State Of Crypto 2025 | a16z Crypto — Eddy Lazzarin & Daren Matsuoka

Ryan:
[0:02] Bankless Nation, we are very excited. This has become an annual tradition,

Ryan:
[0:05] so we're doubly excited to do this every year. The state of crypto in 2025. We've got two fine folks from A16Z Crypto, Eddy Lazzarin and also Daren Matsuoka. He is a partner at A16Z. He leads data science and strategy. Eddy, of course, is CTO. Okay, let's get into the state of crypto for 2025. We'll start with this slide here, which is our cycle slide. We've got total crypto market cap. We always like to look at price. That is all-time high, at least up until recently. We've got crypto developers. We've got crypto mobile wallets. Price at near all-time high. Crypto developer, sort of all-time high, but flat from our 2022 high.

Ryan:
[0:52] And crypto mobile wallets, I guess that's that's up a little bit. What is this telling us about the cycle? And why do you guys look at these three numbers to measure crypto cycles?

Daren:
[1:01] I think the way that we have always approached this space, you know, of course, there's many lenses, you know, that you can look through to try to see where we're at in the cycle. You know, one being, you know, the macro environment, which we think is very important. I think our perspective on the market has always been rooted and defined by kind of this feedback loop that we call the price innovation cycle. And the feedback loop really is kind of between the prices, which generate interest, the developers, which come in as a result of that interest, and then the products that they build, which bring in new users, right? And so throughout crypto's history, we've seen this feedback loop take shape. We saw it in 2017 with the ICO boom. We saw it in 2020 with DeFi Summer. We saw it in 2021 with the NFT surge.

Daren:
[1:49] But then I

Daren:
[1:49] Think in 2022, something different happened, right? We had, of course, the FTX collapse. We had the launch of ChatGPT, which shifted a lot of the attention toward AI. And of course, the crypto industry at that point was under a full-blown regulatory attack in the U.S., And so we entered, I'd say, some very dark days for the crypto industry. Of course, the infrastructure developers continued to build, which turned out to be, you know, an important set of years. But it was, I'd say, honestly, pretty dark days for crypto during those years.

Daren:
[2:23] We've since kind of come out of the other side. Prices have risen again starting in 2024 with the launch of the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, which I think brought in or just, you know, made the space much more accessible, kind of generated a lot of attention. You know, we saw sort of this meme coin media at the end of last year, which brought in new users. But these things really weren't all that interesting for developers. They weren't obvious platforms to build on. Which is why I always like to say this wasn't like the other bull markets that we've seen. The other bull markets were more driven by new products, innovation, lots of developer activity. And I don't really feel like we saw that in this last wave. The good news, though, is that I think right now we are very, very well positioned for that next developer-driven bull market because we have the stablecoin trend, which is bringing in a new type of builder into crypto. We have pending market structure legislation in the United States,

Daren:
[3:23] which, you know, I think will hopefully lead to a big inflow of talent into crypto. And I think we're just in a different world now. And it's one that I'm really excited about as we kind of think about it in the frame of this price innovation cycle.

David:
[3:37] I think the developer account, Ryan called it flat. I'll call it dwindling since 2022, has been kind of just this thing in the background that's really defined what is felt like to be in crypto over the last few years. And I want to pair this with the next slide. Bitcoin still 50% of market cap is the next slide that we're going to talk about. You guys have it highlighted as Bitcoin still dominates. Now, this slide has just a huge story in it. And if you were to extrapolate some of the first early years of this slide, you would think that like Bitcoin dominance is going to inevitably approach 10 to 20% of total crypto market cap. That has not been the case. Filling in the rest of the chart, we now see Bitcoin kind of like hovering around pretty consistently between 40% and 60%. And it seems to be slowly kind of stabilizing here. And you pair that with, you know, the previous cycles where Bitcoin dominance went so low because so many new tokens were created, like layer ones had crazy, crazy momentum, which also attracted a lot of developers thinking, oh, I can build apps and make money here. How do you guys square the changing landscape of the total crypto market cap of Bitcoin hovering around 50 percent, you know, Ethereum at 15 percent and like a healthy share of down market dominance mixed with like the developer count and some of the other charts that we were looking at earlier?

Eddy:
[4:53] There's a lot of factors at play, right? So trying to explain it in like one or two sentences is not possible. But I'd say here's generally how I think about it. I don't think of Bitcoin as stabilizing here, right? I think of Bitcoin as continuing its feedback loop, as developing and establishing itself as a store of value, as something like, look at gold, for example. We have a little comparison with gold, but not a time series on gold. Gold has done really, really well over the last two years. If you were to look at the price graph, I think if you think of and you believe that Bitcoin is digital gold, then it makes a lot of sense that Bitcoin is doing really well. That is an area that has remained relatively insulated from regulatory pressure, from, you know, all the other developments in the space. Like that's kind of a product, right? Like Bitcoin's mere priceness is kind of its product. And that has continued to do very well.

Eddy:
[5:51] Over the last few years, though, and I think we talked about it, you know, we talked about it last year, and it was definitely a theme for us, is that we were about to turn a regulatory corner, right? That was a really, really big question. And the period from 2022 to 2024 was really marked by the proliferation of products that do not require new regulatory clarity. And those have kind of come and gone, and we can talk about those. I'm sure that we will a little bit later. But also So during that period, we had AI take off and be something very, very attractive to some of the best entrepreneurs in the space. So I'd say the fact that Bitcoin has grown, not super surprising, given where everything else is situated. And the fact that developers have stayed more or less sideways despite the incredible

Eddy:
[6:41] appeal of AI and the regulatory pressure I see as a positive indicator.

Ryan:
[6:47] It's funny you say that, Eddie, because if Bitcoin is kind of a proxy for gold, you'd sort of expect it to trade or like price, you know, more correlated with gold. And yet you guys have a slide here, which is like, sometimes it does that. But most of the time, it's more correlated with stocks, actually. in the NASDAQ. Is this the market trying to figure out whether Bitcoin is sort of a tech play like the NASDAQ or whether it's a debasement trade like gold and it's just in the process, the messy process of deciding what it is? Or maybe it'll always be both. How do you explain the weird correlations here? And maybe the fact, this is top of mind because gold just hit $30 trillion and everybody who's in crypto is like, what about our digital gold? I thought Bitcoin should be like going up to in this type of environment. It's not.

Eddy:
[7:36] It's tough to explain, but I will say this is that Bitcoin is, even if you fully buy the theory that Bitcoin is like a digital gold, it's not a pure digital gold, right? It's digital gold with some layers on top. It has this weird cypherpunk origin. It has this current sort of culture, which has proliferated into several different forms. It had a regulatory climate where there was no access to ETFs. All of a sudden there was access to ETFs, people thought that it might never happen, then it definitely did happen, right? There was the backdrop that the SEC kind of begrudgingly recognized its non-security status. Now that's kind of been enshrined. So there has been news and development and memification and legitimization of gold, or of Bitcoin in a way that hasn't happened for gold.

Daren:
[8:24] How's the story for gold changed?

