2025 Year in Review

Crypto had that first sort of eight years and plus of infer and sort of speculation and buildout and rails and now it seems like we're in the kind of beginning of the endgame of crypto of like what it's going to look like in maybe 5 10 years time of like great apps fully abstracted from the end user super high performance blockchains and also institutions and corporates and people all around the world using this stuff. So yeah, excited about what's to come and really feels like we're at the real middle point now in crypto is evolution.

Hey everyone, quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode. Nothing said on Bell Curve is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Our guests and I may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Speaker 1: How you doing, buddy? How's the end of the year?

Speaker 2: Good. Good. I think this is the year I finally got like a lot of presents. Like not just the big ones, but like small ones. So, our apartment is like full. I've been waiting 32 years for this.

Speaker 1: Delivered.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I do. I do feel like Santa Claus. Like this year I am Santa, you know? I am the captain.

Speaker 1: Do you know what you got yet or you haven't opened any?

Speaker 2: No. Like I just will tell my sister to get like some cool guy clothing or accessory because I'm like totally incapable of doing that myself. So, pretty sure I've slotted in some sunglasses that I will without a doubt lose within at least 18 months. The last sunglasses had a good run. They were like, it was like almost three years, two and a half years.

Speaker 1: I had a similar thing. I got I allowed myself at the beginning of last year to think that I could get nice sunglasses again. And got a pair. Lasted for yeah about just almost two years. So, I'm actually pretty happy with those. Um, maybe we should just view them like subscriptions, you know, like sunglasses as a service.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Like that's going to be, you know, 200 a year for two years of a good pair of sunglasses.

Speaker 1: Fancy innovative way to finance sunglasses. Just advertise those. Park, you know, some white labeled stable coins on the side. Just be streaming payments for my sunglasses when sunglasses interrupt.

Speaker 2: Exactly. New business model for the for the VCs out there. But, you know, I get I get why Warby Parker was successful. They're like, "Everybody loses and breaks this Like, let's just make it look just close enough to designer quality that people and and build like a cool brand around it." Also, I don't know if you feel like this. Sometimes I feel like when I wear the branded sunglasses is kind of lame these days. It's like it's like a lame flex.

Speaker 1: It's not our MMO. Like I had that like little Prada on the side and it was like that was the only part that I loved the sunglasses but it didn't it's not me. That's not me. I don't think any I think that's like the least Boston thing I've ever seen you do probably.

Speaker 2: Exactly. So yeah, we're going back to our roots with this one. We'll see what Sydney cooks up for us.

Speaker 1: Man, what about you? Are you just stocking up on winter, you know, Montana You get a like a a a new a new saddle for Christmas?

Speaker 3: Mostly just, you know, everyone here, the clothing is so functional, you know, it's functional clothing, right? It's stuff that layers well, wicks your sweat, you know, no fashion out here, right? This is functional wear. Uh, some hot chilies, you know, that type of thing.

Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the opposite of Milan.

Speaker 3: Correct. I think Montana's pretty safely the opposite of Milan.

Speaker 1: That's why I'm all dressed up today in my little jumper over here.

Speaker 2: There you go, guys. Um, all right. Well, should we just launch right into it? We got we got an hour and 15 minutes left and change and we actually have a lot of categories. So, why don't we just launch right in.

Speaker 1: Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Bell Curve. This is a special we're going to do a two-parter for you. So, we've got a this episode is going to be a 2025 wrapup podcast. So, we've got categories. We're going to do biggest winners, biggest losers. We actually have a longer list than that. and we're just going to go through the highlights of this last year and then we're going to return next week with predictions for 2026. So, this is easy listening. This is, you know, if you've got a long flight or if you've got in-laws with political opinions, you can just pop those earbuds in and listen to us. Very useful here.

Speaker 2: Veryful. Yeah. Happy holidays.

Speaker 1: Happy holidays. Copy. You know, before we even get in and introduce these categories, can we just get a qualitative retrospective on 2025? I, whoever feels brave here, just spin us a yarn. What did the year feel like? I thought this was a pretty interesting year for for crypto in general. Was it a good year? Was it a bad year? We're going to get into specifics, but I'm curious on just how you're feeling leaving 2025 as a year. What do you think, Zave? You got you got any hot takes you want to off?

