Banks are looking to get started in DeFi - Aya Kantorovich
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Ladies and gentlemen, we have someone who can do that joining us on the other side of the mic. From August, previously known as Fractal, Aya Kantorovich, thanks so much for taking the time. This isn't your first rodeo appearing on The Scoop, but I think it's your first time in your new seat. It sure is. We're excited to get into everything. Obviously, folks may be unfamiliar with what you're working on and what you're all about. They may be

have been living under the proverbial rock or paying too much attention to the slings and arrows of the new administration. So give us a rundown of your journey. And then there's a lot of stuff that we're going to get into. Yeah, I can't wait to dive in. Thank you, Frank, so much for having me on again. Any conversation with Frank is going to get into the nitty gritty, so I'm buckled in and ready to go. My quick background. So I started...

my career on the banking capital markets side of the business before entering into TMT Equity Research and then finally making my way into crypto in 2018 at Patera Capital. Then I was part of the founding team of FalconX, so crypto prime broker, joined Seed and left right after we raised our Series D. And I got very lucky. I transitioned out a month before the FTX collapse happened. So, you

Had a lot of concerns with CeFi. We can dive into that if you'd like and lack of transparency there. August, our new company, which we're very excited about, is focused on bringing prime services on chain. We have a smart contract wallet that we've built in order to support and facilitate all of that.

And then we've also launched Upshift. So that is our retail company and what we're focused most about, tokenizing all yield on-chain and making things really simple. If you think about on-chain finance today, multiple clicks, multiple chains, very many protocols. Our idea is to simplify all of that in one place. And that's what we're aiming to do. When you think about the composition of our crypto capital markets, you would think,

in the wake of that credit crisis that there'd be a deeper penetration on the institutional side into decentralized credit, decentralized exchange. But that didn't necessarily happen. Waltz, those rails held up and were quite strong and robust relative to the centralized counterparties, and obviously more transparent, to your point.

What's sort of holding us back from a more decentralized future from a capital markets perspective? Yeah, I would break it into a couple buckets. The first is, you know, as it pertains to how you define institutions, you know, we get to

We tend to get caught up in that nomenclature pretty often in crypto. I would say, you know, if you're talking about the institutions such as, you know, retirement funds, family offices, you know, large, large multi-billion dollar asset managers that are buying, let's say, the BlackRock iShares.

Those institutions are getting involved, but they can't touch DeFi directly due to regulation. And so that's an area that's always held those folks back, a lot of the banking participants. At least in the United States, we've seen a lot of activity pick up on chain with banks overseas. But regulation is really the big one. Where we have seen them engage is they are very large liquidation

LPs of crypto funds. And so while they directly are not facing DeFi, they are indirectly facing DeFi. And so the AUM of those funds has significantly risen over the last

two to three years, and largely in part to more of these institutions getting involved. And so I think people tend to overshadow that because, you know, you want to see the big headline of the bank touching DeFi directly, you want to see the retirement fund touching Aave directly, as you mentioned, but, you know, they can't necessarily do that, they can definitely invest in a fund who can. And so we're seeing a lot of that. And then on the, you know, DeFi piece directly,

I think you're still seeing quite a bit, you know, for example, from our position, a lot of our lenders today haven't, you know, we're the first counterparty they've lent to since, you

since the collapse of a lot of the C5 players, whether it's Celsius, BlockFi, and in part to the very strict security measures that our smart contracts have and full transparency on how loaned assets are used. But to your point, I would say there's definitely a dichotomy between these two on the expectation of the large headlines coming on chain versus what they can or can't do and then who's actually engaging on chain today.

That's really well put. I think one thing that has, if you were to sort of take a look at the penetration of Wall Street into crypto, obviously it's expanded, maybe not into the DeFi side of things, but they have like this proxy exposure via maybe the crypto funds they're investing in who have a bit more flexibility into dabbling, as it were.