Eddy:
[8:26] Like the only interesting thing I've heard about gold over the last 10 years is that like they might find a bunch of it in some asteroids. Right. Like that, which is like, which is sick, but like that's about it. Right. Whereas like what has happened in Bitcoin has been a roller coaster of mania, associations with other things, regulatory opacity, like all this stuff. I think what I think is happening with Bitcoin is that it's just kind of become clear what it is. And that may change again, because at the end of the day, it is software and it can be changed. And we do allude to some interesting efforts recently to try to turn Bitcoin back into a technological platform.

Eddy:
[9:05] At least for now, those narratives seem to have stabilized.

David:
[9:08] Darren, let's talk about the changing landscape of just crypto geography, the physical geography across the world. What countries have adopted crypto hotter, faster, more quickly than others? What countries are also under discussed maybe as well when it comes to crypto adoption?

Daren:
[9:24] Yeah, I think there's actually some really interesting findings in our geographic analysis this year. You know, one way we tried to cut it was looking at indicators of kind of real on-chain adoption of crypto, and then also indicators of kind of more so interest in trading the tokens around crypto. And I think when you put those two things kind of side by side, there's a really obvious trend that emerges here, right? On the adoption side, you know, on-chain usage of crypto, a lot of that activity tends to come from developing countries, countries like Argentina, Colombia, Pakistan. And of course, that makes sense, right? Crypto in many ways is needed most in countries that have unreliable financial infrastructure or those that lack economic or political stability. On the other hand, we did another analysis where we looked at web traffic associated with the kind of websites of the top tokens on CoinGecko. And if you look at the distribution of kind of where that traffic is coming from geographically, it's all developed nations. It's countries like Australia, South Korea, which I think totally is a different complexion compared to the on-chain usage and the indicators there, which I think, you know, just speaks to the fact that crypto is very global, but the ways people are using it differ between developed

Ryan:
[10:47] And developing nations. So you're saying, Darren, are you saying developed countries are doing a lot of the buying, but developing countries are the ones actually doing the stuff on-chain? Yeah.

Daren:
[10:55] That's what the indicators would seem to suggest. And I think it does make sense.

Ryan:
[11:00] The hot pockets here, the surprises to me are like Nigeria. And this is pretty big, right? And it's interesting, like a population like Nigeria, they skew much younger. So I think there's the most amount of like, you know, 20 year olds in the world right now. Other countries that stuck out, Colombia is, you know, shooting pretty high, like, I guess, South America, that entire region, Argentina, I guess empirically, like, It seems like these countries are doing a lot on chain with things like stable coins and actually doing the bankless thing of trying to escape repressive banking regimes as well. Is that what the data is showing?

Daren:
[11:35] That is what it's showing. And I think it's a pretty cool story, right, to see that, you know, the countries that need crypto the most are the ones that seem to be furthest along on the adoption curve. And of course, you know, the developed nations have a role to play in kind of the buying of tokens and, you know, that type of activity. But, you know, pretty cool to see the distinction there.

David:
[11:55] It's not often that we get to talk about the difference between the median crypto user and what crypto Twitter thinks is the median crypto user. So I'd like to continue this discussion. This next slide is, we estimate the number of monthly active crypto users has grown from 40 to 70 million.

David:
[12:12] Let's talk about that a little bit more. What do you say is the typical profile of a user? What is the median crypto user of this 40 to 70 million? What are they doing? And what do we know about them?

Daren:
[12:22] Yeah, so I'd say, first of all, right, like there's a lot of different ways to define what is a crypto user, right? Of course, right, like there's people who just buy crypto and hold crypto. Those people are not interacting on chain necessarily. And so what we want to do with this analysis is look at how many people are actually kind of using crypto on chain on a regular basis. And so that is kind of the whole point of this analysis. We take a bottoms up approach. We use a number of different methodologies. We talk to a lot of people. We look at a lot of on-chain data to try to just get at, you know, how many actual people around the world are using crypto in these ways. And our estimate is that 40 to 70 million people are actively transacting with crypto on chain. Of course, that is a very wide range. We understand that. And the reason is because it's very hard to get that number to be super precise. But still, you know, it's an estimate. We think it has grown by about 10 million since we did the same analysis last year. And kind of that is the point of this analysis. And, you know, I'd point out that it's still just a fraction of the total number of people who actually own crypto, but may or may not necessarily be transacting on chain, which I think shows that there's a big opportunity to bridge that gap in the coming years by bringing more of those crypto owners on chain,

Daren:
[13:44] converting them into crypto users.

Ryan:
[13:45] Let's talk about that number too, because actually that headline number of global crypto owners is pretty mind blowing in a different way, which is 716 million is what you guys are showing. So 716 million. So we're just like we're on our way to a billion human beings that own crypto, which is actually massive if you think that owning is using crypto, which I happen to think. But then you're talking about the conversion ratio here means one in 10 of crypto owners are actually active on chain because we're getting like 40 to 70 million, right? So less than 10%, something like that. So I guess that indicates that we have a lot of opportunity to grow in terms of on chain. So that's bullish. But it's actually pretty... Astounding to me that we're already close to a billion human beings that own crypto assets. How substantiated is that number? Do we feel secure about that number? Because it seems so high to me. And I don't know, I have a hard time with those types of numbers in crypto.

Eddy:
[14:44] I'll let Darren say a little bit more about the sources, but think about what's in that number. Like if somebody sends or receives some USDT on Tron, right, that counts as somebody who owns crypto, right? That's somebody who, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's somebody who knows how to use Morpho, right? There's a huge difference. I think in the way that I think of this funnel is just there is, you know, owning is kind of the minimal simplest activity.

Daren:
[15:13] But it gives you some minimum financial exposure mediated by somebody who's giving you some product, right? That's the way to think about it. And that product can be very simple.

Eddy:
[15:22] It can just be, look, I'll help you send and receive payments in South America, right? It could be something else. It could be, I'm speculating, I'm holding a little bit of ETH, I'm holding a little bit of Doge, I'm holding a little bit of whatever, something like that. It could be all the way the most complicated form where you keep a substantial balance in some lending pools and you're actually trying to make payments internationally with crypto, right? Like there's a whole array in that 700. That's why I think it's big is that it's hard to conceptualize all the types of things that are happening. The estimated monthly active users, which is a tough number to estimate, but that's where we get into the people who are actually intertwining their lives with it to some extent. And I think, candidly, I think crypto has a long way to go in terms of how complicated it still is. Try to make payments, like try to use crypto today to make some payments. Try to manage your portfolio like in a neobanky kind of style, self-custodial, you know, neobanky style. Try to do that on chain today. It's possible. I do that. I know a lot of people who do that nowadays and it's easier than it ever has been. But it's still incredibly difficult and I think we have a long way to go.

Daren:
[16:34] Before it's a mainstream activity. And I think the 40 to 70 million indicates that, right?

Eddy:
[16:38] And it indicates progress, but it also indicates a long way to go.

Daren:
[16:40] And I think you're right to approach this with some degree of skepticism, right? These estimates are very hard. You know, the sources we use are listed on the slides, but I think you should kind of treat these as ballpark numbers, which is why, you know, our internal estimate has such a wide range.

David:
[16:56] So on one side of the spectrum, you have individuals, but this most recent era of crypto has really been defined by institutions.