Speaker 3: Um, yeah. I think in general it was a year of like a bit of consolidation. Um, you saw major ecosystems like Ethereum and Solana sort of power through and consolidate a lot of mind share and attention as well as Hyperliquid as like an emerging ecosystem. But most builders I now speak to are pretty much building in one of those three ecosystems, maybe base as well. Whereas I think probably this time 12 24 months ago there was still a lot of chains launching and it was pretty fragmented. So I think in general this year was like a bit of a year of consolidation regulation obviously and I think crypto as a sort of credible asset class that institutions can deploy capital into for the first time uh with a lot of certainty. I think it was the first time that's kind of happened ever in crypto.

So maybe I think Mike we spoke about it in Denver earlier this year but um you know the beginning of the end I think is what we were calling it of like you know crypto had that first sort of eight years and plus of infer and sort of speculation and buildout and rails and now it seems like we're in a kind of beginning over the end game of crypto of like what it's going to look like in maybe 5 10 years time of like great apps fully abstracted from the end user super high performance blockchains and also institutions and corporates and people all around the world using this stuff. So yeah, excited about what's to come and really feels like we're at the real middle point now in crypto is evolution.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm going to actually start just to build on that. I think Zave, you were an honorable mention. you didn't do it publicly so I couldn't list it as best calls but yeah when we chatted in February of this year at ETH Denver I think you did a really good job of calling what was going to happen from a market structure standpoint but also from a sentiment standpoint and I I think that we are probably one year into a three-year rough time frame of consolidation and ideological churn in crypto and I think one uh to to foreshadow some of my best calls or you know thoughts on best calls and um you know just category winners of the year. I think one cycle that we've seen play out time and time again in crypto, but it feels like it's shortening and you've seen this, you know, uh I forget Shashana Rubenov or Shashana, the technology hype cycle phase. I think you've seen that play out uh in shorter and shorter timelines in crypto.

And I think the the phases go like this. There's a speculative boom and a whole bunch of capital that moves in to fund a new sector. And in crypto, we also have this weird premium around community or like shilling. Uh and then that drives valuations really skyhigh. And then there's a long period where two things happen, which is the game of musical chairs stops and then multiples rerate and consolidation happens. And there's a number of years that sometimes needed to take place before the winners can truly emerge. And where we've seen that actually play out in 2018, this was CFI infra. So this was the BlockFi and Celsius and or like kind of the custodian prime brokerage phase of crypto. And people don't remember back then actually there was a huge discrepancy in valuations around tokens actually looked cheap compared to what was happening in the private markets for some of these C5 businesses.

And so that the ideas were good. Uh but a lot of first of all a lot of companies had to fail. There had to be consolidations and you know multiples and valuations had to come way way in before you could get a couple of winners emerge. You know Anchorage and Galaxy I would call kind of the winners of that that phase. And DeFi has gone through a similar I mean DeFi valuations peaked. If you look at many of these charts um even really good projects have not gotten back to their you know DeFi summer 2020 late 2020 early 2021 valuations. And I think it's been confusing to people because we're, hey, we're revenue meta, we're fundamentals meta, and why my revenue is going up, but my token price is going down. And my response is that you have to work through a lot of the the valuation overhang that you built, you just started with the wrong multiple. If you if you looked at a bunch of charts and you just started in late 2021, they look pretty damn good. Then it makes a lot of sense, right? It only doesn't make sense when you have this crazy data point to start with. So I think that we are one year into that playing out writ large across all of crypto, but it'll be different for different sectors based on how mature the categories are, how bad the tokconomics are, and how much speculative premium has recently been injected. That'd be my, you know, summary of 2025.

Speaker 2: I think that's totally fair. I mean, I think it's like um a year of two two barbells basically, like things that have, you know, we've been waiting for for a really long time that are really awesome like prediction market success, you know, stable coins just everywhere, right? Like even every single fintech outside of crypto is thinking about stable coins. Uh RWA's a big year for like RWA finally um I think getting traction on chain and being used in DeFi. And then like on the other end of the spectrum, you had so much like shitty noise. Like DATs were so annoying. I really hated DATs. Uh I think we all saw that how that was going to play out. Um I think the creator tokens, you know, that was not like great. Just hasn't been successful. Caused a lot of noise and you know builders. Yeah, I'm looking at you big guy.

