Robinhood's Plan to Bring Global Finance Onchain | Johann Kerbrat

Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. All right, everyone. Welcome back to Empire. Very excited about this one. We've got the head of crypto Robin Hood. Johan, John, how you doing, man? Good. How are you? Very good. Long time to see you've been busy. Yeah, it's been fun. Yeah, we, um, I remember when was our last chat? Dazs? Yep. That's right. Uh, and you're like, there's a lot of stuff coming. I can't fully tell you everything. There's a lot coming. So I didn't like there was a lot of you did not. You did not. I've never known you to lie, man. Um, tell me about the evolution of I remember so Vlad. I don't know if you were at Robin Hood, then I would have guessed you were. Vlad gave a keynote at permissionless. One of my conferences in 2022. I think it wasn't Palm Beach. Yeah, yeah. And kind of announced, you know, they're launching this crypto wallet. And that was for me like that. I mean, there's also our conference on bias, but I think of that as like the moment Robin Hood started really pushing. Can you just maybe we start macro with this and then go micro tell me about just the evolution. Like, was the, was there always this grand vision? Was it kind of like, you know, let's do a V1 and then a V2 and a V3 like tell me just the evolution of crypto internally. Robin Hood. Yeah, I think the vision was always here. Um, initially we started with this idea that customer should be able to access any type of financial instrument that they are excited about. So crypto was one of them. Back in 2018. And that's when we launched, you know, Bitcoin trading and Ethereum trading. But then we we felt that the blockchain technology and crypto technology where actually able to power a lot more than just trading of assets. And we thought that it would be a great way for us to expand internationally, not just in the US through crypto technology because it's a lot easier to build. You can get access to a hundred millions of people. We just have wallets that people can manage themselves. And so that's where the vision started. We launched a wallet. A few years ago, like you mentioned, it was purely crypto. And now we are starting to add what the real vision is, which is tokenized assets, being able to get yield on your assets as well. And doing more and more with your crypto. So the wallet is now live in 120 plus countries. We've tokenized asset on it, our stock token product. And I think it's been a great way for us to really expand where Robin is basically. Yeah, I feel like you've been doing crypto stuff for, I guess you're right, 2018. Yeah, you know, the spot tokens, but 22 you launched the wallet. I feel like the Robinhood chain is you're like, you guys basically telling the industry like, we are here. We are like a we are like a very real player in this. Yeah. I think we were always a real player. We are one of the largest US retail platform. But I think the chain for us was not just a side project, like I think what a lot of competitors have done is creating a change just for the sake of it. What we wanted to create was this infrastructure and this backbone where we can build new products. And we can bring to classic customers, retail customers, the benefit of the blockchain technology. And that's what we really wanted to do with this chain. So it's integrated within our main app. You can have the own product that I'm sure we'll discuss about directly on it. And it's using the chain to actually give the benefit to the customer even though they're not necessarily defy or crypto people. Because I think the two world are comproving more and more. And so we need to stop this question of defy tried five. We just need to bring everything to the customer and make sure that they get the benefit of it. Yeah. What is the actual benefit of doing all the stuff on chain? I think there's a lot of accessibility question being on chain, give us the possibilities that everyone can build on top of our chain is permissionless. We can connect to way more partners, the group provider, as market maker, of Dex's because it's all available to us. We don't need to create separate fixed line with every single market maker or every single partner on the chain. And I think that's the beauty of it. And the second beauty is what I was saying around the wallet. Available in 120 plus countries. All these people can now have access to our UX and UI. And at the same time, still get good pricing because it's using the chain where it's integrated deeply with Robinhood. On the landing products, you get the best of defy with a high yield, but you also get the simplicity of Robinhood, the UX, UI, and everything that we build around it. So I think that's just an evolution of the technology that we've been using for TriedFi where you don't restart your exchange anymore. You don't stop working on the weekends. Everything is live and it's on the blockchain. Yeah. Internally, I would guess. So we just acquired this company, Missouri. And so now we have two systems. We have two CRMs. We have two databases. So I am going through internally connecting these integrating these two things. I would guess internally at Robinhood, there's all these benefits of doing things on chain, but you have two different