David:
[17:04] Now, institution is this word that has been said in crypto ever since I got into crypto in 2017. The institutions are coming. The institutions are coming. Now, it truly actually does feel like the institutions are here. I mean, like, how can anyone say otherwise when BlackRock is putting tokens on Ethereum? So just the year of institutions, 2025, we can finally say that the institutions are here. But nuance, to what degree are like institutions coming in for like, you know, just a PR blast and just saying that they're in crypto, to what degree are they actually here doing real things? Like how real are the actual institutions coming into crypto? Eddie, I'll throw this one to you.

Eddy:
[17:42] Yeah, yeah. So let me say, so I've been in the space long enough, working at A16Z, but also before that I remember all these announcements. Okay, this has always been the case. Every time the market's a little hot, you know, people feel like things are happening, you get a ton of these. And I admit, I've been very skeptical of them for many years. And the reason is that when you go talk to some of these institutions, I'm not saying the ones on the slide here, right, but I'm saying over the years, you'll often end up talking with somebody at like an innovation department, you know, or something like that. And they'll be, I'll be like, okay, but what are you really trying to do? Like, what's the interest? They're like, well, look, it's hot. And we just want to show we're doing cool stuff.

Ryan:
[18:19] And they're just doing like a proof of concept pilot thing that's going nowhere.

Eddy:
[18:23] And the point, the subtext is kind of, they want to show that they're working hard and they're paying attention to things. Which is fine. Okay, cool. But that's not building stuff. Whereas I can say, totally honestly, I've talked to a lot of the people on these slides and others, and I've been really impressed with how concrete what they want to do is. And that shouldn't be too much of a surprise, because whenever you talk, when I talked with them three years ago, seven years ago, they had some kind of ideas, but I just knew, okay, we don't have the gas for them. That's just impossible. Or there's no way that the regulatory is going to make sense for them. Right. Or there's no way the user experience can adapt to handle this. Right. Whereas now we have sub one second, sub one penny block space. We have regulatory clarity. We have much better UX is much better. It's still a long way to go, but much better wallets. Like it's actually possible. So I hear from them very concrete ideas. that doesn't necessarily mean they're all going to come to fruition, right? Not every product idea is actually developed. But I'm hearing very, very specific stuff from them that I think represents their money is where their mouth is. They're actually taking steps to make real products. You know, the Stripe stuff is one example. Bridge, Privy, Tempo, they're spending money on this.

Ryan:
[19:40] Yeah, they are.

Eddy:
[19:40] They have a great Stripe pay team that's a really sharp team, really understands payments. Like that's one corner. There's the...

Daren:
[19:48] So Robinhood and L2,

Eddy:
[19:50] That's a big deal economically, but also it seems like a core part of their roadmap, right, is tokenizing equities, integrating their full app experience on-chain and off-chain. I could go through all the examples here, but the plans are specific, actionable, and make business sense. I want to.

David:
[20:08] Pull out one nuance from this, however, Eddie. So what if we just took out away stablecoins? And let's say we just decided to classify stablecoins as not crypto. Now, some of the brands that we have on the on the slide here, Stripe, Visa, PayPal, Shopify, Revolut, MasterCard, like Circle, like, okay, but like, what about the crypto side of crypto? How much are institutions here for crypto, not stablecoins?

Eddy:
[20:33] Yeah. So I'm interpreting you to be saying maybe we can say crypto is like this part of the spectrum between cypherpunk as hell to like at least like decentralizing things and sort of upending the economics of the system.

David:
[20:47] Or tokenizing real world assets. That counts as crypto.

Eddy:
[20:50] OK. OK. Yeah. So I'd say it is less. They're obviously here for the stable coins because they can see it as at a minimum a cost savings. And when you see something at a minimum as a cost savings, that's a major motivator. If it's a technical simplifier, that's nice too. If it enables you to offer some new yield sources, that's even nicer, right? So that's like increasingly complex stuff. But I'd say, What ends up happening, even if they come for the stable coins, they stay for the crypto. Because what ends up happening is they've wired up everything in their back end. Maybe they've given people public private key infrastructure. Maybe they've started to use and deploy new types of identity systems that would be needed to interact with different things on chain. All of a sudden, when your engineering team wants to go and build the next thing, the easiest way to do it is on the blockchain. And now we're in crypto world because there's all these adjacencies. Is there's all these things interconnected just by default because you're using a blockchain. When you use a blockchain, things become composable and interconnectable. So I do see it that way. I see them as coming for TradFi reasons, which is good. They were only ever going to come for TradFi reasons. You think they were going to come for cypherpunk reasons?

Eddy:
[22:04] That's ridiculous, right? Of course they're coming for those reasons. But now when they come here, they've helped grease the grooves so that it's easier to stay and it's easier for other people to build products on and around it. So this is kind of how it happens. I think the one.

Ryan:
[22:20] That has surprised me most is probably the big asset issuers like BlackRock. And the thing that's encouraged me the most is these companies are making real revenue on crypto products. Look at BlackRock's ETF, I bet $100 billion. How much revenue is that throwing off of them? It was zero two years ago. Every time I see Larry Fink talking about tokenization on CNBC, he's got a big smile on his face when he talks about crypto. I kind of think he's dead serious about tokenizing a whole bunch of things on public blockchains. And that this time around, it's not PR, it's actually real. Do you guys agree with that? Is that real?

Eddy:
[23:01] Yeah, no, I mean, Biddle's real. It's not an idea that we're happily here talking about. It's already a thing. I already hear about it all the time in the context of other companies issuing new stablecoins. They want to white label their own stablecoins. They want to have some kind of like, you know, money market source backing it, collateral backing it. Right. It'll comes up a lot. Right. These are real products. That's a new, interesting thing. I think the question for me is kind of closer to what David is getting at, which is like, how is this a deal with the devil? Right right i i think you know i i think i think not right and i think it's pure positive and that's because as these things start to work and you complexify the surface of all the integrations that creates more entrepreneurial opportunity right no matter what like just blood needs to be through the system and i think if if the products that they offer are bad all the things that we set up with crypto make it easier to upend those things and to offer great products that people really, really want that maybe contain features that are more in line with what we consider the OG values in crypto. So...

Eddy:
[24:11] I think it's fear positive, but we'll see how it plays off.

Ryan:
[24:14] Speaking of good products that people really want coming from crypto that have product market fit, but are kind of trad file, let's talk about stable coins now directly. Okay. So this is a slide that I think looks very impressive and probably is very impressive. Stable coins now rival the world's largest payment networks in transaction volume. There's a big bubble in the middle. This is stable coins, 46 trillion in transaction volume. That's unadjusted. The adjusted number when you take out bots and some other things, I think, is $9 trillion. But when you consider Visa, the network, it's doing $16 trillion. I guess this is per year over the 12-month time period. ACH networks, the only ones that's higher, that's basically like raw Fedwire settlement layer, and that's $87 trillion. So stablecoins punching above their weight class with respect to settlement and transaction volume. What do you think this means? Has this been a surprise for us?

Daren:
[25:12] I think it shows that stablecoins have found product market fit. And while we can debate kind of exactly how to interpret all these numbers, I think the fact that They rival these global payment networks that have been around for decades that literally plumb the entire banking system. We're now like seeing stable coins in the mix among these players, I think is really impressive. And I think just speaks to the fact that people, there is real demand for this product.

