort of the start, right? I mean, you start to build these sort of tynthetic swaps, you know, tracking and index order exchange. It's kind of the next logical step is how you tie, and obviously people are working on this, how you tie that up to the real world contract. And then obviously the real world barrel as well. It's certainly sort of the start of, and as you say, you can see that expand across different commodity classes. No, correct. And again, I mean, you know, oil markets are and always have been a huge space. I think there's some operational inefficiencies within that traditional crude trading space that I think the tokenization and push towards this helps, helps reduce in terms of the different settlement friction or counter party delays or, you know, kind of access barriers to these different markets. So I think, you know, over the long haul, it makes a ton of sense, not only for crude, but for I think a lot of assets to come on chain and move towards more of a 24/7 type of a trading platform. But, you know, well, obviously take some time to figure out and work through the details of how that's done behind the scenes. Yeah, just out of interest. Like, what does it mean for the humans involved in this to have 24/7 trading? How did teams deal with it? Did they run a 3/8 hour shifts or is it sort of handed around the globe? Or did it, I wonder, sitting there underpants at home sort of, never getting a break? Yeah, I think most traders I talk to that are managing risks on these books feel like they're working 24/7 regardless. But as you've seen within a lot of crypto desks, there's increasingly, you know, more globally spread teams where the same trading pod might have, you know, an individual in Singapore, they might have someone in Abu Dhabi, they have a developer that sits in London, they have someone in the cameins or US. And you're seeing these teams where, you know, we'll slot headcount more globally to really cover the time zone challenge that this creates as a market, which, you know, my own thoughts on it, or, you know, what does that mean for for a traditional PM rule, right? Like, where it's, you know, do you need almost like copiums that are running, you know, 12 hour, 12 hour type shifts or whatever that may be longer term. But I think a lot of teams just made it work where they're, you know, really being conscientious behind risk signals that they're putting in an alerting tooling that can let the know if they need to, you know, hop on and get involved with trades that are happening or have an individual on their team that can manage the kind of downtime or other side of the world while they're asleep at the end of the day. Fascinating, just out of interest as well, just on the talent side, because obviously one of the things that happened, somewhat under the radar initially, or least certainly to me, was within these sort of high frequency traders with these heavily quant trading firms or an A-Sense capitals and so forth, they're well known now for having these two year non-compeats and essentially based on the fact that actually we're building a lot of pee and that IP is defensible in terms of non-compeat and not just periods and all the rest of it, which is what they're legally. Legally bound on sent in the States, are we seeing any of that creep into this space is there sort of much more onerous employment terms put on people or is it still sort of somewhat akin to other other asset classes. But it's similar to most deaths, I think, look, if you're trading interest rate bonds on an affixed income desk, you typically have a non-compeat that's going to bar you from running a similar trade on a similar fixed income desk or direct competitor. This might vary from firm to firm, but you're typically okay if you want to move into an adjacent asset class. So if you want to go from, I would just say interest rates to all of a sudden I want to go and trade petrol at a commodities firm. Typically there's not as much friction, it's not something that your non-compeat is going to be directly enforceable within. Similarly within crypto or even prediction markets, I think you're seeing that almost treated as part of that big grouping of assets where you look, you'll have a crypto trader that's done it, they might have a 12 month non-compeat, can they go back into a traditional equity's market for their next opportunity or vice versa. You have someone coming from an FX desk that wants to move into crypto. So you typically have that same kind of issue across the board, and I think terms in contract are becoming very similar for a lot of these firms where a 6 to 24 month non-compeat tends to be standard. A lot of times we'll see anywhere from 6 to 12 is kind of the most common range, but obviously senior traders, senior pns on these desks sometimes get hit with much longer sit out periods. And I guess it's really important for the final section on the piping piece. Is there any demand pockets of demand within those teams? What are the most challenging roles to fill? And I ask that in the context as well as I presume if you're on a revenue generating desk you get paid more than if you're in the blockchain infrastructure world trying to connect together piping so that companies can do transactions in these digital assets. Well trading is hard and I think to be a good portfolio manager, a good, you know, quant researcher, someone that's high level, it takes a lot to find that type of person. And I think a lot of companies because of that are always interested in, you know, can we bring in a high