Speaker 1: I almost put as my chunk chunk coin. Yeah, I decided not to because I knew I was gonna get a lot of for it. I still think that's going to work. I still have a lot of long-term.

Speaker 2: And then just lots of noise from like the, you know, Trump coin and all that crap. So, like, you overall I think net positive. But, um, this is also the first year I've been, you know, first full year of being heads down as like, you know, an operator building, um, a new network. And, you know, we're in like a pre-launch stage. So, I've been it's been nice not to kind of have to be in the weeds of, you know, crypto Twitter every day to figure out what's going on. I think this is the year that crypto Twitter fully died in terms of providing any signal to noise. I think it actually does provide a good amount of signal now. It's just a really perfect contraindicator. Um, it's really it's useful in the same way that the magazine contraindicator, right? By the time something makes it on the cover of Time magazine, you can fade it or treat it as a contra indicator. I think that's what CT has become this year.

Speaker 3: Uh yeah, I think maybe one thing that CT lacks a bit as of 2025 is like kind of unique insight and good research, which is what I personally try and use CT for the most. And I think in the year of AI slop mixed with these things happening in crypto, uh fortunately I think you get a lot less out of CT than maybe you once did in the past. And yeah, I think there's room for that actually going forward for people to build profiles around that.

Speaker 1: Well, I would also say too, one of the reasons I think the signal is so bad is because you you effectively haven't had much market feedback in terms of what actually works for the last eight or 10 years. And when I look out at CT and a lot of the big names, you know, it's a bunch of people who are young and haven't built companies. And so now the market hasn't rewarded actual value creation and company building for the last 10 years. It's super rational and reasonable for why that would be, but I see a lot of takes and it's just like what are you talking about? um just often and and I think it comes from just the makeup of this industry and you know I think having there's always been this one common trend that at least I've seen in crypto in the last eight years is you get people that have experience in tech or finance and they come in and they're like this is crazy man it shouldn't work like this and and the natives the the crypto natives right and they were like no you don't get it and you know I think those people have been proven proven right and what they did know I think I still think there's a big gap in between people that come in this industry and they don't have a good understanding of the market they don't take the market seriously and want to play the game on the field but there's a reason why people that have more experience and years under their belt have felt like this because it is a crazy upside down industry where some stuff is disruptive but some of it just never made any sense I don't think to begin with and so I think we're in the beginnings of the rubber meeting the road on a lot of this stuff and maybe but so I think this is a good this is a good opening ramble for for this I think we did capture capture the mood or the zeitgeist but why don't we start by just I'm going to introduce our categories that we're going to go through here so these are the uh we'll make these annual bell curve awards but we've got some some classic ones and some that will be kind of fun categories so we're going to do biggest winners biggest losers uh best comeback story of the year uh most overhyped Um, that that'll be a fun one. Rookie of the year, best calls, worst calls, Ponzi of the year, best conference of the year, and then cockroach of the year. That was a late addition by Miles here. I love that as a category, though. That's that's epic. Why don't Why don't we just start with the easy ones here? Who wants to kick it off with biggest winners of 2025?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll I'll go. I'm I don't have something that creative for this one, honestly. Like I think I would call Koshi the winner. Just for like mind share uh out in inside and outside of crypto. I think you know it's one of the first apps where I have lots of friends that have never you know touched a crypto anything in like cryptonative. And they're on Koshi and and loving it. Mainly for sports betting like I think dominant you know amount of activity on there is is in sports bettings. So, uh, lots of, I think, you know, really strong support from like their investors that are trying to basically ground them as the winners. We'll see if 2026 is as good for them. Um, we're seeing like, you know, Robin Hood and, uh, Coinbase now vertically integrating their own like um, prediction markets. Um, so we'll see just how defendable of a moat they actually have. But yeah, that's my that's my that's my one winner.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I've got a few I can briefly get into. And funnily enough, I've started off with Poly Market. Interesting that Miles said Couchi. Maybe that's just their own biases, but um I think Poly Market that investment from IC was like huge. the 2 billion investment. That's like a real uh signal of how credible crypto is now to large institutions and that's just like such a telling point I think in crypto's uh history. So yeah, I think what Shane's done in general, you know, from almost being sort of sent to prison, you know, a year or so ago with people banging down the door to now like, you know, running this massive new financial market that institutions are adopting in real time and investing into I think is huge. A big winner for me there. Another one I think too large to ignore is Hyperliquid. I think in general like massive launch, the product's amazing. They've got a bunch of builders building on it now. Um great yeah following. So I think that's super impressive. And the other one I think is actually kind of Coinbase. I think like Bass as an ecosystem has done super well postregulation. They've really solidified themselves as like the category leader of crypto almost like all around. So, I think those three for me, if there was a podium, they would be standing on it.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, maybe to be uh a little bit different, I could say the Trump family was the biggest winner of uh 2025. No, just kidding. Although they did they had a good year in crypto. I I was I again, not terribly original here. I originally had three that I wrote down which were actually they're kind of the category winners to me of big uh big sectors which I think that in general the way that risk has been priced in crypto is kind of backwards for how it has historically worked in startup funding which is the earlier the stage you are the more risky it is because it's much more risky to fund something that's an idea versus something that has product market fit and is you know series D and just about to go public that type of thing but I don't think that's how it's functioned in crypto And actually there's a lot more capital in the early part of the stack because the idea is that you know we're going to launch a token. It'll probably be one or two years and then I can get most of my investment out. But there is a we're dubious on how much we can create value post token launch right it's kind of that's the way that it's worked and I I think that that's about to flip and I think that the winners will be the category winners of big existing categories. This is why I picked Poly Markets over Koshi just because I think their strategy of their to me the brand that has kind of emerged and they own their own audience which I think will be really important. Um, I also picked Robin Hood because I think Robin Hood was really down in the dumps back in the end of 2022 and they've built their business back up and done something I think only a founder business could do in their shoes which was to really fully embrace crypto prediction markets and it seems like they've executed extremely well and leveraged their you know uh almost 20 million monthly active users or whatever it is extremely effectively and I see a lot of consolidation happening in the exchange category and I think Robin Hood is really really well positioned to execute uh to execute on that.