But overall, just zooming out, right, that institutional exposure to cryptos, an order of magnitude larger compared to previous cycles. And one thing that I'm curious to get your take on is the impact of that institutional exposure on the different boom and bust cycles that we've seen, right? Because it doesn't look like that's changed that much in terms of

the same cascading liquidation blowups that we see in terms of the volatility that we still see, you would think, or I would have thought, that with more institutional capital would come a dampening of these weird idiosyncratic elements of

of these crypto markets, but they haven't. It's still seemingly just as volatile and leverage boom and bust cycles seem to play out with just as much frequency. Do you think that that changes on the micro part? And then of course the four year cycle that we typically see, or is that going to continue to sort of be a pesky idiosyncratic element of this market?

Yeah, I think the devil's in the details here. And so looking at the numbers on the micro side of it, we saw the largest liquidation event happen on February 2nd in crypto. But if you actually dial into the details,

Anyone who's been in crypto for a while will tell you that it was nothing like Black Thursday and Friday of crypto in previous cycles. And so the reason it was the largest is because the notional dollar denominated value of crypto has gone up, not in years.

or notional BTC terms. And what I mean by that is that if you actually just look at implied volatility, the implied volatility is actually down significantly from where it's been in pre-2023 numbers. And so, you know, a huge part of that is, you know, exactly as you mentioned, is that the holders of Bitcoin have completely changed and the participants have changed and become more institutional. So if we look at just

Taking this month, I mean, look at who the top 10 holders of Bitcoin are. Today, the top 10 holders are...

19.75 million of the 21 million capped Bitcoin supply. So roughly 94% has been mined. The top 10 holders, excuse me, hold 20% of that. So 19.75 million is out there of the 21 million, 94%. And of that, 20% is held by these 10 members. Those 10 members include, and going by order of magnitude,

Coinbase, Binance, BlackRock, MicroStrategy, Bitfinex, the US government, the Chinese government, EOS, Tether, and Zappo.

And so the two names that really strike out to me that are different here is BlackRock as number three and MicroStrategy as number four, but even Coinbase as number one. Because if you think about, you know, the participants who are buying Bitcoin, leaving it in Coinbase custody or buying the Bitcoin ETF and using that.

I bet potentially as margin. Those participants are far different than our traditional, call it hodlers that we've seen historically in the last, call it eight years. I see. And I would really dig into that in terms of investment strategy. So if you think about if someone has a portfolio and they're targeting 2% of Bitcoin allocation, if Bitcoin drops, then the share of the portfolio also drops and the manager therefore has to buy more Bitcoin.

Conversely, if Bitcoin rises, then now the BTC share is higher than 2%. So the manager has to sell. So basically, when the market goes down, institutions buy. And then when the market goes up, the institutions sell. And so inherently, BTC implied volatility has dropped.

And you're actually going to see that, and I'll give you my last data point on this, is that notably Bitcoin is now less volatile than 33 S&P 500 stocks as recent as 2023. And there were in total more

more data points around even not just S&P 500 stocks, but also Nasdaq stocks and others that are far more volatile than Bitcoin. So that volatility number is decreasing. I would say the headlines perhaps aren't necessarily framing it in that way. You know what I think it might be? You know what it might... So the point obviously is that we have seen a decline in volatility as the concentration of Bitcoin being held

among institutions increases. But maybe there's this sort of feeling that there's maybe this sort of like anecdotal sense of volatility derived from the fact that in a recent, like over the past year, there have been so many macro events happening over the weekend, whether it was news or headlines out of Israel or

or even recently, right, with Trump talking about tariffs over the weekend. And so the news hits and is digested first by crypto markets because everything else is closed. And so it seems like our markets are more reactive, but they're not necessarily more reactive. Well, at least thinking about Bitcoin specifically than other stocks. It's just that this is where on a weekend, right?