level PM or someone to join the team. So typically you're seeing, you know, P&L splits associated with those types of roles, you know, higher base salaries, but they're tied into the profit sharing. It's, you know, you eat what you kill type of a scenario on the infrastructure side. So it almost gets split into two categories within crypto or digital assets or prediction markets, whatever it may be, you still need to your standard infrastructure team. Right. So, you know, you have your front end guys or back end, your, your DevOps, whatever it may be machine learning engineers that are helping build out the actual trade infrastructure, quant devs and those skill sets and backgrounds of those individuals are really no different than what you'd find in turn like an HRT or traditional firms in that matter where you see the biggest difference is, you know, all of a sudden we need someone who really understands kind of the nuances of a specific blockchain or, you know, eat. Or, you know, ecosystem going back to like a salana, for example, on chain smart contract development tends to be, you know, rust as a programming language anchor for, for, you know, the blockchain framework, they actually need to interact with those smart contracts. So, you know, you can actually see a niche candidate market and pool of individuals that are, you know, Uber talented and experienced in that sector. And similarly, a lot of those guys and girls, the developers on those teams also are, they're familiar and, you know, SQL type script, they can really do the full stack, but you tend to get this real opportunity for developers within kind of those, those niche trading teams that need to build out infrastructure or, you know, direct connectivity within a specific space. And they tend to be paid, you know, very well as someone that's kind of micro specialized as well. And I think from a talent perspective, some of the hardest individuals to find today with, you know, hyper liquid and, you know, I think the crude market trading that's happening on on chain there has really helped driven a lot of this. And similarly, you know, finding individuals, whether it's a trader or developer or someone who's familiar on the compliance side, if it's relevant is somewhat hard to find within that sector still. And I think it's because, you know, some of this is so new people don't have years and years of experience. It's a handful of companies that are really operating these trades at a super high level. But you're starting to see just about everyone I've talked to, honestly, and on the client side. So, you know, funds that we work with and prop dash, whatever it may be, almost everyone I've spoke to do is like said, you know, look, we're interested. interested in getting in on this, we're starting to look at research and where is an entry point that makes sense and all of a sudden this becomes relevant for us to really push the pace into these sectors. In the sort of five minutes we've got left, sort of on that piping side. So essentially, this is obviously not trading taking you on the underlying, on the digital assets themselves, but leveraging blockchain infrastructure. And it's strange to be talking about this because obviously four years ago, and you and I have drinks about this last week in New York, right? It was sort of that, you know, the meme coin stuff. And if you didn't have a block, if you were a recruitment firm without a blockchain plan to put candidates on on chain, you know, whatever it was, like any company had to have a blockchain plan. And it all kind of died away for a while. And but now it seems like actually, as with all things, sort of the underlying valuable bits of the technology are being seen, there's clear cases where with the correct sort of governance and compliance, you can start increasing, we're seeing increasing transactions in commodities in stablecoins using blockchain infrastructure. All makes sense to me. You know, like I said earlier on, the speed of transaction, the lack of effects risk, the some of the complexities about setting up US dollar-denominated accounts, all this kind of stuff. Of course, it can absolutely also be used for nefarious purposes. How widespread are you starting to see companies, traders, merchants, debt-up, or starting to think very seriously about digital infrastructure, blockchain infrastructure to be able to process these transactions and so forth? I think I see it like everywhere. I'm obviously biased on the industry as a whole. You know, someone who's much closer to the product than most people. But as an infrastructure, like any infrastructure develops over time, like any underlying technology develops over time. So I think one of the marketing challenges I think crypto and digital assets has had to overcome is, you know, I think when people heard crypto or digital assets, you know, 5, 6, 7 years ago, you think, "Look, oh, it's digital gold." Maybe it'll pump and we'll get these excellent returns. I think the connotation became trading and trying to just generate returns almost like, "Hey, this is monopoly money. At first, look, this is a real technology and infrastructure that changes the way we transfer funds, that we have to rely on different agents or liquidity networks, which I think is where a lot of the real underlying value is and why you're seeing credit card companies that are now implementing their payment transactions via blockchain and banks that are looking at building some of their in-house tech on this type of software. If you're familiar with that, but the