# Institutional Utility, Token Buybacks, and Venture Capital Trends

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-05-20

## Transcript

I mean, what's interesting about crypto is that it enables people to launch companies and get liquidity a lot earlier.
I mean, now companies are IPO-ing significantly later.
Like there's lots of conversations that you probably shouldn't IPO unless you have $500 million in revenue.
What's up, everybody?
It's LG Ducet here and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that accepted the bear market a long time ago, but still can't quite find our way out of hibernation.
Today is May 20th, 2026.
If you were launching a crypto business today, how would you shape it?
Would you raise with promise of a token?
Would you use your revenue for growth, marketing, or maybe even buybacks?
Today, we're going to sit down with an insider on the venture side to get a download on how this stuff works and where our industry is going.
Joshua Frank, CEO at The Tie, is on with us today.
Today's episode was brought to you by Cape, the privacy-first mobile carrier, Pharos, the layer one built for RealFi, and Nexo, earn interest, borrow, and trade crypto.
Joshua, welcome back to the show, man.
How are you doing?
Doing well after the Knicks.
comeback victory against the cavaliers last night that was last night of course man that was epic i checked the score in like the third quarter i was like oh wow maybe the calves are for real and then i saw i didn't check until later and uh yeah congrats to you man congrats to the next game i think you know having uh james harden is your primary defender against jalen brunson in the fourth quarter maybe not the best coaching decision oh man i saw i saw those highlights and i saw i have a few friends who put up some polymarket bids right as like they knew even when the knicks were down like 10 points they were like or 15 or whatever it was they're like this is you know their odds are at like six percent or ten percent like that's going to change so i know a couple guys who made a little bag last night from betting on a Cavs collapse.
And of course, listen, people listening, I'm always going to bring this back to something on chain, okay?
We can talk about sports or whatever.
I'm always going to relate it back to some degen play I wish I made somewhere.
But Joshua, congrats to the Knicks.
Hopefully they continue on from here.
It'd be great to see them make the finals for the first time in a really long time.
face whichever juggernaut of choice that they want to play against.
But let's talk about crypto, man.
Let's actually focus on the stuff that people want to listen to today.
On the institutional side, I think we had you back.
We actually had you on the show back in January.
And I think you were with Jay on last year.
And you're always good at giving us like a state of like what's going on in crypto, how people are feeling, how you're feeling about price action, as well as I think, you know, considering the tie, like you guys also know where funds are going, which I think is always so important to ask, where is that institutional money?
Where are things being deployed?
That's what I want to talk about with you today.
You guys were at ConsenSys a few weeks back.
What was the vibe like?
Were people ecstatic?
Were they worried about price action?
What were people saying?
Yes.
We actually did our own.
We had about 800 people, institutional only event at ConsenSys called Innovate.
Yeah.
And the institutional, you know, it's this interesting dichotomy.
I mean, you know, people in the institutional world are not really negative on the space right now, whereas retail is very negative.
Like, I think if you walked into a, you know, a crypto developer conference, you know, the vibes would probably not be, you know, quite the same.
But I think also there's this disconnect that's starting to happen between building and using blockchains for tokenization, for infrastructure and price.
Right.
And it's kind of.
this disconnect is starting to happen where you have real adoption and does that mean prices will go up, right?
And so a lot of the institutional folks coming in are thinking about how do I use blockchain rails to make settlement more efficient, faster, more, you know, less expensive, right?
Like, you know, how do I run my business using blockchain rails?
How do I use stable coins?
Whatever the thing might be.
And that world is very positive and is excited and is building.
And I hear it in my conversations.
I mean, I spoke to a top five, you know, U.S.
bank.
Everyone knows who they are.
I'm not going to throw out a name the other day, but, you know, they're like, you know, we are planning on offering crypto custody and, you know, trading to our customers and the ability to in-kind create and redeem, you know, ETFs and other products.
These are like crazy concepts.
12 months ago that are now just part of every single conversation.
I mean, every bank is coming in, especially with regulatory change in the US and is fully embracing and offering digital assets to their customers.
And so I think from an, it's just a very different vibe, right?