Ryan:
[25:41] Darren, what's the next catalyst to growing this, to exceeding ACH? Like, is it going to take kind of machines or AI agents using stable coins? Is it going to take like big consumer payment type use cases? What's going to be the thing that's going to allow us to 10x this 46 trillion number?

Daren:
[25:59] Well, the crazy thing to me about stable coins is that I think stable coins have one of the strongest network effects of any kind of possible technology, right? Like by its definition, the more people that are using stable coins, you know, makes it more attractive to accept stable coins. And then the more people that accept stable coins bring kind of more users into stable coins. And there is this built-in network effect and potential flywheel that I think we haven't even really yet seen, right? Like I think, you know, we're starting to get adoption from the institutional players who have the distribution to be able to do this. But the actual kind of inflection point where the network effects really start to kick in, I think is still ahead of us. And I don't know when that moment will come, but I think, you know, if this plays out in the ways that, you know, we hope, I think, you know, we could see this number get a lot bigger.

Eddy:
[26:52] Yeah, guys, like it's not like what needs to happen, like time needs to happen. That's it. It's already we're seeing a runaway feedback loop. Things like every time this graph goes up, that's not because like some guy like put a rock on his shoulder and push it up a hill. Like it's rolling downhill. Right. That's the way to think about it. That unadjusted number is going to explode past the ACH number any time now. Right. And I can unpack a little bit as to why. Right. It's because so many things are happening in that unadjusted number. That's actually why we got it that adjusted versus unadjusted. You don't use the ACH system just to flap money between your accounts for no reason, right? That's like, it's too slow. There's no point to that.

Ryan:
[27:38] It's a pain in the ass. The UX is terrible. I hate doing ACH stuff.

Eddy:
[27:42] Yeah, no one's going to do that, right? And so that number reflects the fact that people need to do that. It has costs, it takes time and so on. The same with like a visa payment. You don't just like move money through a visa channel for no reason. It costs money. it's complicated, it's slow, right? Whereas moving a million dollars back and forth on a blockchain today using stable coins, you could do that for fun. You could do a billion dollars in volume.

Ryan:
[28:07] He's my kind of fun.

Eddy:
[28:08] You could take a thousand dollars and do a billion dollars in volume and mess up our unadjusted chart for probably a hundred bucks. Like, right, you could do like a trillion dollars of volume. So that reflects the fact that it's low, the very low technological cost means that people are just going to kind of move stuff around. Hey, we want to rotate the, you know, we're one of the major custodians and we just need to rotate some assets around. Oh, five trillion dollars of volume just like flew through.

David:
[28:34] You see what I'm saying?

Eddy:
[28:35] So like it doesn't it doesn't have the same meaning. Now, that doesn't mean that it's meaningless. It's still very meaningful in specific cases that people are paying. They're settling real exchanges. There's tons of real activity in that, too. but just it's so easy to do the trivial thing to do the complicated thing that's the point is it costs so little that it's you're just going to see an explosion that activity think about think about internet bandwidth right do you like to work for yourself about whether you're going to like send a 4k video like across your local internet connection or whatever like no you don't even think about like how many gigabytes are we consuming in this podcast like we're we're like.

David:
[29:14] Is the answer

Eddy:
[29:15] To that, actually. Obliterating the internet by the standards of 20 years ago. We're obliterating it, right? But now we use it without even consideration. We don't even think about it because it costs a little. So that is what's going to happen. That's exactly what's happening.

David:
[29:26] In that unadjusted versus adjusted gap, the $45 billion to... Trillion, excuse me. God, big numbers. That 46 trillion to 9 trillion number. What is in that gap? Like, what's the average activity that you guys pruned out from the data here? Is it like something nefarious or is it just like operation stuff? Like kind of how you alluded to. Anything that we should know there? Is there anything interesting there? We work with

Daren:
[29:50] A data provider called Allium to develop the methodology to basically remove bots and certain types of bots and artificially inflationary practices. I don't think there's much to do.

Eddy:
[30:02] That's not necessarily nefarious stuff, but, you know, if an exchange is just moving assets between their omnibus address and, like, their cold storage, like, do you really want to count, like, three of that as, like, a billion dollars? Like, you know, you don't. It doesn't make sense.

David:
[30:15] The other answer I was thinking is that, like, chains would have stables on their chain and then they would, like, wash trade and it would, like, hey, look how much volume is on our chain. And I don't really know if, like, to what degree that represents a significant amount or not.

Eddy:
[30:26] I mean, I don't see a real point to that, but that could happen. I mean, if they're rebalancing liquidity on a bridge, that would count, right? That would count as a movement in stable coins. But that's not nefarious, but that might be a big number.

Ryan:
[30:37] Let's talk about stable coins just like rolling downhill right now. And part of the reason it seems like they're rolling downhill is we are post-Genius Act. And that just happened this summer. And it does seem that it is now in the U.S. Government's best interest, like Treasury is excited about exporting some of America's debt via stablecoins. Because it seems like some of the central banks around the world and other countries have stopped buying so many Treasuries that are now buying gold. And so America's debt, we're looking for new buyers of our debt. And it seems like Treasury is like, oh, the answer is stablecoins.

Daren:
[31:19] We've got stablecoins listed as a top 20 holder of U.S.

Ryan:
[31:24] Treasuries, and that has been a big deal. And stablecoins, of course, are 99.8%, U.S. Dollar stablecoins, denominated stablecoins, are 99.8% of all stablecoins. Like there's really no euro stablecoin out there. There's no yen. The other currencies aren't represented. America is kind of like dominating on this. So can you talk about that story? Is it the case that no matter who runs the next administration and how pro-crypto or anti-crypto they are, stablecoins are here to stay in America because they solve a, I guess, a core problem.

Eddy:
[32:01] A distribution problem.

Ryan:
[32:02] Yeah, a problem that we have in America. Talk about that. Maybe the geopolitical story here and the monetary story around the dollar and how that links to stablecoin adoption.

Daren:
[32:13] I think this is a really important part of the stablecoin story, right? Like on one hand, you know, we know what the backdrop is, right? We know that the US national debt is growing out of control. We know that the demand for that debt is fading, right? For the first time in 30 years, foreign central banks hold more gold than US treasuries.

Ryan:
[32:32] That's what this is showing, right? This pink line is going ahead of the blue line here. And so So gold is on the upswing. For the first

Daren:
[32:41] Time in 30 years, right? And on the other hand, we see the opportunity, right? Like we have stable coins, already a top 20 holder of US treasuries projected by Citi to grow into the trillions of dollars of supply by 2030. And like you said, over 99% denominated in USD, right? And so this is the kind of perfect opportunity to help the United States sustain dollar dominance, which, of course, is an important priority.

Ryan:
[33:12] Does this just mean that America is perma pro-crypto now? They can't ever be anti-crypto because they need it for stable coins.

Eddy:
[33:17] I think there's a lot of risks in trying to psychologize about the government.

David:
[33:22] Ryan.

Eddy:
[33:22] I tell you, don't try to reason about them like that.

