Dragonfly $650M Mega Raise, Wintermute Launches Tokenized Gold & Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan Call In

I'm about the back the I'm above the JP Morgan, Black Rockck, DTCC, Fidelity, the entire thing was just institutions. It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. You said it. He finally said it. So, boys, boys, I'm boys. We're boys. I'm about the H the back up the B the B the Hop up above the back. The rollup is headed to the top. If we're not already at the top, we're going to the top. We're on fourth floor today. We're going to be on floor one and then we're headed straight to the moon, boys.

All right, we are back. We're live and never felt better. Bit of a rocky start this morning, but we are live once again. Plenty of updates for you guys and pretty excited. We've got Matt Hugan from Bitwise, the CIO, the chief investment officer of Bitwise coming on the show later today with tons of news in the neo finance space to talk about.

Obviously, you guys have seen Black Rockck getting into Uniswap with their Bold product. Also, Apollo getting into Morpho. So, these guys are starting to adopt DeFi technologies and it's happening sooner than anyone thought it was going to happen. So, Matt is at the center of all this and he actually believes this is what is going to pull us out of the bare market. He's going to be on in about 15 minutes and we're going to chop it up with Matt Hooan from Bitwise.

But first, we've got some news that we want to go over with you guys. So, let's do it. Let's bring up some headlines. We've got the payments firm Level closing their $7 million seeds round. This one was led by our friends over at Galaxy Ventures. Galaxy's on an absolute tear. They did tenbin and now they are working with level.

And if you had listened to our chat with the Galaxy Ventures team I believe this would have been two weeks ago, maybe three weeks ago. Yeah, we did have Will Newell on the show and he told us about another company that he was particularly excited about. I have a feeling he was talking about Levelville, which announced their $7 million seed round today.

Levelvel enables businesses to process both fiat and stable coin payments. Again, we're seeing teams on both sides of the aisle. These companies are helping to cross the chasm. They're helping bridge the gap. We're seeing this in the **RWA** space, right, with native issuance, digital twin, the tokenization teams working on both the equities and the crypto side. And now you know we have Level which is a payments company that it's working on both fiat and stable coins. Again sitting in the middle and and able to service both sides of the market.

Founded by X AQR Trader and spun out of Galaxy Digital. Their team is from PayPal, Deutsch and Black Rockck as well as other major financial institutions. The $7 million seed round will expand their product suite including B2B crossborder transfers, payment processing and lending solutions across London, New York, Canada and Switzerland.

So shout out to the Level guys. I think we're going to see more of this and we're going to see more forex as well. I think that is an underrated part of this stable coin business. But obviously stable coins in general are exploding. We've seen a lot of B2B businessto business stable coin payments happen. A lot of people are starting to pay at point of sale with more stable coins and crypto debit cards.

And then obviously the remittance industry is actually still quite early. The global crossber payments market is demonstrating explosive growth. Transaction volumes are projected to reach $320 trillion by 2032, but global payments remain constrained by legacy financial infrastructure. And so we're going to see level play in this market as well.

Shout out to those guys. Congrats on the level $7 million seed round led by Galaxy Ventures. Next up, Wintermute. Wintermute launches institutional tokenized gold trading. You guys know Wintermute good and well. People like to say they are responsible for pretty much everything that happens in the market. Them and jump trading are some of the most villainous characters.

Obviously they're not villains here. They do good work. They're market makers. But a lot of this things happens behind the scenes. You know these are the guys making the markets. most of retail is out there taking the markets and so they're just you just got to take what Wintermute gives you. Which is why they catch a lot of flack, but they're getting into gold.

Which is no surprise if you've been tracking Tether and the amount of tokenized gold products out there. And so what Wintermute plans to do is they expect the tokenized gold market to reach 15 billion dollars in 2026. This is a result of tokenized more of these gold products as well as the gold market just continuing to rip. Which is why we've seen a lot of growth happen in this industry up until now.

Wintermute is going to be working on an OTC institution trading product. And so this is what is going to target hedge funds, corporate investors and minimize price impact for large trades. So these are people and market participants trading large sums of gold. The settlement obviously is a difficult thing particularly with gold because it's difficult to move from place to place.

Paper contracts and derivatives have made that particularly easy but settlement time is still a blocker. And so tokenized products bring settlement time all the way down to nil. Instant settlement for tokenized gold. And this is representing gold that's held in vaults, enabling electronic settlement, simplified market access through blockchain technology.