systems. You have an off chain order book, you have an on chain order book, you have a wallet here, you have a cell facility on non-customer. How does that work internally? And then also how do you think about that maybe on like a five or 10 year time horizon? Is there a world where all of Robinhood moves on chain or there's just no need for that? You know, I think for me, I see the convergence happening more and more. I think for trading equities, for example, right now we are still using very specific American exchanges, but you could see a world where you can connect to any exchange in the world using tokenized assets. The way that you can use your portfolio as collateral, right now it's mostly on on margin and finger this, but for a lot of countries you can't easily do this, but with tokenized stocks it's actually a lot easier. So I think the two world we will converge. I don't know if the entirety of Robinhood will be on chain, I think that's maybe a bit more further than five years. But I think you see the benefit of the chain and I think the more we can bring this benefit to the customer, the more it would be a no-brainer for them to use the on chain version of this product versus the off chain where the poor e-dless benefits from them. Interesting. So you basically just want to build a system, some sort of backend system where you can actually just plug in all the liquidity venues that you want to. It could be a DAX, it could be a SACS, it could be a New York Stock Exchange, it could be NASDAQ, it could, right? Yeah, and that's usually what we've been trying to do as much as possible to offer all the best price to our customer. So for example, even on a centralized platform, if you place a Bitcoin order, we will look at the pricing from different exchanges, different market makers and we will only route to the best one. And I think that's what we want to do for everything, right? If you want to land your money, we'll look at multiple options and make sure that we will give you the best one, the one that we've built on chain, we feel is pretty good. But if tomorrow there is an off chain option that is even better, like we will absolutely look at it. But I think for us, when you think about the cost saving that you have with a chain where everything can be automated through smart contracts, verified through actual code and not just having middle player in between that are all taking like a cut of the fees or whatever revenue. I think blockchain will just bring so much improvements on a lot of pricing and a lot of projects that you try to do yourself. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm biased. I tend to agree. How does crypto work internally Robinhood? So there's two different models that I've seen, which is it's kind of like linear versus horizontal, right? So do you like do you have your own, is there a crypto PNL or is there like, yeah, we have a business line. So basically Robinhood is pretty amazing in the sense that we have 11 different business lines that are making at least nine figures in revenue. And that really diversifies the overall group. And so when crypto is a bit down like this year or the sentiment is a bit lower, you can see other business line like prediction market that are actually going up. And you have 11 business lines doing 100 million. Yeah, almost. Yeah. Which is a, you know, a great feat for a company like Robinhood. Like we were able to diversify quite a bit. And I think that's really advantageous because the market is changing, you know, during COVID, there was a lot of question on Robinhood, will people still trade and then people were trading and then the rate increased so people were like, okay, well, people are not going to trade as much. But all of this really diversify the overall business. And I think you really makes the company solid. And crypto is just one business line. And so we have all in PNL. Basically, with all on, you know, employees that are working, engineering, product, and also the cause that we have to run the business. Yeah. What is your like an, if you're looking at a PNL, what do you like revenue sub items here? Like is it like trading fees, blockchain fees? Okay. Yeah. Basically, these kind of things. We also, you know, we acquired a bit stamp last year on an exchange. So in institutional business, we have staking, we have lending, so different type of revenue there as well. And yeah, trading fees definitely. It's still the largest portion of the whole. Yeah. Okay. So Robinhood itself has these 11 business lines doing, you know, over 100 million a year. If you fast forward a couple of years, what is the crypto PNL? Like could you have a couple yourself doing 100? Could you have staking as, you know, 50 million a year lending is 100 million a year and trading is what do you think that looks like? Yeah. To be honest, I couldn't tell you right now because we haven't done this projection at the sub item level. But all goal is also to make sure that crypto can be a business that is also diversified and not just based on volatility of trading. And I think that's what we've been seeing lately with Institution, for example. We have a lot of institutions that are just using our platform a bit as a white-libered platform to offer crypto to their customer or