A macro hedge fund can actually express a view or hedge or speculate or whatever have you, or take some risk off the table, et cetera. It's a fantastic point. And I don't think it's talked about nearly enough. And I'm really glad that you mentioned it because it's,

You're absolutely right. In this administration, so much- So proud of myself. Yeah. But it's true. It's so important. So much news has hit on the weekend. And on days where maybe it's a federal holiday and the markets are closed. And

To your point, these managers have to express their views or hedge their portfolios in some way, shape or form. And there is a lot more correlation with Bitcoin and, you know, macro markets now. And so you're seeing that being expressed in crypto and not only, you know, in the US, but also especially with Asia. We're seeing a lot more of that activity really spike up where it was quieted down over the last couple of years.

And so that's really exciting. And I think it's, you know, my take, hot take is that it's going to move markets, traditional markets to become more 24-7 over time. We will at some point get stock trading on the weekend just because of how, you know, news travels and when things are being announced. But that'll take time until then crypto is going to be where people continue to show those insights.

I will say though, it sometimes does feel like there was a lot of memes on this point with the most recent tariff-related drawdown where, oh geez, I'm sure you saw some of them where it's like, the great thing about crypto is in anticipation of the market opening down, it trades down lower and then it will also still trade down even lower when the market does in fact open lower.

So, you know, to be fair, like some of it's kind of just, there's a difference between our interpretation or how things feel and like what the actual raw data suggests. But there's no doubt, right, that this intertwining element of the market with sort of increasing institutionalization of the market has resulted in the things that matter being the same things that matter to traditional markets.

I mean, when we think about this morning, the CPI report was indicating that inflation rose unexpectedly higher in January, resulted in a drawdown across global equities and crypto. It feels like the specific crypto-specific headwinds appeal to be ameliorated to an extent with the regulatory environment shift.

Now this is in the driver's seat. Yeah, I would say, you know, it depends on the narrative you're trading on and your investment thesis for the space. To your point, if you are a systematic fund or market neutral, then we are very much in the four years of headline space.

trading again. And look, I think people tend to have short-term memory sometimes and forget that the first four years of the Trump administration were exactly this, where, you know, trading was felt very emotional and very reactive to headlines. And we're now in the tariff and inflation cycle where we're, you know, there's just a reaction to, you know, every, every, and

announcement that comes out weekend or weekday. But if you think about it from a momentum standpoint, the Bitcoin's inflation is going down. And so to your point around the CPI, right, you have the US dollar CPIs around a little over three.

And so it's historically high and the US dollar has a limited supply. Here we have 21 million of which 94% is already mined and inflation of that's going down. And so with Bitcoin with less than 1% inflation, gold with roughly 1.7% inflation and annual supply increase and the CPI and US dollar, which we mentioned, Bitcoin as a momentum play

is still looking like a really great reserve asset and a hedge against inflation. So I think it just depends on what narrative you're trading on. But, you know, without a doubt, I'd be lying if I were telling you that, to your point around the memes where we trade lower, market opens, we continue to trade lower, and we're trying to figure out where the market's holding. Are we holding in 90K? Are we going back to 70? You know, the whiplashes...

are very real. Um, and it tends to impact, you know, your day to day, uh, your day to day, my life, my life, my day to day happiness, my day to day sanity, my day to day ability to get out of bed in the morning. No, I'm just kidding. Um, well, when you think about those tail, those specific tailwinds, um,

You mentioned the attractiveness of Bitcoin as a reserve currency because of a reserve asset because of these attributes. And I think we've seen over a dozen states come out. And we've also seen Czech Republic come out and say that they want to create some form of reserve. How significant is this? And how do you anticipate this will play into the bull case for Bitcoin specifically?

Very significant. And, you know, I think what we're seeing in the United States is this almost competition between and the beauty of state versus federal, but this competition between the two, right? You had Trump announced that he wanted to make a Bitcoin reserve.