Ryan:
[33:26] I'm just going on incentives, though, right? Now it's super incentive compatible. Crypto is good for America.

Eddy:
[33:32] The way I'd put it is that people have been able to get dollars in treasury. Exposure to treasury is American debt overseas. but they've always needed to go through complicated intermediaries, if at all, right? It's a really difficult situation. Stable coins have meant that now we're removing the car dealerships, right? Like we're removing the intermediate, we're like, we're letting you just get the thing straight through many, many costs, many, many more efficient channels. That is what has happened. So it's, but it's not just overseas. It's even people look like people domestically, like think about where do you honestly like ask, like ask yourself, like, this is not that, this is not that, this is not a tongue twister question. Okay. How do you get the highest interest rate on your dollars? Like as an american stable coins it's some stable point stuff it's it's whether it's through coinbase if you know you know most normies.

Ryan:
[34:24] Don't know how to do this but yes this is the

Eddy:
[34:26] Correct answer people who are interest rate maximizers and that is a cohort of people who are like really really into like squeezing out every bit for their interest like they're flooding into this stuff i know people who are not really crypto people and they're like wait i can like get this rate at Coinbase, I can get this rate on chain, whatever. Like they ask me, they try to learn about it. They dip their toes into it. They're not really doing a lot else. Like this is kind of the come for the stable coin, stay for the network pattern, right? It's like there's concrete, measurable, kind of hard to dispute benefits, Before you know it, you have a bunch of crypto adjacencies to the position that you set up, to the infrastructure you set up, to the stuff that you set up for yourself. That's kind of the pattern. And I see the same thing for American debt. Yeah, people want dollars. It turns out they want dollars in a bunch of different ways. And if doing that on chain is actually the most cost effective way to get that, then some dollars are going to do that.

David:
[35:24] I want to turn to slide 22, which talks about the decoupling of stablecoin transfers from trading volumes. And so typically stablecoin volumes would just run in parallel with exchange trading volumes, but that has not been the case and increasingly not the case in modern times, and especially at the end of 2025. What does this indicate about just the level of maturity, the level of adoption

David:
[35:44] of stablecoins and crypto as a whole? Darren, I'll throw you for this one. Yeah.

Daren:
[35:48] So for a long time, stablecoins have been criticized for only being used to settle speculative crypto trades like there was no other use. But I think if you look at this data, it tells a different story, especially in the last couple of years. We have now broken that correlation to broader crypto trading volume, which, in my opinion, indicates that we have found product market fit. It indicates that stable coins have many uses beyond just, you know, for their role in settling crypto trading. And I think is a really important way to frame what's happening with stable coins. I think it's a cool slide.

Ryan:
[36:24] I want to move to my favorite slide in the slide deck. Not that I have favorites, but I do have favorite. This is it. This is a share of decentralized exchange spot trading volume as a percent. So if total crypto trading volume right now, and this is up from zero in 2019, before we knew what a decentralized exchange, a Dexterly was, this is up to 20% now in this market. This is probably the most bankless slide in the 2025 report because all of these trades are happening without a bank. It's a decentralized exchange. It's non-custodial. Fantastic. What is this showing us? And do you expect this number to rise?

Daren:
[37:04] I do expect it to rise. I think it's risen pretty steadily over the last five years since this category existed, right? Like, and that's the other crazy thing, right? We've only had this as a concept for five years, right? DeFi really came to life in 2020. And so really remarkable to see that, you know, nearly 20% of trading now happens in DeFi.

Ryan:
[37:27] Do you think we're all doing this because so we don't get SPF again? You know, back then it was like, you know, a lot more happening in FTX and custodial exchanges. Like, is this how we learn?

Daren:
[37:38] I think so. And I think we can already see some of the benefits of doing this in an open, transparent, resilient way. And I think the numbers kind of speak for themselves here. It'll take time for DeFi to continue to grow and mature, but certainly a number I expect to

Eddy:
[37:58] Continue to take up over time. What are the things that prevent this from going higher, right? Like what are the bottlenecks? I think they're obvious. Gas fees, liquidity, integrations, better UX for wallets. All those things are going to improve.

David:
[38:10] On-ramps.

Eddy:
[38:11] Yeah, on-ramps. All those things are going to improve. This number is going to go up, right? Because the trust is, I mean, I do a lot of, when I buy my personal positions and things like that, I do a lot of it through DEXs as well. And even though I have all the options in the world, right? Because often the fees are better. It's just a little bit more comfy. I don't have to worry about exchange limits. I have a self-custody setup I like. Those aren't necessarily properties that every consumer has right now. The general trend is for those things to increase. I feel that this will.

David:
[38:42] Be the case. When I look at this slide, I see two things. I see the just pretty, you know, linear growth. It's going up something like 3%, 4% a year ever since 2020. And it's pretty steady, precise and steady. The other thing that I see is we're like halfway to 50%. A little bit further than that, a little bit further than halfway. At around 50%, things get really interesting because that's where price discovery moves away from centralized exchange to decentralized exchanges, or at least we are equally weighted when it comes to determining what is the price of something. What's the price of Bitcoin? What's the price of ETH? When price discovery happens in the decentralized context, that gives decentralized exchanges weight, power, influence over centralized exchanges, which right now, like so much of just the crypto industry is looking to Binance, to, hey, Binance, what's the price of Solana? What's the price of ETH? When that gets closer to 50, all of a sudden people are going to look on chain to learn what the price of ETH is. There's no question there. I want to turn straight to 26, which is not included in the slide we just talked

David:
[39:44] about because the slide we just talked about was spot volume. Now we're talking about perps and protocol revenue. In addition to 2025 being the year of institutional adoption, it's definitely also the year of perpetual futures, just kind of dominating the on-chain mindshare and volumes have just exploded. What does this tell us about the future of this perp financial instrument?

Daren:
[40:04] Yeah, a lot to say here. I think one, I'd start by saying this is kind of a natural evolution of DeFi, right? Like, you know, we started with kind of the basic infrastructure, you know, the decentralized exchanges, and now kind of people want more sophisticated products, especially as we know, you know, speculation is an ehh. Plays an important role in crypto today. And I think Perpetual Futures emerged as really the ideal product to get leverage on crypto, long or short. And as a result, it's allowed new protocols to emerge, generating literally trillions of dollars in volume. The top purpose exchanges generate over a billion dollars in revenue. And so definitely has been a story of 2025. I think there's a lot of new players coming into the space. The regulatory environment is changing, as we know, and there's a lot of money at stake.

Daren:
[40:57] And so I think the story here is far from over.

Ryan:
[41:00] Let's talk about another story that has been emerging that is the story around prediction markets. And here's the slide. So post-election traction of prediction markets, some people thought polymark and prediction markets were sort of just like peak during the election, right? What could be bigger than a U.S. Election, 2024, Trump versus Kamala Harris? And now we get this recent surge, which is almost at all-time highs again. And a lot of this is on the back of sports betting,

Daren:
[41:31] It seems like.

Ryan:
[41:32] A theme that David and I have talked about is like, seems like prediction markets are better, more equipped to go out-compete the draft kings of the world and

Ryan:
[41:43] the fan duels of the world in sports betting markets. What do you guys think Think about this story, this trajectory, and what's the total addressable market size here?