You know, there is no, and to be fair, I didn't, you know, I didn't make my way to the main conference, but I think, you know, those that did express similar perspectives, right?
It was no.
you know, it's still Miami, so you still have your Miami nonsense, but it really is not like a, you know, a Dogecoin wrapped Lamborghini around every corner.
It's much more, how does crypto help us improve some existing product?
It really feels like we're kind of at this, you know, this point where finance is just starting to use crypto as part of finance, right?
And we also see that with a lot of the funds that we talked to.
I know this thing we're going to talk to later, but a lot of funds that we're talking to now, they're not thinking about investing in crypto.
they're thinking about investing in finance products that just happen to use crypto behind the scenes.
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And do they want to invest in those specifically because crypto is the back end?
Or is it the other way around where it's like these products that they want to invest in happen?
to have crypto as a package.
Well, I think there are those that have the belief that crypto is an enabler to make these products more successful than they would be otherwise.
But now it's more like I'm investing in a fintech infrastructure company that happens to use digital assets to do some part of the business, but it's not a crypto business in its entirety, right?
We're hearing that a lot.
I'm seeing that a lot from funds where the mandate or what they're allowed to invest in is starting to expand on the venture side a little bit.
And it's things that are crypto adjacent as well.
And at the end of the day, I mean, you know, I think it's a sign that the industry is maturing and growing up.
You know, you don't think of specific asset classes really as their own things.
You know, all of the big banks trade, you know, commodities, they trade equities, they trade fixed income, they trade any other asset class.
And crypto is just another asset class.
And it's a technology that enables things to operate more efficiently.
And I think that's what we're...
You know, that's what the conversations are starting to become.
The question that obviously everyone has is, what does that mean for my bags?
And I don't have the best answer for you today.
I think that that's one of the biggest questions that we try to answer on the show.
And there is no clear answer, though, is that like when you hear this kind of stuff and we look at like the RWA charts, we look at stablecoin charts, we look at, you know, all these these institutions posting digital asset jobs all over the place.
We talk about this all the time.
I think a lot of people listening and including myself, I'm like, how do I participate in that value generation?
And where will that value accrue?
Is that something that even some of those people also ask you, Joshua, on top of just like, here's where the funds are moving.
Here's the kind of apps we like.
Do they ask that question?
Well, I think it depends who you're talking about, right?
Because we have all the crypto native hedge funds that come to our events that we engage with and the crypto native VCs and all those too.
And it's not just asking us.
It's their part of the conversation.
I think the one clear thing.
is that just like equities, you'd rather own something that makes money than something that doesn't make money.
And ultimately, you know, like as the market matures, you know, people are thinking about tokens as if they were equities or cases.
And there's conversations about, does it make more sense to actually convert my token to an equity and shut down the token?
And like, ultimately, as an investor in anything, what do I want?
I want to participate in the upside.
I mean, these tokens that existed in the past that didn't really give you any participation in the upside, where there was a separate for-profit company that was making money, that's probably not what you should be owning, right?
And so obviously there's conversations now on, does the value accrue on the application layer now significantly more than on the chain layer?
And I think that right now it's looking like it will, and maybe not yet.
Obviously there's still new chains that are launching a multi-billion dollar valuations.
But if you look at the highest revenue generating tokens in the space, a lot of them are the applications right now.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's people are flocking towards safety and safety is assets that generate revenue and have some way of accruing value to token holders.
I think, you know, what's interesting to what I've learned, especially talking to a lot of people in similar conversations on the show, is that it feels to me like revenue gives a lot of these companies flexibility in terms of what they're going to do, right?
Whether they have a token or they don't.
But it's something that they can use as a lever to enable buybacks, which is something that a lot of people want to see.
A lot of our own Milk Road analysts, they want to see that, you know, the hyperliquids and the skies and all these different types of protocols are actually buying back their tokens.
I'm less, I'm a startup founder myself.
I started the tie about nine years ago, right?
We are profitable.
We generate EBITDA, but the best use of that capital would not be buying back shareholders.
It's taking that and it's investing in growth.
And it's, we made an acquisition of a company at the end of last year.
You know, we're continuing to make acquisitions.