Going back to the Trump headlines, now everyone's trading around the probability of that reserve actually getting pushed. Polymarket, you know, at the beginning of the month had it at 44 percent. It's now 12. And so these states are kind of taking matters in their own hands and saying, we're going to create a reserve.

ourselves independent of the Federal Reserve that might be on the table. And so these 14 states have said, here's kind of our plan of action, and we're going to move at it at different paces. And again, it just goes back to there's 21 million of fixed supply. So at some point, everyone's going to own the total supply amount, and then it's just a question of supply demand. But if you think about it more globally, to your point on the Czech Republic, it

At some point, it becomes a geopolitical play here. And I'm very sure that the administration is thinking about that as well, where if you have a limited supply of Bitcoin, at what point do you want the United States to own more than China? If you look at the countries that own the most amount of Bitcoin, it's the US, China, UK, Ukraine, Bhutan, and El Salvador. So it's really this race between

um some of these different countries because at some point you know you want to both be a large hold of gold u.s dollar reserves bitcoin um and so we'll see that race play out as well which for everyone who holds bitcoin is is much better for for us too i mean it's difficult to imagine a world in which we would want china own more bitcoin than us and then you get you know into an interesting arms race type dynamic

Which sounds very bullish for our respective bags. So another meta of this cycle that feels different is this meme coin, Cambrian Explosion. And Trump's meme coin kind of caught a lot of people by surprise. What do you think it means for the industry? Is it good? Is it bad? Or is it...

More nuanced. Yeah, I would say it's more nuanced. And look, we were both at the crypto ball at the beginning of the year. And the comparisons between being at that event, both institutional, but it was really the first time you had a sitting administration or about to come in sitting administration.

meet with all of the operators driving so much of crypto in the space, the dichotomy of that and then the Trump token launching at the same time for really retail investors,

Totally missed it. And I think I wouldn't be surprised if that was intentional to try to really expand the user base. That's my view. But I think what it signaled more broadly to the market, I'll talk about that and then I'll talk about what it means for space. But more broadly, it signaled that this is a new form of capital formation. It used to exist in the form of ICOs and now potentially it's back. And what that means is really if you want to

raise capital, if you want to bootstrap customers, you can do so in this token mechanism. And so if you really push the boundaries on that, you can imagine a world where, you know,

New York City wants to raise money in order to repave all of the streets, and maybe they launch a token to do so. Or, you know, the universities want to build new facilities for students. Maybe they launch a token for that. Netflix. And then, of course, the proliferation of stable coins facilitating all the transactions between. So I would say that's my optimistic view. But

As it pertains to meme coins, I think typically who you are selling into tends to also be retail. And so unfortunately, what we saw with the February 2nd liquidations is that all coins got absolutely decimated. And so...

There's just a huge dispersion of returns here that I don't think we talk about enough, where perhaps some of the institutional funds made a killing on Troncoin. But if you're a retail user, and perhaps this was your first time onboarding to crypto, you have Fantom, you went through Fantom, it was a great experience.

Now you lost 70 plus percent on these tokens and you're like, you know what? - Rugged, totally rugged. - This was terrible. I had a terrible experience.

And so I think like, you know, really what the industry is missing right now is despite retail activity surging at the beginning of the year, despite Coinbase seeing a spike, you know, an 80% spike in spot volume. Despite all of that, we don't have the narrative here for real product market fit outside of gambling, which is fine. You know, sports gambling is a big thing.

as well, but the user experience is still pretty bad. And I think what we're missing still is like the Axie Infinity, the Dapps decentralized applications that just we haven't seen as much of in this current cycle that we're at least focused more on. So you know what tomorrow is, right? Put you to the test here. Well, at least I think it's tomorrow. Maybe it's the day after. Let me check.

Where is it? Where's the date? Coinbase earnings. Are they not? Coinbase earnings are tomorrow, right? It is tomorrow. This is going to be an earnings period to watch for sure. But we have some initial data in terms of this is the average research estimates with it looks like consumer transaction revenue for Q4 is looking to

The total transaction revenue, $1.1 billion, I guess. Yeah, I'm seeing. I think they're expecting revenue up over 100% year over year for Q4. And I only brought it up because one of the questions we were looking at spoke to the retail activity surging with Coinbase's spot volumes spiking by 80%.