end-pace of day is in Africa where individuals living in a small kind of remote town go off and work in a big city and send money back to their family and there was no way to transfer those funds. So what they did is through the phone lines, they would put money on an account that their parents would use and they would essentially, they almost created this marketplace where then individuals were selling those phone minutes to others and almost using it as a currency. It became kind of like a super early version of almost what like blockchain, stablecoins, blockchain payments have done today. I guess the way that you're looking at those networks and systems being developed is, how do we allow for settlement to happen on chain, how do we create more liquidity where there's less constraints and more of an open access for individuals, whether they're in a major developed portion of the world or small country and then it'll know where it's, look, here is a system that works in all of these different environments and allows for us to have different transfers or systems that are programmable. We can look and see receipts and information very clearly on chain where how do we kind of move to this payment system. So I know that's a very long-winded way of saying it, but I think you're seeing it as a technology and use case behind the scenes everywhere from like healthcare to fintech to trading, blockchain as an infrastructure, whether it's a decentralized chain or an in-house kind of replicant of those. You're seeing it more and more widely used today just because of what it can do as a whole. And is it the same talent pool that drawing on or an existing talent within these organizations kind of figure it out? How are people coming to Jag saying, hey, we're a healthcare company, we need a team to come and start doing this for us today? Yeah, so in any case, we don't, we don't, as of now do anything in non-financial-related areas, but it's, a lot of teams are saying, look, we're building out infrastructure. We typically are dealing with trading desks or fintech-style projects, but that being said, it's, here's what we want to do. Do we have a lead or an expert that really knows this space and depth and can essentially come in as a head of engineering on this type of a project or an initiative where I think early on need someone to almost architect the correct infrastructure. And so we're going to a friend of yours, you guys not too long ago, that building and exchange. You know, they're doing so on, on avalanche, which is a big blockchain infrastructure layer. Understanding, look, is it, does it make sense to build on an avalanche versus, you know, another EDM chain like optimism or whatever it may be? I think it's step one, understanding the type of infrastructure you want to build and create, different chains, re-grid systems will allow you to do some different things. So a lot of companies, I think it's almost, where do we get started? And that becomes, I think, almost a stopping point. So what we try to do is, as a firm is say, look, like, what are the goals of your project or the goals of your trading desk and team? Where are we seeing, you know, similar buildouts taking place? And obviously, without going into in depth in terms of the tech stack or infer that's being built at competitors, you know, here's kind of the general market direction that you should be maybe looking at. And, you know, a talent pool that makes sense to start engaging where, you know, can you start to generate ideas or bring in an individual that can help you lead out these initiatives and house? Yeah, yeah. And I imagine the management consults as well talk to you about building teams as we said at the start, it's gone mainstream. Joe, what a pleasure to have you on. We are very excited about the Joseph Anthony group. It doesn't need an endorsement from us after listening to you talk, cosiantly for 50 minutes, much more than I think I could do on our specialism about the trends and the talent needs. When should people call you guys? Where can they find you? You know, I look at you know, juicevandthanygroup.com, you know, we're on LinkedIn, Twitter, wherever, platforms that people use for socials, we have an account. If people are interested, obviously in learning more about the space, always, always happy to connect. But I think for teams that are really looking at, you know, we want to build out quantitative or algorithmic trading desks within the, you know, digital asset space and not just limited to crypto, but you know, look, we want to get into prediction markets or tokenize crew, tokenize equities. We tend to have a very kind of niche network within those networks to just be able to implement and help facilitate those buildouts. So something that, you know, obviously we're very well equipped to do, you know, done for years even at some of my past firms as well. And always excited to be part of new, exciting buildouts. Great. Well, I will put links to the Joseph Anthony group in the show notes as well as your email and people can reach out. And I look forward to having you back on in a year or so and we can see where it's all gone. And we move from sort of the retail meme coin trader to know it's definitely hit the mainstream and the talent is required. So excited to have you back on at some point. No, awesome. It sounds great. I appreciate you setting it up. Thank you for listening. To find out more about HC Group, our global offices and our expertise in search within the commodities sector, please visit www.hcgroup.global. [Music]