We're launching new business lines.
We're launching new products.
And I think the thing that's weird about buybacks, and I think this is still something that the market is obviously thinking about and pricing out, is are buybacks the best use of capital?
I mean, what's interesting about crypto is that it enables people to launch companies and get liquidity a lot earlier.
I mean, now companies are IPO-ing significantly later.
Like there's lots of conversations that you probably shouldn't IPO unless you have $500 million in revenue.
There are very few companies in the world that get to the point where they have hundreds of millions, let alone $500 million in revenue.
And so the interesting thing about a token is that anybody can participate in the upside of something and it becomes liquid on day one or very, very early on.
And so there are things that are unique about tokens.
But with that said, while those benefits do exist, I think they also create this expectation that you need to then go spend all the revenue that you make buying back more and more of the token to push price up.
But ultimately, is that the best?
Like if you are a private company, you would never, ever, ever do that.
And so I think.
We need to there needs to be a balance that's that's that's struck between investing in growth and buying back tokens.
And I think there's examples like Hyperliquid is generating such an obscene amount of money that certainly they can go and they can buy back a ton of the token.
But if the token is generating five million dollars in revenue, should they be spending two and a half million of it on buying back a token?
what happens if the market turns and everything goes negative and then they have no runway left, right?
And so I think this is something that the market is thinking about.
And I don't think that there's a clear direction yet, but I do think we need to be a bit more thoughtful about use of proceeds.
And I think the market also needs to mature in how it evaluates businesses and understands that the best use of capital is not always, you know, burning tokens.
So what would you do?
So if you were launching a crypto protocol right now, let's say you're launching a Dexon base or something that you think has some competitive legs is in an area where there's a lot of volume, there's a lot of traffic, there's a lot of...
uh potential fees to be made and that's just an example i don't i don't know that joshua is doing that or anything like that just the first thing that came to mind yeah how would you how would you design that let's assume that you're going to have revenue day one what would you advise a business to do in terms of role of managing their fees a potential token waiting to go to be an equity you know what i mean like how would you how should a crypto focused business start today i'm not advising anybody to do anything so it's very I think the first question that people are starting to ask themselves is, do I need a token?
Historically, the answer to do I need a token is with the token, you're effectively printing money out of thin air, right?
And so for a very long time, the answer to do I need a token was, you know, resoundingly yes, because I can print a billion dollars out of thin air.
And, you know, with a low float, high FDV token, I can make a ridiculous amount of money for myself.
And that was the answer for a long time.
Now we are seeing, you know, There's multiple significantly, multiple, market cap significantly compressing.
There's not necessarily multiples in a lot of these cases.
Market cap significantly compressing.
So I think the first question is, do I need a token or do I not need a token?
What is the benefit of having a token?
Is there a way to incentivize my community?
Is there a way to give back?
And I think there are many cases in which tokens do exist or should exist and do need to exist and are better than equity.
But I think you need to weigh that option.
And then I think ultimately, I don't think that there's a best decision, whether it's buying back or not buying back or anything.
The best decision is transparency and transparency with your community and explaining why you're doing something.
And ultimately, I think the projects that will be successful, the projects that are more open, are more transparent, are explaining why they're doing and why they're making the decisions they're doing.
Because ultimately, it depends on the situation, what you should be doing, right?
There's not one.
I don't think there's a best way to do anything.
And ultimately, if we look at crypto over the last.
I've been in this space 10 years, the best way to do things changes so frequently.
And so I don't think you can look at something and be like, oh, this thing works.
It's necessarily going to work six or 12 or 18 months from now.
And so I think it's more, you have to think about what is the, like ultimately, as a fiduciary, right?
Your job is to maximize shareholder or token holder value.
And so I think, you know, I think about things in the long run, you know, how do you maximize token holder value in five, 10 years?
And how do you make sure the token is actually still worth something in five years?
Which I think most people have not done a good job at doing.
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No, I think even tokens now that are five years old, I don't like foresaw.
what their token would look like today either.
As we kind of navigate the second bear market for a lot of those tokens that were launched in the big mania that brought me in the 2020-2021 bull run.