So we'll see, we'll get an indication tomorrow about the extent to which that momentum will continue. But I guess we can ask you, do you think it will? Yeah, it's a good question. I think it really depends on, one, the administration. Again, retail is also very reactive to it. And two, what are the next narratives? Are the next narratives going to be, you know, we've talked about meme coins, but, you know, someone put it very well to me once, which is,

you know, you can only have the first once. And so you can only be the first politician to launch a meme coin and then the first artist to launch a meme coin. You know, we saw David Portnoy launch a meme coin. And at some point that narrative, it quiets down and, you know, you aren't as excited or see the volumes on the second, third and fourth. And so, you know, I think people are looking for what that next piece is.

You know, yield is always a big one that captures retail. But a lot of companies that have been funded recently, and we're seeing more of that spike up, is in the decentralized application space. I think, you know, in the last four years, so much of venture capital really went into infrastructure, ourselves included. And now we're seeing that change into decentralized applications, use cases. Again, how do you capture...

retail interest. I mentioned Axie Infinity again, but it was really gamified on-chain games. And maybe it's just more hyperliquid. Who knows? The poster child was, of course, Stepan.

Step in. Yes, I had a couple of sneakers. Those are really cool. But, you know, we haven't, I don't know if you've seen it on your end, but I just haven't seen those applications come back in this cycle. And it really feels like the missing link here for actual use cases. I 100% agree. I mean, but it's hard when you think about the value of

That can be, I mean, it's easier to hit that unicorn valuation on a new layer one because that's where all the value occurs than if I were to just start some stupid application. I'm just kidding. Look, you say this, you say this. However, all of the tokens that have launched on Binance since the beginning of the year, all the PERP launches, excuse me, are all down 30 to 90%. Oh, yeah.

But that goes back to this point you made about capital, which we'll call it, around our market is so bad at doing a proper roadshow and thinking through...

I don't know if meme coin is one way to do capital formation, but the existing way in which we go to market with some of these tokens is just super unrefined and not very sophisticated. No offense, Barachain. I'm sure you tried really hard. But when you see something like that, that just speaks to not...

the value of their token, but the inability to really go to market properly and have buyers lined up, to have institutions lined up, to create an equilibrium between the sort of early sellers or the early employees who will sell and the new buyers in the market. And this is something that I've talked about or I complained about

Ad nauseum. You're spot on. But it takes, you know, in the traditional world, you have an investment bank that's managing the entire process for you. Yeah. And there's a book building process and they're securing institutional buyers. Now we just have these imbalances. The only difference in crypto that has worked is...

you know, these product market fit companies that have a fully sustainable business and then launch an airdrop. So, you know, back in the day was Uniswap. Yeah. And then most recently, Hyperliquid, right? The hype token launch was fantastic.

And it really, really shows that if you have product market fit, you have dedicated users, you have people who like to use the product on a day to day and aren't necessarily there for the token, and you create that wealth generation.

on chain, it continues and stays consistent. And people have gone out and bought hype just based off of that, you know, airdrop event. And I think that was really, really well executed. Major shout out to that team on doing, you know, a fantastic job, but really goes to show that, you know, if you have...

product market fit, you have a product that works, it's a lot easier to value the token than on technology that perhaps is there, but the applications on top of it haven't been built yet. I think that's a good point. I mean, I think everything, there is a degree of nuance to these things. And I think when we look to the future, we're going to learn from the mistakes that

and the accomplishments of various projects, and that'll get us closer to Valhalla, as it were. But you're 100% correct. But I do think that a lot of people don't take the time to think very thoughtfully about these issues.

Yeah. And it, you know, it unfortunately leads to pump and dumps. And then, you know, going back to our earlier conversation, that's where retail gets hurt. And so, you know, it's, it's not great for the space. It's not great for the new users. Um, and it's not great for the industry at large. Um, and so, you know, ideally to your point, we have more hyperliquids, uh, come out over time.