some of them are using it to unwrap an offline between stablecoins, to be able to send more easily between their entities. So I think we will see more and more diversification happening in our business. You guys have a crypto as a service business as well. Spin available for a while. We have some banks in Europe using it, for example, BBBA. And I think it's been pretty interesting to see because for a lot of its institution, they want to get into the space, but they also don't want to build everything from scratch. And so we are able to give them a solution kind of key in hand and they can build on top of it. Oh, interesting. Interesting. How big is the team? How big is the crypto team? I don't even know if we have an exact number, but it's pretty large now that we have a bit. Did you require the Canadian company? Wonderful. Wonderful. And Robinhood Canada is live since July 1st as well. So nice. Nice change. You want to talk about the chain? Yeah, absolutely. Tell me about the chain. Well, it's launch on July 1st as well. So it's three weeks in. Market cap is about $750 million. We have about $1,000 billion in TVL as well. And we passed $1,000,000 and 5 million transactions. So I think what it shows you is that in three weeks, we saw a lot of excitement and engagement with the chain. I think the main reason was we wanted to have an ecosystem ready to use as soon as we launched. So not only are you able to connect to our PC slowly because we have done a few partnerships, but we also launched the same time as all-ending products to bring some of the stable coin TVL into the space. And then we did some partnership with Slider as a prop stack, Arcus on the spot side. And we are really seeing a lot of excitement around mincoins lately and some of our RWA projects, like Stocktoken, where we have about 19 million in TVL there. We're going to try right now. You guys overtook base. Is that right for daily active users? It kind of depends, but we are one of the top in terms of daily active user, in terms of developer as well. We are pretty eye, I think the data always depend on how you slice it. So I know we know the game of our chain data. So we are trying to be careful there, but we are definitely seeing a good traction. Yeah, yeah. What design decisions did you guys make? Like when you guys are building the chain, there's so many design decisions that go into building a chain. Like how much do you embed natively into the chain? How much do you work with external partners? How much do you build internally? Even like the yield that you give on a Landbarrow, like that is the decision, is it fixed? Those are all these micro decisions. Can you tell me about how you got some of the big decisions that you guys made? Yeah, the biggest one I think was deciding on how we were building it. There was a lot of question on should we build oil one or should we build an L2 or L3? What we felt like that we wanted to build on top of Ethereum. We felt like we wanted to get the decentralization and the security of the L1. Why did you want to build on top of Ethereum? Liquid decentralization, security. I think for us, that was pretty important. We also wanted to be able to make own design decisions around block time, gas fees, this kind of thing. And so when we decided to build using the arbitrum stack, we were able to get all those benefits and at the same time make some of our own decisions. So for example, when we saw that there was a lot of excitement around the chain, we made sure that we could try to reduce the gas fees to make sure that people could still trade. That's not something we could have done if we were not owning the chain and the decision around it. The second part is that we like the tech from arbitrum. For example, you have Stagos where you can build any type of language around it. And you also have a way to create party orders that are a bit different from the proprietary mode in my opinion in some situation. So all these kinds of things were important. But I think at the end of the day, it's what I was telling you about earlier is this deep integration within the main app that I think gets people excited. They realize that our own products that we launched is just the first one and that we will have more and more integration and I think that's where it's a big game changer for us. Did you ever think about buying a chain? We always look at acquisition. I think it's always a question of what acceleration are you getting from this acquisition versus just partnering or versus doing something else. And I think for us, we felt pretty good about this solution where we were able to start from scratch, not necessarily from the chain or in the story and also build what we really cared about. For us, we're really focused on developers. So we wanted to have an ecosystem ready to go. We also wanted to have fast block time because I think that's the main issue sometimes resting on chain. So all of this was pretty useful to do that from the beginning. Do you see the chain as a going back to the P&L? Is the chain a P&L item? Will the chain make money and spit off fees or do you almost want to drive the fees to zero to enable all this trading and land borrow activity and perps? Yeah, it's a balance. You know, right now it's definitely looking like a