Tokenized gold is one of the things that I think we're going to see happen a lot more. There's going to be a lot more growth here. We've been talking a lot about tokenized equities, money markets, these sorts of things as forms of collateral in vaults and other trading strategies. But you know you have this permissioned layer that that prohibits a lot of retail investors from buying those products because they are securities.

Gold on the other hand is a commodity. Anyone can buy it even in tokenized form. I believe we're going to see a lot more tokenized gold used as collateral in DeFi and NEOI going forward. Moving right along, we've got Banksa, Banksa and Ton partnering to enable stable stable coin payments for APAC businesses.

Integration should allow small medium enterprises to process crossber transactions and B2B settlements using TON's blockchain AR architecture. Obviously TON being the Telegram blockchain. Banksa is licensed in US, Europe, UK, Canada and they are expanding Ton's global payment network.

Recent Ton Pay was launched on Telegram and obviously Telegram's got massive distribution, 1.1 billion users. I think Telegram is moving a little bit faster than some of the other messaging and social media platforms. We're also hearing that X is going to be launching a financial services component to the social media platform X. And so this, I think, is very very similar.

We're going to be seeing a lot more of this. And social media companies are getting into the financial services game. Anyone with massive distribution can stand to benefit from financial products and services because the lifetime value of customers is so high and they already own the relationship with the end customer.

I'm sure you guys feel it. You hop on your phone, next thing you know, you know, you hopped on to check an email, next thing you know, you're checking Twitter or you're checking Instagram. It's just second nature at this point. And that's why it makes sense for more of the highv value products and services to be integrated more deeply at least from a capitalistic perspective.

That is what is going to maximize the amount of value that you're squeezing out of all of the attention in the app. WhatsApp I believe already has payment embedded into it. Telegram is now partnering with Banksa to enable more financial products and services. Mr. Beast is launching a financial product and service component to its business.

And X is doing the same. This is all a result of the distribution that they already have, building and verticalizing more of the business stack and integrated into their existing distribution. It's the position that they find themselves in. So, we're going to keep moving along. Let's see what we've got up next.

Yes, China is running the EV playbook on humanoid robots and it's working. This is insane. I wish we had the video to show you guys, but I don't think we do. So, we're just gonna we're just going to talk about it. There was a video that went pretty viral of these humanoid robots dancing.

And so in 2025, last year, they did a similar ceremony where these things were, we talked about it yesterday on the stream, they were actually like still robotic looking, kind of clunky, kind of robotic movements, not very fluid. They did this same ceremony, show unveiling of like the latest years of these this humanoid robot, and it was incredible how humanlike these things are.

They were dancing. They were practicing kung fu martial arts. And all of this was with humans and robots on the stage together. And so I think these things were particularly small at first. And it just goes to show that these things are going to scale up incredibly fast.

The difference between 20 25 when they did this in 2026 was basically the difference between like chat GPT 2.0 and chat GPT like 5.0 whatever we're on now. It was an incredible step function and increase in the effectiveness and productivity of these things. Now, it actually looks like they can coexist with humans, which is an insane thing to even say and think.

But that was the impression that I got watching this. We're going to be seeing a lot more of this. Obviously, Elon is working on his own Optimus humanoid robots. They've shut down certain models of Tesla so they can focus on the Optimus robots. they are also they've also at least Elon has been particularly fascinated by the hand of these Optimus robots and how difficult it is to build a good hand.

And so I did notice in these Chinese robots that they had almost like a mitten or a glove on and so it did not have the same kind of dexterity that humans hands have. And so I think that would open up another set of use cases. China is shipping these things extremely fast. They're innovating very quickly and from from what I'm hearing, China is also going to be selling these things at a very affordable price point, which I think is going to open them up to end consumers very very quickly.

We're going to be seeing a lot of these. Maybe they don't have all of the robustness of all of the tasks that you could imagine, but they are certainly coming and I think once Elon gets Optimus out the door, it's going to be a little bit of a higher price point, but we are going to see a lot of those and apply that technology to a lot of different use cases.

There's one last thing about the robotic industry that we're seeing progress that I want to mention which is that if you guys have been watching some of the some of the podcasts that we've done previously with Arthur Hayes you would have seen that we had Niels from the Ayuki project the Auki company is one of the few companies out there that's mixing blockchain and robotics.