But what we are seeing, despite all that, is that the price discovery is happening on chain. And so, you know, there are silver linings in all of this where, you know, even if we look at where all that discovery happened, whether it was hype or it was meme coins, it didn't happen on centralized exchanges first. It did not happen in CeFi. It happened on DEXs and CFI.

And that personally makes me very happy because I can imagine it's, it's, I mean, that's been our, our guiding North star is that, you know, things will move more and more on chain over time. And we are seeing that although slowly, but, but it's certainly happening. And, and these are these, these venues, if you want to call them that just perform. I mean, I don't know if they can handle the same amount of size, but when you look at how they perform during COVID,

these massive liquidation events, right? They perform very well during these market turndowns. What does that say to, what does that tell us about the resiliency of DeFi during these drawdowns? I mean, I think it's time and time again, we've seen that same resiliency. We saw it with FTX. We saw it, you know,

three or four years prior and consistently

DeFi works and it's fully transparent. And when it perhaps, you know, on Black Thursday in March of 2020, when COVID happened and that triggered liquidations, you know, you had a 48% price drop in ETH and DeFi worked. You know, now when with what we saw with Feb 2nd,

you saw that Aave, for example, processed over 210 million liquidations in the market downturn. And by comparison, Aave processed between 2020 and 2022 roughly the same amount. So the size is enormous. And despite all that,

C5 performs seamlessly. And so I think, you know, we, we maybe don't always hear and see the blowouts that happen in in C5. But there's they certainly do happen. We don't always can verify on chain, who has lost money on balance sheet, who now has higher and much larger liabilities on their book, a lot of C5 now has a prop desk and takes risk on their drives desk.

And so you can't verify any of that. And I think you'll continue to see, again, people tend to forget, right? We have short memory span. And so people started to take more risk on during FTX. And now with what happened in Feb, we're starting to ask the same questions, which is, all right, how much did you lose on Feb 2nd? And were you well positioned? And what's the size of your book? And if the counterparty says, I don't need to show you, then perhaps that's not the right counterparty to be trading with.

No, I think that's really well said. And it's a lot of those unknowns, right? It's not necessarily, when you think about transparency, yeah, it's not an issue until it becomes one. So at first glance, it doesn't really seem that superior to engage with DeFi because the CeFi works, right?

Until, of course, it doesn't because there's a blow up. Yeah, and this is really important that you brought it up because Luna collapsed in March. FTX didn't go bankrupt until November. Yes, it's easier to paper over the cracks now.

Exactly. Or try to trade out of it. But these things take time, right? And those cracks grow. And, you know, after Luna, the market took a pretty big bear turn. So it was hard to make up any trading loss that you might have incurred in doing so. And so, you know, with DeFi, it's all transparent. It's all on chain. If you see someone, you know, if Avi, for example, had

taken on some bad debt, you would have been able to see that and analyze exactly whether or not you wanted to move your funds off and use a different counterparty. And so at least for the folks we've spoken to, people very, very much understand that

how important DeFi is. It's really just a regulatory piece. And we've seen since, you know, late Jan that that those conversations have sped up dramatically, and almost to the point where it feels like every person I'm speaking to on a call because these conversations now went from Oh, I can't have this discussion to let's have all of the discussions in the world.

exhausted because you know suddenly the the tap has been turned on again and you know everyone wants to start a defy project some sort of initiative uh where even if they fork something internally at like a at these c5 firms at uh at banks i'm talking much broader you know i think um

a lot of the banks that we've spoken to are already engaged in DeFi in some way, shape or form in a permission sense. And so, you know, every, every bank, every large bank has someone tasked to work on this. Uh, and now those conversations are just sped up. Yeah. Uh, I think that like, as long as there's guardrails around it, um,

then it's a pretty appealing infrastructure to build on. Yeah. That's where, that's where we play a lot, uh, a big role. Um, because to your point, you know, you want to be able to control whitelists. You want to be able to control how funds are used. You want to be able to get alerts for hack risks and asset movement and smart contract changes. You want to be able to, um,

really control both asset movement on a token level, but also on a protocol and chain interaction level. And we're able to do all of that while still giving the institutional experience. So we found that people really appreciate it because you are looking for those kinds of guardrails in an open and transparent system. What does the introduction of AI agents mean for our capital markets today?