Eddy:
[41:52] Yeah, it's a great one. So I'm not a sports bettor, right, I admit. But there is this great book called The Logic of Sports Betting I read years ago that really like teaches you how to think about exactly how to think about prediction markets, how to think about the way traditional sports books are set up.

Daren:
[42:08] There are some

Eddy:
[42:08] Interesting reasons to believe that from a technical perspective, the architecture of a prediction market is better for all these types of betting. That includes sports betting. And when I say better, I mean more dynamic, better pricing for end users, lower fees, just a better overall, more liquid, more entertaining, but also more technically precise experience. I think all the prediction markets or all the sports books might end up having to converge on this type of design because I think it's a better design, right? It promotes volume and use in a way that a trad sports book setting the line might struggle with. So that's maybe like a quick point on the architecture. Sure. I think the thing that's surprised. So the theme here is like, yeah, election season, we're not in election season, so we can't get election season volume. We're just not going to get that. But it turns out that a lot of other venues, a lot of other places where there are interesting types of speculative financial activity could happen on chain. Now, in Kalshi's case, they don't happen on chain yet. Maybe they'll do that in the future. Who knows? I don't know. But.

Eddy:
[43:14] Once there is some kind of interesting financial vehicle on chain, what we've found happens is that people start to find ways to compose with it and it starts to be able to integrate with other things. That's kind of the magic of putting something on a blockchain. And the minute you can compose with a thing, you can make that thing more valuable because it's more useful in other settings. So what I am looking for, what I think the end state is, is a lot of the types of things that occur on sports books are set by like old school market makers in the betting sense of the word. I think those things are going to come on chain. I think those things are going to be building blocks for other types of financial products.

David:
[43:54] Listen to some of the infrastructure conversations here. On slide 33, you guys have a TPS, transactions per second comparison versus NASDAQ and Stripe. Compared to credit cards, we have a lot of growth left to do, but also at the same time, in aggregate, the title of the slide, you guys have blockchains are processing more than 3,400 transactions per second, approaching the scale of some of the largest financial systems.

David:
[44:15] This has been the story, I think, of the last cycle to this one. Last cycle, we had 600 Gwei gas prices, $1,000 Uniswap trades at the PicoTops. No longer the case today. And in addition to that, we just have way faster blockchains. What has this unlocked? What has this produced for us? And also, where are we in this arc? Eddie, I'll throw this one to you.

Eddy:
[44:36] Well, I think we're well beyond the point that blockchain capacity is the limiting factor, aren't we? I mean, that just doesn't feel, does that feel like the bottleneck to you guys? It sure did for me three years ago, two years ago, right? I was getting all these interesting stories and pitches and people were saying, I want to do this. Like, what is this? How is this going to work? Does this sound good to you? And I was like, there's just no way it's fitting on a blockchain. Even for something as simple and benign as payments, we are now well past that point. We can do all the payment stuff. We can do the payment stuff cheaper than the current system can do. And the reason why not everyone's using crypto for payments, blockchains for payments today, is because a lot of regulatory questions needed to be answered. A lot of products need to be wired up. A lot of public-private peak or photography needs to be built into a lot of apps. There's a lot of stuff that remains to be built. Those seem like the bottlenecks to me. So I think the phase that we are, where we are now, is scalability is no longer the obvious limiting factor. Instead, we have to figure out all the other product bottlenecks, regulatory bottlenecks, and all those other things, right? And I think that's still a surprise to some people when they hear that, but we're just in a completely different era.

Ryan:
[45:46] I want to ask you evaluation questions based on these next slides.

Eddy:
[45:49] Tough one. That's a tough one, right?

Ryan:
[45:51] Well, I'm only bringing the tough ones to you guys because I think you have all the answers here.

Ryan:
[45:57] So Solana being a hub for on-chain activity, there's been a massive increase in kind of this revenue type metric of Solana selling a lot more block space at times, exceeding Ethereum. We also have average transaction costs per second and average transaction costs on Solana and Ethereum and Layer 2s continuing to go down. There's this perennial question of like, okay, so Bitcoin, no one seems to be valuing it based on the amount of blocks-based sales it actually has, right? It's like it's meme-ified itself into a digital gold. Well, what about everything else? Okay, so like, what about something like Ether, the asset, or Solana? Are all layer one tokens, are they monetary assets? Are we expecting some sort of cash flow from these types of things? Or is it somewhere in between? This is like a question I feel like David and I started the podcast, The Answer, and we really still don't have the full answer. Do you guys have the answer to this question?

Eddy:
[46:54] I don't know if we have the answer, but I love Darren. I know Darren has a lot of thoughts on this as well. I'd say I think the answer is very clearly in between. I think that the monetary valuation idea or digital gold style idea is itself in a way a underdeveloped idea right and that's because we have had only a few types of things in the world like gold like silver whatever that can have these types of properties of being like unchangeable of being fungible of being easy to identify of being timeless right like things like that of lacking depreciation like we only have a few things that have had that and they've been bundled together into a specific thing like you can't separate the properties of gold into different things without incredibly complex financial engineering. It's a bundle of things. Bitcoin is a bundle of things. Well, one of the things that technology does is, and I'm going to avoid using the word territorialization or deterritorialization here, but one of the things that technology does is, is it can unbundle those things and can allow them to be reassembled in arbitrary ways. We don't have to bucket assets like Ethereum or Solana or any of the L1 tokens. We don't have to bucket them into like, they're either with this bucket or that bucket. Turns out there's thousands of buckets. We can make buckets. We can program buckets for God's sake. So trying to think about it in this kind of like oversimplified way is part of what makes it unsolvable in the mind.

Eddy:
[48:21] Instead, the way to think about it is Ethereum is the default collateral asset across Ethereum, like Solana, like Sol is for Solana. It also benefits from a burn because when people use gas, it's burned. Also, it is bridgeable, blah, blah, blah. Also, it's a quote pair for all these things. Also, you see what I'm saying? Just analyze it for its properties. Trying to squeeze it into a specific label contorts the mind into a place that you cannot actually understand it. So it is the properties that it has. And we can give that a name, but that's what it is. And I think Ethereum benefits from the burn. I think Ethereum benefits from being an asset people trust as being something extremely censorship resistant on a decentralized blockchain. I think it benefits from multiple things.

Daren:
[49:06] And remember too, right? Like the industry can evolve, right? And the ways that these tokens get valued can evolve, right? Like remember up until like really this year, right? Like most projects, except for, you know, very specific circumstances, most projects were afraid to turn on the fee switches and actually generate revenue that accrues to token holders, right? And it was only until, you know, this year that we're now starting to see that opportunity open up, which is going to totally, I think, reshape people's mental models around how to think about valuation.

Eddy:
[49:38] That entire conceptual path was not available. Now that conceptual path is available.

Daren:
[49:41] Right.

Daren:
[49:42] And so I think a lot of this can just shift over time and we will see.