I had mentioned them a couple weeks ago on the show. Probably should have been a lot louder about it. Because that token is on an absolute tear. See, we've got the video now. Why don't we cut to the video so you guys can see what I'm talking about with these robots. Yeah, that this is crazy.

Like these robots are if I'm a parent of one of one of these kids, like do I want them on this like that close to an experimental robot doing kung fu? These things are so light on their feet. They have so much dexterity. The agility is incredible. They're doing back flips. Oh my god. They kind of stutter step when they land these back flips. It's not super super smooth.

But if you guys see the comparison between 2025 and 26, it's it's night and day. These things are actually actually good now. These kids do a great job. So, I haven't I think I've seen a humanoid robot, but I haven't really interacted one with one. I have interacted with some of those robotic dogs. If you guys have seen those, those Boston dynamic dogs. It is very unnatural.

There's an an interesting phenomenon actually about this though which is that you know obviously me my age I I've interacted with plenty of real dogs as well as real humans. And so they did a study with babies and they checked whether babies could tell the difference and they really couldn't. I've also heard stories that babies are basically their babies aren't afraid of snakes.

You can actually put a baby right next to a snake. It's totally unfazed. It kind of pets it. It thinks it's cute. It doesn't have this innate fear of this thing like us humans do. Yeah. Why don't we cut back to the article? And so I think the reason why this feels very unnatural to us now is because we've got, you know, decades under our belt of time in which we've interacted with humans and we've interacted with you know real animals.

So when it when we're faced with an artificial humanoid robot or an artificial human or or a robotic dog, it feels very different from what we're accustomed to. Smaller people or people that will grow up and these things will already be ubiquitous working in factories or teaching your kids in school. If your kid is coming up through, you know, their life and their experience and they're accustomed to robotic dogs and humanoids, there's going they're going to have a very very different relationship with them.

It won't feel unnatural like it feels to us. It'll feel like they're interacting with someone or something that feels very familiar and very natural. Which is going to be a very strange thing as this continues to develop. It it's pretty pretty a fascinating development. So, how am I getting exposure to this? I have bought some Aayuki because Niels came on the show and he talked about it with Arthur Hayes and it's doing quite well.

So take a look, do your own research, not financial advice. We've got one more headline before we get to our first guest. Shout out to the man Dragonfly founder and investor Hib. These guys closed their fourth fund at $650 million who said that VC was cooked because this was raised during a bare market. You guys seen the fear and greed index at extreme fear. It was pretty much as fearful as it could possibly be.

Dragonfly has been around for a long time. They're one of the best VCs in the space, constantly staying steadfast in the vision that they have for the space overall. They're also not dissuaded by the fact that this is a bare market. I think it's pretty clear at this point that we're in this crypto winter phase. If it's a V-shaped recovery or a U-shaped recovery, we don't know, but we're going to find out.

And so for Hib to to you know raise these kinds of funds it it's pretty incredible. They first raised they raised during 2018 ICO winter. They also raised pre-Luna collapse and you know that is where they returned the fund. And so they've continuously time and time again been profitable in the space with VC. they're also generating some some pretty radical fees which makes it a tremendous business.

Hib has said that his view is that non-financial crypto has largely failed. So these guys you know didn't get wrapped up in the you know governance and decentralization theater, none of the social creator coin nonsense, none of the memecoin nonsense. These guys stayed steadfast in DeFi and have continued to build throughout the DeFi summer, DeFi Renaissance, DeFi 1.0, DeFi 2.0, and what we're calling Neo Finance, which is the the latest iteration of Vitalic calls it low-risk DeFi.

And it's generally this convergence of legacy finance in the Wall Street cohort merging with a lot of the DeFi OGs, and this is what we're calling Neo Finance. The financial crypto sector is accelerating rapidly. You see this in stable coins eating more and more of the payments stack. And then obviously all of the mechanisms being built around stable coins. Defi is rivaling CFI at scale. institutions are actively building in this space. Prediction markets are emerging as trusted infrastructure.

The fund for thesis is that crypto remains early. Can't really can't really make it simpler than that. They're still early. And so obviously you've got to have some foresight into which phases and sectors are going to appreciate the most, but this is where we're at. Don't get messed up in all of the hype and narrative. Stay steadfast. what works is DeFi and that is where Dragonfly is continuing to focus on agentic payments, onchain privacy, tokenization and expanding financial infrastructure.