generic revenue, but also we want to find a way to make sure that people are excited about using it. The last thing I would like to do is to optimize for revenue on the chain, but therefore people don't want to use it as a trading player. So they don't want to develop on it. So you have to find a balance. You also don't want to make it completely zero because then you get spam all over the place with fake activity, which is also not good for either the customer or for the chain because now you have to develop more systems to actually support the load. So it's a balance, but I think for us, we see it more as a back end solution to build on top of it and purely like something we want to optimize revenue for. Robots and machines will outnumber humans on chain and peak is how they get there. PicoS enables any machine to do business on any chain. It turns machines into autonomous actors and liquid assets with ease, giving robots access to capital and the ability to compound their value. That means funds, allocators and institutions can underwrite, finance, trade and route capital to machines the same way they handle any other asset. Millions of new potential consumers for any web-free service from compute to storage to anything a machine may need without a human in the loop. Head to peak.xyz or click the link in the show notes to find out more. How did you go about selecting the partners and how did you almost philosophically think about this? Why didn't you just build a Landbarrow internally? Why work with Morpo? How did you go about this whole entire thing? Yeah, so a lot of things were about how we announced the chain. We announced it last year, right? Doing our first event in the summer. That was the ECC one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was pretty cool. At the time, a lot of people were asking, "Hey, why did you just announce a chain?" The goal for us was to really say, "Robin is coming into the space. If you want to build with us for a child." Then during DAS, we actually announced a test net. A couple of weeks before that, the goal was also to say, "Here's a technology. Start building with us." A lot of people just reached out saying, "I'm building xyz. Wanna see if Robin is interested." We focused a lot on developer tools. We partner with people like Al-Kami, Privi, a lot more that just to make sure that we have the right infrastructure in place. Also with Dex's and other platform to make sure that we could have the trading side in place. For landing, Moffo was one of the options that we looked at, but honestly, we were very happy with the team. The way that they were thinking about building products really matched how we wanted to build products. We wanted to do something different from the competition. You mentioned it. When we launch, we are basically giving a return of about 7% approximately. That rate is going to be stable for a while until it will change based on activity. We didn't want to launch something on day one. A few hours later, it will completely change. The other thing we wanted to do was to get an insurance to make sure that there is an issue on the smart contract or something like that. Some of the losses will be covered. We partnered with Lois of London, which was also an interesting thing because we created one of the largest insurance programs for crypto with them. That required the discussion with all of this partner that we took for the program. Having strong partnership really allows you to build unique user experience in my opinion. That's what we really like to do. Then you can go with Moffo to Lois. Lois is contracted with Robinhood, but having all the details from Moffo was helpful for the insurance. Is the dream to pick one or two partners in each category? What the decks you've got, I'm forgetting the, you just swap and then they're not D.Y.D. X anymore. I forget the name. Archaeus? Do you want one or two in each thing? Or is it like, hey, eventually we want to work with Ave and Spark and Camino and Sky. Or is it like look we're just deep with Morpho and like they're great and they're design partner I think you really depends what we're gonna build There are products where you know we think that having just one partner is better Now products where we think that you know projects will we don't necessarily know where everyone is going like there are new ideas being developed on a constant basis You know, I wish I had this crystal ball that sometimes I don't so that's why we wanted to change to be permission less Anyone can develop on it and there are some projects that are really cool like you know the morning sometimes I look at my Twitter account or my ex account and I see all the stuff that are being launched and it's really exciting to see But for us when we want to do this deep integration that that we have um It's most likely with one or just a few partners because honestly we don't have the bandwidth to build like yeah unlimited the amount of projects But you've seen it for example on our wallet we created a perps experience. It's pretty well designed It's I think a lot simpler that what everything else is available on the market and we did this partnership with lighter up to really create this unique experience where you can Use your stock token as collateral you can