So the other the other the last winner I was going to say is Morpho. I think Morpho is having a great year and we're talking and one I think the thing that they got really right I think they got a couple things right but they got isolated um you know risk in borrow lend uh there's a lot of nuance to that how they've actually structured it. It's not 100% isolated but I do think the modular lending was roughly right as a category. I think they won big fintech deals like Robin Hood and they fully realized the DeFi mullet thesis and I think they're one of these rare crypto companies that pivoted from cryptonative into a more B2B strategy. So, and then I think you know we're talking about this at the same Avara Labs and you know the DAO are viciously fighting and the token is dumping because of this and I have no idea if that's going to continue. Kind of feel like once they resolve that it'll be okay. But yeah, it looks like they're at the precipice of potentially emerging from a massive incumbent. So yeah, I think Morpha had a really good year too, I'd say.

All right. What about biggest losers?

Speaker 1: Biggest losers. Uh this is always a fun category.

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. I I'll kick it off. Um maybe like not super obvious, but I think it was a really bad year for optimism. Um, you know, I think like pretty much everything outside of base is not doing great, which means that the Super Chain thesis is like kind of in shambles right now. Um, I think they've lost a ton of talent to other projects like, you know, Tempo. Um and yeah, I think there even things like that they promised for a long time like like um you know the interop solutions um I think like ZK sync is leaprogging them and things like that and also going like more effectively after tradi stuff. So yeah I think like the rollup thesis rollup centric roadmap is in a you know delicate spot. Um, and I think, you know, optimism, which was always kind of the uh, you know, the leader of that um, of that cohort, uh, is is probably um, at at its like all-time low in terms of, you know, sentiment on how it's going to play out.