These are the sectors where crypto largely has found product market fit and this is where they believe Dragonfly believes the best investments will be made especially when sentiment is weakest. So, congrats to Hib, friend of the show. Always a pleasure when he comes on. We'll be seeing him out in Denver. We'll be talking out about the fund and what they plan on doing with the $650 million and where they plan on allocating.

All right, guys. That is all we've got in terms of the news and the headlines today. We've got the man, the myth, Matt Hugan. You've seen him on Twitter. We're going to send him in to the green room behind the scenes. He's going to be up in just a moment. And we're going to be talking about several things. Bring the glasses back up here. And so we're going to get him in in just a moment.

In the meantime, let's go over a bit of what we've got. So Bitwise did see $260 million in flow to onchain products in a single week. they saw the Salana staking ETP in Europe pulled in $60 million. Generally we're seeing this convergence between legacy finance and the evolution of DeFi. You guys have heard it several times as we've been talking about it.

A lot of the the instit infrastructure on chain did not find product market fit. They're being forced to innovate and a lot of the legacy financial products are now meeting tokenization where it is and they're being forced to innovate as well. the market knows where this is heading. And it's heading to tokenization, but it's happening a lot faster than I think a lot of people expected. So, we're gonna bring up Matt and we're gonna be talking about it. There he is. Without further ado, Matt, welcome to the show, man.

I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. I'm I'm glad that you joined. I've been longtime follower on Twitter. I think you've got a very reasonable, nuanced, and pragmatic approach to the space. And I'm excited to to chat about what you guys have going on at Bitwise.

I love it. I appreciate the kind words.

Absolutely. Well, I think there's been two pieces of news as of late that I think would be great to start with that are that are right at the apex of this convergence. We're seeing some of the DeFi blue chips work with some of the largest financial institutions in the world. It's pretty incredible. And so I'd love to just get your initial reaction to Black Rockck working with Uniswap as a liquidity mechanism for their product B.

And then also Apollo building on top of Morpho. Your first impressions, your reaction to when you saw this in the news and we'll we'll dig into some of the nuts and bolts.

Yeah, absolutely massive. I think the market hasn't recognized what a big deal this is. is the world's largest asset manager integrating with the world's leading decentralized exchange to provide liquidity into Bidd. A second piece that you didn't mention is the CFO of BlackRock saying they will tokenize all their ETFs in the next 3 to 12 months. And then this massive endorsement by Apollo, which is really like the Black Rockck of Credit saying it wants to build on Morpho.

I I it's hard to imagine the the scale of the importance. This is really opening the door to institutional DeFi. It's a huge first step. If we were in a bull market, these tokens would be plus 100%. We're not, so they're basically flat, but I really think it's a a critical event in the history of DeFi infrastructure. I'm I'm really excited about it.

Matt, I was listening to a podcast that you did recently with the block and and you mentioned this Black Rockck is is I think it was the CFO mentioned that they're going to tokenize these ETFs in short time in 3 to 12 months, which you said is a foregone conclusion. It's basically happening.

Yeah, that's the thing I think the crypto market may miss. When a big bank says 3 to 12 months, those things are already 90% done. This is not an experiment. It's not an idea. this is something that's happening and they're just aligning it with their marketing calendar. So I was really taken aback by that. Look, we all know Larry Frink, the CEO of BlackRock has said every fund, every asset, every stock will be tokenized, but I think even me, a bull in this space, thought that was a five or 10year period. Now five or 10 years has shrunk to 3 to 12 months. Um I think it tells you a lot about the pace at which this is moving.

the people in the chat they're asking you know this is a permissioned feature right and you know if you look at the black rockck bidd partnership with unis swap you know they they're working with securitize in the middle there to make sure that there's qualified individuals and market participants that are you know end up getting into the biddle fund. how much does the the permissioned you know aspect of these things separate them from the existing DeFi landscape?

You know my my impression was that tokenization one of the the biggest value propositions was always composability. So how much are we you know kind of tokenizing for tokenizing sake without actually getting the the the main benefit versus you know kind of separating these things out.

Sure. I mean, it would be nice if they yolo shipped for full fully decentralized, no AML, KYC, access to everyone, and they went from zero to 100 miles an hour overnight. That's not the way that these banks work. So, what you're saying is absolutely true. This is permission. It's controlled. It's only institutional investors. It is work. It means that the institutional investors want exposure to this probably because they want to experiment with looping strategies, maybe because they want to borrow against it as collateral.