Eddy:
[49:46] For those of us who've been following crypto for a long time, you know, Bitcoin was often memed as original, as digital cash. Cash, yeah. Cash means payment. Okay, cash means payment. A lot of people wanted Bitcoin for payments. And that totally, yeah, that totally fell apart, right? That totally fell apart. Does that mean Bitcoin failed? I don't think so. I think Bitcoin as this huge decentralized thing and think, imagine like a giant idea amoeba, like crawling across the landscape. Like sometimes it reaches, sometimes it like goes into certain areas and grows. Sometimes it like withdraws because that wasn't good. Like it's just, the idea just spreads and it evolves. It turns out that a really comfortable conceptual niche for Bitcoin ended up being this ossification, digital gold, fixed supply, like these ideas became kind of its hard outer shell, right? Whereas for Ethereum, because it's a more complex technological object.

Daren:
[50:48] Is still undergoing exploration. Solana, all the L1s,

Eddy:
[50:51] They all will too. The other network tokens like Uni, like Morpho, right? Like those will continue to evolve. We will start to think of them differently. I hope, I know we really punched this one, but you guys said that's like a really important question. It's really important. I agree with that. So I really wanted to attack it.

Ryan:
[51:07] Thank you.

David:
[51:08] Eddie, your multidisciplinary nature is showing. Let's turn into the favorite valuation metric of 2025, revenue. This title slot is titled Solana and Hyperliquid Capturing the Majority of Real Economic Revenue, a Big Shift from Bitcoin and Ethereum's Dominance in Years Past. And then we have a chart that shows actually a pretty big rainbow of colors of different revenue sources. And I can't really pick anything that's particularly too dominant here. Hyperliquid at the bottom, I think, is probably the biggest. Solana, Ethereum, Tron, BSC, Bitcoin, even having some REV on this slide. That's interesting. talk about this slide because I me and Ryan have always been huge fans of revenue because it kind of equates to maturity, adoption, realness. What has been the 2025 story around when it comes to revenue?

Daren:
[51:55] Yeah. So this metric, I would say, comes with, as you guys know, right, tons of nuance, right? Because it is a function of both the demand and supply of block space, right? Like that's kind of what it comes down to. And, you know, over a long time horizon, right, I think in order to make crypto more accessible to the world, you need to increase the block space, right? We needed to bring fees down for users. Of course, that comes with a set of consequences and trade-offs. But nevertheless, I still do agree with you. This is a metric worth watching because it shows how much people are actually paying to use these chains. And I think in the last couple of years, what we saw as Ethereum increased its block space, as it moved a lot of the activity to layer two as it brought down the fees for users. Meanwhile, kind of Solana, you know, garnered a lot of attention and activity and kind of also, you know, brought more usage onto its block or into its block space. We saw a shift from what was previously a Ethereum and Bitcoin dominated world to kind of new applications, including Solana, including Hyperliquid, including, you know, Tron with the stable coin narrative. And so I think we're seeing much more diversity now across chains. And it's all kind of part of this complex story that Eddie has talked about.

Ryan:
[53:14] All right, guys, I think we have time for maybe just three more topics. But I do want to get to this one, which at the risk of being nerdy, this is a perfect CTO question, Eddie. So you ready for this? So you got a slide here that shows the amount of Bitcoin at risk under some sort of quantum computer that can start breaking some of Bitcoin's cryptography. This is actually something I've been worried about.

Daren:
[53:36] Like, because I don't know how Bitcoin solves for this.

Ryan:
[53:39] I'll just describe the slide. There could be as much as 6 million at risk. 6 million Bitcoin supplies. Yeah. So how many, I don't know, half a quarter of a trillion dollars, something like that? It's a lot. It's a lot. And this is a prize to whomever goes and creates the quantum computer that can go crack some of these addresses. So a $500 billion prize is out there. And so the Bitcoin community, and this is, by the way, even if they implement quantum secure sort of algos, which they totally can, still these, you know, legacy addresses could be susceptible to this. So I'm kind of thinking like, what does Bitcoin do about this? Do they break their immutable property rights or like it's kind of a bad choice

Ryan:
[54:22] here, Eddie? How do you think this results?

Eddy:
[54:24] What I think is most fascinating is that you can have a lot of, there's a lot of debate about the timeframe, right? Like how long until we have enough quantum computing capacity to actually break some of this.

Ryan:
[54:35] You think we will, right? I mean, 10 years from now?

Eddy:
[54:38] I think we probably, no. My team has debated this at some length. It's a real nerd snipey topic for cryptographers, right? But we tend to think that it's a little longer out. We actually have a podcast on this that we put out last year, I think. But we tend to think it's a little bit longer out, probably 20 years or more. Oh, okay. What's being said? I don't think it's a, like, around-the-corner threat. There are some people who have been hyping that up, that it's sort of inevitable. I think that they're being a little funny.

David:
[55:03] But in any case... But would you know, Eddie?

Eddy:
[55:06] Would you really know? No, I don't. He's building a quantum computer right now. Me, personally, absolutely not. Way outside my domain, I'm totally making everything up. But I'm just riffing off what experts have told me who do that, right? But the interesting thing is that the Bitcoin... Community, so to speak, will definitely need to make a decision. Now, there's many possible paths. They could fork the chain and remove those Bitcoin, the sitting duck Bitcoin. They could decide to, you know, create them. Yeah, that's a tough one. They could, you know, they could change it so that they could have like a rollout process where over time people have to gradually upgrade. I don't know, but they have to do something because as it is today, those could be yanked and then when those get deposited into some exchange like that.

David:
[55:53] But Eddie, Bitcoiners have been flexing their we don't do anything to the chain muscle since the small blockers won the block size wars.

Eddy:
[56:02] You know, for all we know, David, for all we know, this could be a gift from Satoshi from the future.

Daren:
[56:08] And he did this to force them to do a fork. Satoshi did this on purpose, so they need to come together to coordinate and run a hard fork.

Ryan:
[56:14] Maybe it's a gift from Satoshi to provide a massive reward for whoever builds the best quantum computer the fastest.

David:
[56:20] Maybe it's a big bug bounty. Maybe that was Satoshi's vision.

Eddy:
[56:24] Maybe Satoshi was an AI from the future and left this as a gift to ensure his own creation. That's why this question is so fun.

Ryan:
[56:31] All right, something else that's fun. AI and crypto, what are the highlights here? Where are the use cases? Where do they combine? How are AI and crypto going to interact?

Daren:
[56:41] Yeah, I think if you would have asked me this question last year, I think I probably would have been like, yeah, you know, centralization, decentralization, I would have given some hand-wavy answer. I think now, looking at it this year, the opportunities have become a lot more clear, right? I think on one hand, you know, we're seeing how hard it is to distinguish between AI and human-generated activity. We now have proof of human systems like world with 17 million verified humans already. I think a lot of the narrative around AI agents has come to light, right? Crypto might be the only viable payment rail using standards like X402, IP, that whole conversation, $80 trillion market, blockchains can help us coordinate and transact around that. And then, of course, I think the world in general needs more decentralization, especially in the context of AI, which is a very centralizing technology. And this idea of decentralizing the compute layer, I think, can help keep AI open, permissionless and neutral.

David:
[57:43] There's one last slide I want to talk about before we let you guys go. That's going to be slide 51, which is, or excuse me, 52, which is kind of your forward outlook and predictions slide. So just looking into the future.