Speaker 1: I I maybe I can go next because I'll I'll just build on that. And I called the whole infra as a category the loser of 2025. And I would lump I would lump everything from genurpose L2s at large uh to uh you know RAS shared sequencing. I think all of that stuff has just had an unbelievably challenged year and I want to do a call back to this is the the sequence that I've seen play out a number of times. I think there is going to be a happy ending but you're going to have to cockroach through it because I think there was just a massive amount of overfunding. There were broken mental models. I think infra because it was so close to L1's where there's still this open question of monetary premium. I think people assumed that that premium was going to extend to the infra layer and that they didn't really have to think through revenue models and talk there were some really wonky ideas that these teams even view their view their own revenue streams and business models and I think that's collapsing and I think that people now understand there's going to be consolidation and they're going to be valued just like regular businesses. So I think that there's a lot of intellectual uh yeah difficulties as the market is showing that the the previous mental model was not correct and I I do think there will be a happy ending for those that can stick it out but I just called IM infra as a whole the loser of 2025.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I can again build on you guys. So I've got a few things here. Um I think one of the biggest losers is stream finance uh losing losing 93 million a few weeks ago I think um can't help anyone. So yeah, that was a huge loser for me. I think we still are understanding the implications of that actually in crypto and who knows if that's to blame for some of the market activities as of late. Um some other ones which are actually related to your point around inframike. Um so I've got in general the Bitcoin ecosystem. So, not Bitcoin itself as an asset, but kind of like layer twos and uh you know, some ordinal stuff like that seems to me like that was very hot like 12 months ago and or six months ago even and might have fallen off a cliff uh more recently. So, yeah, curious to see if that does come back at all. Another one that maybe has been a loser now for several years, but this year again might even top the list is just gaming as a category. Uh, crypto gaming. Someone posted on crypto Twitter a few days ago like some of the amounts of dollars raised is just insane. And the amount of value they've delivered is is is very very little. So, not sure if that will ever play a role within crypto, but at least for now, it's a huge loser, at least in my eyes, even though there are some cool games out there. Um, and then I think another loser, which you know, who knows if this comes back as well, but at least in 2025, I feel like the modular blockchain thesis in general. Uh, potentially as of this year, like it's unclear to me if in 10 years time this will be a thesis or things will consolidate around uh majors like Salana and Ethereum and maybe just like chains that own the pool stack. So maybe that as a thesis I think hasn't been their biggest winner and I guess some price um activity has sort of reflected that. So yeah, it chipped in a few there but there are a few in my eyes that didn't do that well this year.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. Um I think there's like a lot of hidden complexity uh in like in building rollups, right? And seeing Tempo become an L1, arc become an L1. Um, you know, I think there's probably more like new like appj1 like launches this year than than rollup launches. And that just, you know, I think like we're kind of wrong on some assumptions there. Um, and we're starting to see revealed preferences like, you know, going towards it's actually easier, you know, in a lot of ways to launch an L1.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that I would be a long-term supporter of modularity as an idea. I think the two things that people got wrong is it has to be one versus the other. There are large successful integrated ecosystems like Apple where everything is tightly controlled and then there are you know ecosystems like Android or you know Google which has a totally separate more modular quote unquote strategy and I think it was a mistake to ever say that one had to be like the other but in terms of the exist I think that the whole industry got the path dependence side of things wrong. They vastly overestimated the size of the market and the amount of specialization that was required. Right? And I think people didn't really think that the Kyle Sanmani criticism of modularity I think stands today although I think long term he'll be wrong about it which is if you have a bunch of different folks in the value chain everyone has to make margin right and they have to coordinate together and that is just maybe at at a very large market size that makes a lot of sense but at the current market size it doesn't make sense for everyone to grab a margin and it's much quicker to coordinate if it's just one team making a bunch of calls versus all these different players in the stack that you need to work with.

Speaker 2: I think two things there with regards to modularity. I think maybe we overestimated the amount of modularity that we need. You know, Ethereum as a chain kind of already is modular. You have the layer 1 and then there is some layer 2s that specialize. But we've seen now that a lot of the power has sort of consolidated to base and there's about 100 other chains that don't have a lot of activity and then Ethereum is trying to sort of bring the data availability side back in house and they don't want to outsource that to other chains. And so like I think in general probably both going to exist like as Mike said before you have your salas which are pretty monolithic and then you have maybe something like Ethereum which is like okay bit of a mixture like Michael was saying a bit modular a bit monolithic and some things it does and I think Miles your point as well around that layer that was successful this year totally it's kind of like the middleware layer which I think was a massive problem in crypto before 2025 of like just user experience it was impossible to on board I think now this layer has been built out really successfully In 2025, you've seen massive acquisitions. I think a lot of value has already been acrewed or acquired, let's say, by these companies and now it's really spurred on the application era. So, yeah, I think massive winner in 2025.