So I would take it as two things. One, a sign that institutions want to do this and two, the necessary first step for Black Rockck to move into full-blown DeFi. I think if you back up and think about DeFi three or four years ago, there were like 10 major challenges separating us from disrupting all of finance. There were regulatory challenges. There were bandwidth challenges. There were institutional understanding challenges. And then there were these challenges around AML KYC and sort of digital identity.

We've knocked down all of those other challenges. That's what this signals. The market is mature enough. It is tested enough that Black Rockck is willing to attach its reputation to true decentralized exchange, true DeFi. We still need that last piece of AML KYC and decentralized identity before we take over the 10 trillion dollar finance market, but going from zero to one is is a much bigger deal than going from one to 100. And I think we've gone from like zero to 10 Um and and I think the rest is just a matter of time. So you the the critics are right. It's limited, but it's a huge step.

I I tend to agree with the idea of this being a stepping stone. I think I think that's the right way to think about it. And I can't help but think that, you know, when we hear Larry Frink talk about tokenization more recently, he's also talked about basically one chain to rule them all, which I think maybe is a is an opinion that, you know, his other financial institutional counterparts may not share, but it does signal that he is already thinking about composability to the extent that everything is happening on one unified chain.

Yeah, I think that's I think that's reasonable. You know, I think no one knows at this point how it's exactly going to pan out and and my own view is it's more likely to be to be multi-chain. But I do think he's thinking about where this goes. Look, some some context. You know, I come from an ETF background. Maybe I mentioned this on on the block podcast, but I think a lot of the the push for BlackRock into tokenization is that they actually missed the ETF game.

So Black Rockck today is known as the world's largest ETF issuer, but they had to buy the ETF business from Barclay's global investors after the great financial crisis. So they missed the innovation of ETFs and had to pay up to catch up and that became a huge business. I think they see tokenization and DeFi as the next wave of that. They're determined not to miss it. Um whether it's one chain or multi-chain almost doesn't matter. what Black Rockck thinks it'll evolve the way it evolves. But it is interesting that they're seeing the big picture. They see how this spans out over time.

It it you know, one of the things that we've noticed on the show just recently has been this transition in previous cycles which I I know you've you know you guys and Bitwise have been a while around for a while I think since 2017. So you guys have been through multiple cycles. You've seen how this space has evolved. you know, back in would have been the DeFi summer 2020 era, you know, we started to see a lot of L1's pop up and this was primarily, you know, around a lot of surge in DeFi as well.

And so each chain had kind of the same components with their own skin around them. Every chain had a DEX, every chain had a lend borrow market and and every chain had a yield aggregation service of of some kind. It was a very chain ccentric way of of looking at the world. And now we've noticed that this transition has happened and it and it's taken us to more of an asset ccentric view of the world.

And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this because now you know we're looking at Bidd on multiple chains. But now Bidd has, you know, a DEX and soon enough Bidd will have a lend borrow, I'd imagine. And then, you know, soon enough it'll have a yield aggregation or or preferred vault aggregation service. Do you think that this is the right way to look at this space overall now that we have some higher quality assets coming into the ecosystem or or yeah, generally kind of tell us about, you know, the pros and cons of of what this mental model might might give us?

That's a fascinating mental model. I think it's probably accurate, right? It looks a lot more like the traditional market which is how that is structured like there are there are multiple exchanges where stocks trade but there is only one stock. There are actually multiple prime brokers lending against that even though there's one entity. The same is true on the fund side. So I think that is probably the right view of the world.

I think, you know, may maybe an extension of that is there's probably a power law distribution in terms of in terms of dexes, in terms of lending markets, in terms of of vaults. So I I'm not sure it will be one to rule them all. I think it's probably more like a classic 703010 or 702010 distribution is is what you end up seeing.

But I I yeah look in the end the the the people who have real power in any sort of financial ecosystems are the product providers and then the customer aggregators the actual infrastructure it's it's challenging to compete. So so I think I think when you think about where control lies I would think in the customer aggregators and the product side as much as in these actual dexes and and such.

So, I' I'd love to dig into that a little bit more. And we've heard this on on throughout a variety of different product and market verticals. It's those who own the end customer on on the distribution and front-end side. And then the bare metal, you know, that is that is where the money's made. It's this barbell. Everything in the middle tends to get commoditized as people kind of commoditize their compliments towards the middle of the stack.