Daren:
[57:53] Excuse me, 53. Yeah. So we're going to talk to you guys in 12 months. We talked to you guys 12 months ago. Today's today. And then in 12 months, we'll talk to you guys again.

David:
[58:00] So we'll revisit some of these subjects in 12 months time. So this is just thoughts about 2025 and beyond. Market structure legislation will pass. Traditional finance institutions and emerging fintechs will double down on crypto. More talent will flow into crypto. Overall, when you broad strokes these things all together, what are you guys thinking about as we wrap up this year and into 2026. What does 2026 look like for us?

Daren:
[58:24] Yeah, so I think the theme of all of these things here that you see, and I've used this analogy with Eddie before, right? But the Bitcoin white paper was released in October 2008, which means the crypto industry is 17 years old. And next year, it will be 18 years old. And I think it's very much like a teenager nearing the end of adolescence about to step into adulthood, finally being taken seriously by the world, whether that's through real institutional adoption, real regulatory clarity, the stablecoin narrative, the infrastructure getting better, all of these things just feel like a 17-year-old about to step into the world. And that's really exciting to me. I think we've finally grown up as an industry and I'm very excited for the years ahead.

Eddy:
[59:13] Yeah, I'd say last year, I think a big thing we were saying, which I'm glad we talked so much about this time, was that stable coins had reached product market fit, which that's abundantly obvious now, like to everybody. It was like becoming obvious and now it's totally obvious. And a thing that we pointed at that was going to be the big question for the next at least six months was what's going to happen with regulatory. And.

Daren:
[59:40] Or, you know, rewind the tape, like what's happened over the last year,

Eddy:
[59:44] Incredibly positive regulatory. Could have gone the other way. And it's gone really, really, really well. And what we're seeing now is the consequences of those things. What are the consequences of stable coins reaching sort of this mainstream appeal to major financial institutions? What are the consequences of the regulatory clarity that is coming and is continuing to come this year? What will happen? I think what will happen is, as this is all digested by tech in general, we're going to have a bunch of new products, a bunch of new integrations, a bunch of new shots on goal, a bunch of stuff's going to work, a bunch of stuff's not going to work, and we're going to play forward the tape where all of the different themes that we've talked about will continue to mature. So I see this as like a storm, you know, a bunch of stuff coming together and becoming more organized and specific. And we're going to see the consumer facing consequences of all this back end stuff, regulatory infrastructure, everything. We're going to see what that looks like in 2026.

Ryan:
[1:00:47] Eddie, does that depend on market structure? You think we get the market structure bill done? You think that's going to happen?

Eddy:
[1:00:51] I think we do. I mean, the shutdown and other things from what I hear have endangered that slightly just because like, you know, chaos in the government slows things down and started to pass bills. But even with what we've gotten so far, a much better leadership in the SEC, excellent leadership with the Genius Act, with improvements in the OCC, improvements at the CFTC.

Daren:
[1:01:16] We're still going to see a ton of fruit.

Eddy:
[1:01:18] It's not like everything was hinging on clarity. Clarity will be huge and is a big, big deal for the industry. But we still have a ton of new slack on the line to pull.

Ryan:
[1:01:29] Yeah, I agree with you. Even the SEC's Project Crypto seems like. Just that alone, without market structure, we could get a lot more done on that. Totally. Guys, this has been great. So the report is a 2025 state of crypto. It's bankless. It's our personal favorite as far as a summary. It's just really concise. The slides look beautiful. By the way, there are dashboards coming to this that updates many ecosystem metrics that we talked about today in real time. So Darren and Eddie and the team just like put together, you guys are doing fantastic work here and I love it. We'll include all the links in the show notes. The last question I have to ask you guys is because some people are saying the cycle has topped. All right, and I wanna know what you guys think about this because you've been through multiple cycles. We started talking about like the different cycles and how crypto does work in cycles. If we look at traditional four-year cycles in a bull market, which is what this would be, it would be about over. I mean, we'd be allowed 10 minutes to midnight here. It could end in November or December. Maybe it's already over. That flash crash certainly didn't feel well. What's your personal thought on this? Is the bull cycle over or does it still have some legs into 2026?

Eddy:
[1:02:37] You're going to hate my answer, Ryan. I'm not going to be like, we've got seven days. Far from that. My genuine belief, I think you guys feel the same way. Okay, this is not that crazy a thing. It's like, it's getting a little harder to tell.

Daren:
[1:02:51] It really is.

Eddy:
[1:02:52] Yeah, it is. I think it was a lot easier to tell last time. And the time before that, it was. I'm telling you, it was. It was. Let's be honest.

Daren:
[1:02:58] It was.

Ryan:
[1:02:59] When I saw Doquan on Twitter.

Daren:
[1:03:00] I didn't sell, so

David:
[1:03:01] I actually feel insulted by that.

Ryan:
[1:03:03] No, but retrospectively, I don't know, David. It was pretty easy to tell.

Eddy:
[1:03:07] We knew something was wrong. It was easier to tell. Now, it's honestly harder to tell. And I think that that makes sense because crypto's gotten so big and pluralistic with all these different things, all these different things going in all these different directions, more blockchains, more products, more infrastructure, more exogenous factors like regulatory, macro, debasement. All this stuff has gotten so big that it's like under attack and growing in a hundred different angles at once that you can't really point at a single feedback loop that underscores the entire process. So I genuinely kind of don't know.

Ryan:
[1:03:42] So you straight up just don't know?

Eddy:
[1:03:44] I swear I don't know. I swear. I swear. I'm not just being like whatever. I really don't know. But I do know that from a technological perspective and from a regulatory perspective, as we've been saying, we're in the best place we've ever been. And that means more products. And so, Darren, my job- That's what I mean.

Ryan:
[1:04:05] That's why it's so hard to sell.

Eddy:
[1:04:06] Okay. Yeah. Darren, in my job is to follow that, really. Like, we kind of look at the macro, but like our job is really to follow that. And we got a ton of stuff to be following. So, that's awesome.

Ryan:
[1:04:16] Darren, you have anything to add? What's your cycle prediction? Anything that data is telling us?

Daren:
[1:04:20] Yeah. Well, I am not a macro guy, But like Eddie said, what we do look a lot at is developer activity, kind of new products and innovations, kind of launches. And I will say this last, and I said this at the beginning of the episode, this last run up that we saw in price was driven more so by the external factors, right? It was not kind of part of this traditional feedback loop between products, innovation, developers. And now we are at a position where we feel the tides are shifting. And, you know, we do have the infrastructure. We have the opportunity in front of us from a product innovation developer standpoint to kind of hopefully kickstart the next wave.

Ryan:
[1:05:03] Okay, Darren.

David:
[1:05:03] Eddie's calling for two more years. Eddie's calling for two more years.

Ryan:
[1:05:06] That's what I just heard. Bankless Nation, you guys can, you know, interpret this on your own. We don't want to put words in your mouth, all right? But we do have a bright future ahead of us over the long run. Eddie, Darren, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a real pleasure.

Eddy:
[1:05:20] Always a pleasure, guys.

Daren:
[1:05:22] Thanks, guys. Bye, guys.

Ryan:
[1:05:23] Bankless Nation, none of this has been financial advice. Two more years? Or we have no idea. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.