You know see the purpose directly on our wallet and so yeah those type of deep integration does we query our like contracting partnership and so usually we don't have as many as as we would like probably yeah, yeah, could you ever see um Like bringing some of these teams in house Um, I don't think it's necessarily the goal for us. I think you know being part of Robinhood also mean that um, they will have specific requirements specifically set of rules to do and I think for for a lot of Those startups they are able to move very quickly because they're still startup stage. It's almost nicer that they're outside of the Robinhood In a way right like because you know, it's always we like to look at them on a constant basis like I think The startup is still the most exciting part of the creation of companies again experiment tri-fings Etherate until the fine product market fit I think you know once you're part of a large company. It's a bit different And you have kind of a line with the vision of the product. Yeah. How did you think about um Trying to think the right way to ask this question you guys are in a very privileged position and like a place of extreme leverage I would say so there's Nearly all crypto companies would love to be integrated into Robinhood and for many that you integrated with it's actually probably like a maker break moment for that company Um, and I'm sure when they have their board meeting the number one thing they're doing or when they're fundraising They're saying we got integrated into Robinhood. How did you think about Using this leverage like how much to flex this leverage Um, I think you know, it really depends on what we're trying to do the that products where We want to use this leverage to bring something unique to our customers Um, that can be a higher Uh Return or lower fee or something like that, but I think for us the main vision has always been how do we expand Um, the amount of customer that won't interact with blockchain and crypto and how do we bring to this customer a better product that would They're currently able to to get and I think that's where you know, we will have some of this partnership discussion Um, I think if I'm being honest the most useful part of being Robinhood is that I can reach out to almost anyone and they usually pick up the phone where like um, I work at started before and when you try to call the email or call phone somebody like it takes a bit longer and usually you have to Ask a favor of somebody to get introduced so that's really the biggest advantage that we are is that You know, if I put on twitter or x tomorrow that I want to build xyz I will get a response and and someone interested to work with us pretty quickly And I think that that's awesome, but yeah, you also get you know, Robinhood was 27 million funnily to count It's a pretty unique distribution lever and so obviously what we want to bring in for our customer is something They save to use but also that gives them benefits that be cool enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How did you think about structuring from a financial perspective And I'm sure there's you know, you can't go into all the details here, but um Like can let's use more for for example like can you just get a bunch of more photokins? Do they pay you do you pay them? Is it all just revshare like how do you structure these financially? We don't have revshare with more for I think the the main question for us was Really how do we build this product in a different way like I mentioned the rates that is not fluctuating constantly The fact that we are able to connect the actually the pool into our main app like this kind of things sometimes We do have revshare so lighter for example Glad to see you of lighter mention or revshare It's public. It's on the contract But I think you know for for us It's like like we're at this stage of the chain where it's less about Optimizing for revenue and more optimizing for adoption. It will tell you. Yeah interesting and he uh Any teams get close to being live with Robinhood and then something fell apart at the last minute Um I don't think so. I think usually you know we we spend a lot of time selecting the partner or creating contracts and all this thing so um I'm not on my group at least um There are times where an negotiation are difficult because you know we are public companies So we have a lot of requirements and things that not necessarily everyone wants to deal with Uh, but I I don't remember something where we were about to go live and yeah, it's been Did you out of despair? That's good. That's good Uh, did you think about doing anything with hyperliquid or hyperliquid builder codes? Uh, we we've discussed a few times. I think You know for for us we really wanted to build a platform that was kind of Very unique to Robinhood um, I think on perps. We are just at the beginning. It's it's a new primitive right it just launch um Like a few years ago and uh, we are seeing more and more enthusiasm around it I think there a lot of question around regulation in the US for example in the EU we are offering in offering the the perps through our centralized platform using bitstamp as an exchange for for the for the actual contracts Um, so there's a lot of question around that on the defi side