Oh, I love this topic. So this is what really, really excites me in terms of the innovation in the space. This one, I have to pull up your notes, I think, because we really got jamming.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I could jam on this for a very long time. But, you know, I will say that sometimes it's hard to think about all the innovation that's happening when you have the market whiplashes. And so this is a topic that personally really excites me. There's been so much work on this that's come out in the last six to eight months. And so the way we're using AI agents today is...

This is under Upshift, right? Correct, correct. Yeah. So we, under our Upshift brand, have launched a vault that systematically optimizes Ethereum returns across blue chip lending protocols. And the AI agent will basically monitor all of the eligible yield opportunities and rebalance between them. And the way you can interact with the agent is...

basically just ask them any questions regarding the vault. So what's my current allocation? Why did it not allocate to a specific pool? You know, all of the customer service questions that tend to come up, how much TVL,

grew yesterday? How much did the APY change? Questions that I don't think people realize, but when you're engaging in crypto, you're not going to go to a blockchain search link or an ether scan, look through transaction logs, and actually be able to comprehend what's going on. It's very complex. And so having this agent respond to you in a telegram chat is a no-brainer. I don't know. I think I could do it. I think I managed to do it.

It's all right. I'm going to put you to the test. And so what's the, what's the, what's the, um, I mean, effectively it's helping to amplify your, your returns by making better informed decisions than you could, than you could make that I can make. Absolutely.

Yeah, it's able to manage a number of different metrics and then move the assets accordingly. Now, where the agent piece comes in is it also lets you interact with it directly as opposed to having to send systematic signals. So you don't necessarily need to be an engineer or quant in order to send API calls to this algorithm in order to rebalance. You can basically say in order.

Plain English, this is what I'd like you to do and this is how I'd like you to do it. Now, the important piece about these AI agents, and I think a major gap we see today is that to your point around guardrails, if you do not have the proper guardrails, you are not going to send $10 million through an agent. It's just absolutely not going to happen.

or you're not going to let an agent execute without burb rails and suddenly get 30 bits of slippage on chain. That's not going to happen. And so what we've done is because we already built the technology to include all of these, both security restrictions, whitelisting restrictions, and trading restrictions on the account, the agent is pretty limited in what it can and can't do. So you bring...

pair the two together and suddenly you have the guardrails you're comfortable with, with the, you know, ease operationally of having to actually manage one of these strategies. Well, I'm going to give it a try. I haven't, I don't have any, I don't have any agents. I just have my helpers doing my bidding, I guess, but they're all, they're all real, they're all, they're all flesh humans. But once you get like some Frank AI agents gone, I think,

I think I'm going to be unstoppable. Watch out world. Yeah. Watch out. So what should, what, what, what's on the horizon for you guys next? What should people be paying attention to? And, and, uh, if they want to learn more, where, where can they?

Yeah, so for Upshift, we're tokenizing all yields. So in our opinion, any asset that you have should be earning some form of yield. We've seen that with stablecoins, we're looking to expand that. And so if you're looking for any sort of yield on the liquid asset, check out our Twitter at Upshift underscore FI or my Twitter at AYA underscore Cantor.

And then in terms of what's next for us, it's continuing to build out more seamless one-click trading. This is a North Star we talked about for a very, very long time. It is very difficult to engage in DeFi today, in trading at large, but also especially in DeFi. We want to get to a point where you get one-click trading, and we're doing a lot of work with transaction batching for multiple legs of a trade, a lot of work with AI agents for

for operational efficiency and so we're going to see more of that and yeah hopefully user experience becomes far more seamless so we do get that wave of both institutions and retail soon well thanks so much for taking the time to join the program thank you frank it was a pleasure always