And so, you know, as we're looking at the ETF market and and some more of the legacy financial products, could you just help because a lot of our audience is founders, builders, investors, but cryptonative founders, builders, and investors. Could you give us a sense of who currently owns the the majority of these two bookends in the legacy finance and ETF world?

Yeah, it's a great question. So in the legacy financial world, it's really the broker dealers and the financial adviserss who own all the customers and assets. So it's either Charles Schwab or if you want to go one layer deeper, it's it's Morgan Stanley, it's Meil Lynch, it's UBS, right? They have a huge chunk of the marketing power. And you see that in ETF land, right? ETFs pay effectively a listing fee to be on Charles Schwab to have access to their customers.

And and sure like the the ETF providers have a certain amount of scale and can build great businesses. But yeah, really where the customers are are where it matters in cryptoland. I think people don't pay enough of attention to like the value that Phantom has created or those sorts of wallet based aggregators. I think there's a huge amount of value there and you're going to see them monetize that customer relationship and trusted brand over time would be would be my guess.

Yeah. Yeah. Back in I think it was 2016 or 2017, there was the original article of the fat protocol thesis, which you know was kind of the counterpart to the social media rising of of these apps capturing and then people thought that all the value would acrew down to the L1's gas fees. Shortly thereafter, you saw the fat app thesis was kind of flipped the barbell back. I think it's been, you know, now the consensus seems to be what what you're saying, which is essentially the fat wallet thesis.

This is the portal through which people, and I think people like that, too, because it's like, oh, I got a fat wallet. Sounds great. Want that, right? Yeah. Um, and yeah, you're right. Those seem to be the entities that are owning most of the customer relationships. I'd probably say, you know, the wallets and the centralized exchanges at this point are are where people see custody and that's their primary access point.

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, look, the the apps can be fatter than in traditional markets because they're two-sided. So, they have supply dynamics and demand dynamics and that allows them to create more defensible modes. So, I don't think the apps get squeezed to nothing. I think they're fatter they than they are in the traditional markets. But I think the fat wallet thesis looked I mean that's how it plays out in every other ecosystem.

I would even say you're seeing it play out here. I mean the largest primitives in DeFi are tiny right now right unis swap is a $3 billion asset something like that. obvious $2 billion massive business is trading 20x revenues or something like completely silly given the scale of its growth. I think that explains a lot of it. you do have this this power in the fat wallet space. Again, the apps don't get squeezed to nothing here because they're two-sided markets. I think that's really an important differentiation, but I do think there's more power in the wallets than maybe most people have historically given credit to.

And and just to kind of put a number around this or you know kind of tie up this thesis that you know the the those who own the customer relationships are able to set prices that everyone else is downstream of and can kind of just pick up the pieces afterwards. And so I think you know wallets are in that position now. And then you know we've got the other side of the barbell right on both the legacy world and and also the you know DeFi neo financial side.

In typical blockchain companies, you know, bare metal actually kind of is a is a somewhat neat term because ultimately these things are machines, especially in proof of work, even in proof of stake, these things kind of all follow down to the bottom of the stack. But in the legacy financial world, when we're thinking about ETFs, what is considered bare metal as you get, you know, to to kind of the two barbell ends of the spectrum?

Yeah, that's a great question. I actually don't know what the right analogy is. Part of me wants to say the index providers which are the bare metal of the intellectual property behind the ETFs. And if you want to look at a beautiful chart, type in MSCI into Yahoo Finance. That's the leading index provider. It's been one of the best investments in the world over the last 30 years. So I think that is like you know ultimately where it boils down to. the the barest of bare metals like the custodians are just completely commoditized and not interesting.

But the the IP level at like the index level, it's been a it's been a great business to be in for a long time and they've they've maybe aggregated more value even than some of the ETF issuers. Look, ETF issuers build deep relationships with customers at Bitwise. We have thousands of clients. We spend time with them. We cross-ell them from one product to another. We introduce them to crypto. you can have very strong relationships. But I do think the the the index level in legacy finance is is sort of maybe the equivalent of bare metal. It's the IP behind asset management.

And and where does Bitwise sit in this? You know, you got Morgan Stanley, Maril Lynch, and Charles Schwab on the one side. You've got MSCI on the on the other side. Where does Bitwise's ETF offering sit?

Yeah, you know, I like to think that we cover both the asset manager and the index side. So, we run our own indexes for our index products and design the IP there. And then even on the ETFs themselves, we try to differentiate, right? We're a large staking service provider. So, we run our own staking service. We we integrate more of that