having this strong relationship with lighter that we invested in in them uh last year Plus some of the other uh, uh protocol that we mentioned like uh Arcas I think for us it was a good structure that we could actually use to really build what our customer are asking for Sometimes when your partner with larger group or larger platform um, it gets a bit more difficult to to optimize for you know our customers So uh, I think that was kind of the decision process. Yeah. Yeah. How much of the um moving things on chain It how much of the benefit is related to like global access would you say For me that's a big part global access I think is is key uh, we still have a lot of equity that we come into our American companies and American exchange that cannot because um accessing Uh, this asset are difficult or it costs a lot of fees a lot of commission Um, you know, if you look at Europe, you still have a lot of platform that are pretty big that are still charging at least one euro in commission um So so I think we we want to solve this accessibility and the the global aspects through the wallet is it's pretty unique because um In a lot of places you can't walk to your broker or you cannot walk to a bank But most places you can have a phone and an internet connection and so that really changed the way that you can own assets. Yeah Um tokenize equities Underhyped overhyped I think it's undi it uh underhyped. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think we're at the beginning um Obviously if you're American and you can have access to a platform like Robinhood probably not the most exciting for you to have tokenized us as said Uh, but I think for a lot of places it's hard to get to um and these assets are going to give them exposure to US talks and ETF in a much easier and cheaper way And I think for us in the US you will start seeing these benefits when It comes to other type of tokenized item like real states are private equity Uh stocks from other exchanges like if I ask you to multi by uh stock on an Indonesian exchange I'm pretty sure that you know you can do it right away with your accounts. You have to use multiple worker Um, and I think that's what we we're going to fix. Yeah very quickly. How much of that is regulatory arbitrage Vers like the technology allows it um, I think it's mostly Right now the reason why tokenized asset are not as widely um spread is I think regulation Yeah, and we're still waiting on regulation in the US, you know clarity is throughout in progress Um in some places they are clarity, but not necessarily everywhere and so I think if tomorrow we had a A clear rule book across the world you could actually see the adoption of tokenized assets. Yeah, do you and so Like net, you know now on Robinhood you have tokenized space X and you have normal space X. Yeah, right Do you eventually from a user perspective or maybe maybe we're fine with that Maybe there's just users who love to do things on chain and there's users who love to do off chain the other product You know pushback maybe is let's combine this and make it just one asset and the user doesn't need to know if it's on chain or off chain What is the product decision there? Yeah, I think right now it's mostly Separated because for the tokenized version it's going to be on all worlds right for the Robin chain and on the Non tokenized version it will be all main platform, but you could see your world, you know, it's a proper regulation and structure, but you could see a world where um most customer won't some chain off chain they just want to be able to trade 24/7 they want to be able to send it if they want to send it somewhere else or use it as collateral on the platform or take a loan against it and we should make sure that the UI in UX does that for them but yeah all the complexity of private keys and wallet and all these things we want to abstract that away for the customer and that's what we've done for the other product when you use Robinhood Earn on the platform you won't have to create your own wallet you want to interact with DeFi at all like everything is done for you and I think that's what matters if we want adoption like we need to make it easy to to access yeah where do you think about where it makes sense to subsidize things across the platform so for example like Robinhood Earn yeah it's like one of the best earned programs on the market today the real rate of lending today is like three or four percent I think you guys have it fixed at seven or it's roughly seven it's roughly seven so there's some subsidy right and like how do you yeah I guess how do you think about that one specific maybe we can go into Earn specifically because I'd love to hear about it but also like where else do subsidize and where does it make sense so on Aaron we don't subsidize so probably not the best topic for me but I think on some programs that we we launch for example in Robin Canada that we just launched we are not charging any fee for the next like 90 days also and so it's not necessarily subsidizing but it's like you know we are operating basically without making necessarily revenue from trading but it's it's like customer acquisition you know instead of spending money on marketing Robinhood never about a stadium and put you know its name on it yet yeah