Speaker 1: All right, let's do comeback story of the year.

Speaker 2: I can start. I can start. I thought there was an obvious one for this category. I'm going to use Oiler as the obvious the comeback story of the year. So, Oiler just I I know that many people are somewhat familiar with this story, but there was a massive hack which was there was I don't know exactly the details, but it was a a flash loan based attack which exploited some kind of vulnerability in the smart contract layer of the protocol and there was the rough amount stolen was around 200 million and I think at that point Oiler had been growing and we were early in this phase of modular lending and they had about 300 million of TVL and boom went to zero overnight and they spent the next year and a half rebuilding. And I thought one of the most impressive parts about this story was that they didn't rebrand. I thought that would have been an easy choice. The name Oiler is, you know, tainted forever, but they didn't. And they built back to in 202 uh sorry, in when did they they actually recovered uh I guess they they recovered um the funds uh which was the first big feather in their cap. Um there's a whole crazy backstory around that that recovery. I don't know they actually did that but um yeah they they recovered that and then uh yeah they relaunched and now they have something like you know two billion um in TVL by the end of this year and it's just a phenomenal story of grinding it out and I can't even imagine what that's kind of every founder's worst nightmare to get a hack like that and I just have an enormous amount of respect for Michael Bentley and the team over there. So, I thought Oiler was the the one.

Speaker 2: Yeah, like by the numbers probably hard to argue with. Go from TBL like literally drain to zero and back to where it is today. It's super impressive. Um my um comeback story of the year probably is ICOs. Um and I think everybody wanted to see ICOs for like come back for a very long time. there was you know obviously there's issues there were issues with the original ICOs like just being vaporware um but there was not I I think like the mechanism made sense and is like one of the best things that crypto has you know put out into the world and enabled right like we are very good at capital accumulation um and giving access to to earlier stage stuff now there's still always going to be tons of like adverse selection uh and retail is not always going to win, right? But like the fact that this is now okay again. Um, and you know, as like we're I'm building like a layer one, the fact that we can do an ICO is awesome and we can price that ICO like at a reasonable valuation and like you know, I think I think the market has finally kind of like figured it out. So that's my uh comeback story.

Speaker 3: Yeah, my comeback story is a person. Um, I think CZ from Binance uh being pardoned. That's a great by by the new government. Huge comeback story. Served four months in prison last year, paid a multi-billion dollar fine and is now hosting massive conferences in Dubai. Uh like the one that he hosted recently and is again seen as someone that the space really looks up to even after all of that and seems like he's going to live a very fruitful life from now on even after all that debacle. So yeah, very interesting to see where he ends up and also just a sign of the times in crypto of like, you know, some things that went horrendously wrong before 2025 can go very very right as soon as you get some good regulations in place and a good government that's pro crypto.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's such a good one. I I would also just in the immortal words of LL Cool J, don't call it a comeback. I I think CZ I think CZ was always in the driver's seat probably. But yeah, he did he he's probably the I I kind of think of him as the Michael Milin of crypto in a in a way where he really pioneered a massive category like Milin did for junk bonds and maybe he pushed it a little bit. He was certainly extremely ambitious and you know treated the the rules more like guidelines but he was ultimately I think proven right and vindicated in the end and like Milin was and I think it's similar for um CZ although maybe some of the tactics are a little more you know yeah well he's a he's a fierce competitor you know like I would not want to go up against Binance um and you know I think he's equally feared and like revered in the industry. Um because you know they have a ton of leverage. Um and they will exert that leverage to extract. Um and yeah, it just depends on what side of you know uh the game you're on.

Speaker 1: Can I make a comment to on your IC? I thought the ICO was such a good uh comeback story for the year. And one something that I didn't fully understand until relatively like the last couple years is that you know every once in a while there are they happen more infrequently but the way that capital formation happens does get innovated on and the story that I always love for this is uh standard oil what they did for equity and you know equity was a concept that you know the joint stock corporation that was an east India company uh you know way of financing new expeditions and ships and things like that which is selling ownership in a public enterprise and financing things that way. There was a long gap before that was really used and we have equity markets like we think of today. And the way that the reason John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil adopted them is because it was illegal when Standard Oil was incorporated in the US to do business in multiple states. And the way that they got around