yeah well you never know right but we've never done that right so instead of spending a hundred million on something like this we're spending it to give back to the customer instead of charging them fees for example in Canada right now they can trade crypto without any fee I think that's kind of the mental process there but everything that we do obviously there is mass behind it we're sure that we see a moment where it's going to be positive for both the company and also for the customer yeah what's the story to Wall Street around Robinhood's crypto strategy is that there's just it's a new it's a new product line and you know we attend that did a hundred billion you know million and now we've eleven and then we'll have twelve and thirteen is it more like a tech play like efficiency internally is it hey there's this new bucket of users that we can go attack that we don't attack today yeah it's a combination of the three definitely the global access I think is important for us you know building Robinhood the way we build in the US in every single country in the world will take a long time and so we think defy and the on-chain version of Robin can actually get us a lot faster but we also see it as a revenue stream and we also see it as a way to attract customer like excited by defy and that what we've seen on the chain you know the past 24 hours on Dex's I think there was alpha billion volume yeah those customer are mostly pure defy customer that came from different chain and brush to the Robin chain and you know until now we run that touching them so yeah I think it's a good thing for us yeah I think a lot of the so look at the metrics now total 24 hour Dex volume over five hundred and sixty million dollars defy TVL three over three hundred million protocol TVL five hundred and forty million almost a hundred over a hundred million total transactions almost two million total addresses which are like for people I mean pretty shockingly large numbers that's so you know tip of the cab hats off to you do you um uh there can be there's a lot of mercenary capital in crypto where I'm sure you know money floods to the new thing in hopes of a token right or some sort of reward now I think there's two elements here for you guys there's the team's building on top of you where the new teams maybe people are hopeful they'll give a reward um uh there's also this idea that maybe Robinhood chain launches a token one day so I don't know if you have common commentary on that um so when teams build on it uh you know some of them are going to do tokens I'm sure and that was the reason we wanted to create a permissionless chain I think I don't really want to get to every single project and tell them what to do or what not to do and they should decide for their own strategy uh on all side right now we don't have any plan for a token we launch with E3RN being the gas fee for the chain so you know we we are contributing to the ecosystem as well um and and I think we are more interested into this type of deep integration then this is really just launching a token for the sake of launching one um if tomorrow there is a real reason to have a specific token that will give benefits to the customer that's something that we we could look into yeah when you think about your competitors who are your competitors on chain oh I don't know I mean I'm assuming as a company it was the I mean I for many years it was the brokerages right like Robinhood is going after you know each trade and Charles Schwab and I think in many ways you guys have overtaken them and in some some at least for my generation you've overtaken them um when we have other crypto apps on the there've been many folks on an empire recently we've said you know Robinhood is our competition right we don't we look at Robinhood is the competition from curious who you look at um it's always a hard question I think yeah obviously we look at everybody that is in the in the space uh we look at market share we want to understand if we have product market fit right and so for product market fit the best way is to talk to your customer and to understand if they use you or if they use somebody else if they use somebody else it's probably because your product is not good um so so we try to look as much as possible to understand if we gain market share or if we keep our market share um I think at this point in the crypto space I think we're still way too small to just focus on that let's focus on you know increasing the pie and making sure that we have more and more customer across the world interacting with crypto um and you know in the future when everyone has wallet and everyone is trading on chain that's when we can really focus on the competition but um you know when I look at uh all different competitors on on the pure crypto play um I still think we are just at the beginning you know the amount of people that are owning tokenized as said for example it's still a fraction of the amount of people holding uh actually equity so um I think we we have a longer long journey ahead yeah yeah yeah we were on the on the this uh on the round up the other we were talking about the updates at you know coin based base um and uh you know you know co co-be stepped in you know there's a bunch of updates I'm sure you've seen I'm curious if you have any thoughts on maybe what base has gotten right and what base has gotten wrong well I think that was a lot of discussion around the the social experiment that they they've tried and um honestly I don't know exactly what went wrong and why he didn't work out but I think it's interesting that companies the size of coin based are trying new things like social on chain I think like I said we are at the very beginning there's still a lot to do um and I think overall you know I have a ton of respect for both Jesse uh Kobe and Brian and so the structure what they really want to organize the the company on makes all sense if for them it makes sense I'm just excited to see that you know coin based is pushing also on chain um on products that are also similar to two worlds because again like tokenized asset will only work um if we have more and more people starting to to use it and insure it yeah yeah what do you think happens with tokens and maybe the context here is you mentioned at the very top of this there's this convergence happening used to be DeFi over here and TraitFi over here and this is big convergence um if you look at tokens the especially if we get clarity the conversation is like you know return to fundamental tools and revenue and real metrics and if you look at equities they're starting to trade you know globally permissionlessly you know 24/7 365 so you you know you kind of tokens becoming a little more like equities you know equities becoming a little more like tokens are these just going to be the same vehicle over time or will they always be separate yeah probably I think you know a great way to raise money for a lot of company has been to credit token and to then use that as a way to create a community give updates and news to the community and then build an entire company around it and and we've seen it with a platform like Israel and another like this was a different way to to create a company but you know such a powerful way as well so I think you will see token being this easier way and you will also see company maybe not going public on traditional exchanges but actually deciding to use crypto token to continue to raise money or or go public through a token I think those two words are going to converge culture yeah 100% one of the metrics you look at I mean obviously revenue if a P&L and it's revenue and cost but there's like do care about daily active users is it daily active builders and developers is it TBLs uh all of the above I think daily daily active user is very important for us uh we don't want to create a chain just for buts or just for a few advent straighter we want to create a chain for a lot of people uh TBL I think is also a good signal for you to understand if you're getting people to actually engage with it um obviously we have a parent product that is going to bring a decent amount of the TBL but also um all those are products like global asset and yeah those are coined on the platform um and then you know a number of transactions a number of wallets all these things obviously a lot of [BLANK_AUDIO] that can be change with how much AI is coming into play and people creating agents. But we also want the chain to be AI first. And so we have skills that are already deployed from preview from Uniswabs so that you can easily create your agent and interact with your chain. And I think we'll see where we're offing goes. But right now, we've been pretty happy with how things have launched. And the question is how do we keep on this momentum? Yeah, how into crypto is Vlad? Oh, he's really into crypto. He's been on a lot of podcasts talking about it and he really cares about it. And I think that's one of the reasons we have such a great crypto arm at the company is because even when the market was down, like it's in 2018 when we launched, a lot of company or competitor, we're saying crypto is dead, I don't care about it. And Vlad and Beju, we're actually on the other side saying like, you know what, if that's something that our customer wants, we're going to offer it to them. And right now it's been a good bet for them. Yeah, very good bet. What is the biggest place where you have Vlad disagree? I don't know if we really disagree on anything in particular. I think that and I have been working super well together. The question is more like, you know, you will always want us to move faster and sometimes I'm more the engineer in the background being like, hey, I need a bit more time to build, but also in that I think we're really great. - That's good. - That's a good, good duo. - Good job. - Johan, thank you, man. Is there anything that you're really excited about that we haven't covered or anything that you're seeing in the industry that you think maybe others are missing that you want to cover? - No, I think, you know, that was a great discussion. So amazing to be here. - Congrats, my friend. Yeah, we're in for you and it's been very cool to see. And maybe Vlad says you need to move faster, but it feels like you guys are moving pretty quickly. So thank you, appreciate it. - Yeah, congrats, man. - Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of block works. Our hosts, guests and the block works team may hold positions in the companies, funds or projects discussed. (upbeat music)