So that's a good way to look at it.
Joshua, I do want to ask you, you're always good at giving us kind of like perspective on what's going on in the market these days.
And you've kind of given us a little bit more behind the scenes.
But last time, I think we were actually looking at charts with you together.
What is your kind of current vibe?
Because I think we spoke in early January.
And then We had that massive, we had another big sink down into like the 60K range for Bitcoin in February.
Now we're kind of slightly rising out of that.
Do you have an up-to-date thesis on whether that we have bottomed in this horrific bear market that we do a podcast for every day?
Yeah, I mean, crypto is not trading too dissimilarly from other assets.
And, you know, the market is now...
somehow pricing Kevin Warsh coming in and hiking rates.
And so with everything going on in Iran with oil, I'm a big believer in the fact that Trump is extraordinarily and always self-interested.
And the thing that he cares about more than anything, and this is not saying I like him or I don't like him, but the thing that Trump cares about more than anything is the price of stocks.
I think almost everyone would agree with that.
And I think ultimately he's going to do whatever.
You know, he can obviously he wants to fight in Iran, but I think he cares about the S&P 500 performance more than anything else.
We've seen, you know, with him backtracking on things over time.
And so I think ultimately, as we look towards, you know, midterms that are coming up, we're not there yet, but obviously we had, you know, primaries this week.
As we start looking towards midterms, Republicans are not in the best position given everything happening in Iran.
given the market, given incredibly expensive gas prices, I do think he probably thinks about how do I solve this and how do I fix this?
And I think ultimately that becomes bullish for all risk assets broadly is my self-interested Trump kind of thought process there.
But yeah, I think the question that you always need to ask in crypto is who is the buyer and where does the bid come from?
Because we always talk about bull market, bear market, cycle, blah, blah, blah.
At the end of the day, when you click the sell button with the token that you're holding, somebody else is going to have to buy that token on the other side or price is going to continue to go down.
And I think the question is, where is the marginal buyer coming from?
I think one thing that's good is we're seeing positive developments on the ETF side.
The Bitcoin ETF has seen positive inflows over the last few months.
The hype ETF has been relatively successful.
And so I think, you know, And I think a lot of these banks and other traditional platforms starting to offer crypto exposure to their clients brings in more buyers.
But we also need to see crypto native hedge funds and liquid funds raising capital.
And they have not been.
They've really been struggling to raise capital.
They're seeing redemptions or investors asking for their money back.
So the question, everyone always talks about charts and cycles and this and that.
I always ask the question of who's buying it?
Tell me the person that you know that's buying the token that you're selling.
And is that a net new person to the space?
I think ultimately that's the most important.
Do you think there are a lot of net new buyers?
No, I don't.
I mean, I don't.
Like, I don't think there's that.
And I think it depends on obviously what the token is and what the asset is.
But I think for the majority of the altcoin, I mean, I'm not saying anything revolutionary.
Go look at the chart of any token.
Clearly, there's more sellers than there are buyers on a lot of these assets.
I don't think that there is a lot of marginal new buyers.
It doesn't mean that that can't change it.
And also the thing to remember about crypto historically is that, you know, the market starts to run and then people start, you know, piling in and piling in and piling in and piling in.
And like, I don't know, when's the last time your Uber driver tried to pitch you a shit coin?
Usually, you know, that's when the, you know, that's kind of when we're on the spectrum of, are we in the seventh, eighth, ninth inning of the bull market?
And I have not had any Uber drivers pitching me or watched Uber drivers.
you know, trading crypto at any point recently.
You know, I always like to say, you know, when no one's talking about crypto, buy Bitcoin.
When everyone's talking about Bitcoin, buy shit coins.
Then when your grandma, you know, says she read an article in the Wall Street Journal, that's when you run away.
And so, you know, I think we're probably in the somewhere in between no one's talking about crypto or people are talking about Bitcoin kind of phase of the market.
I mean, what are Uber drivers talking about right now?
I feel like the joke would be semiconductor stocks and or Pokemon cards.
I feel like those are the two top markets.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I need to do a gut check.
I've had this idea.
Somebody listening should take this idea.
I don't need any credit.
But during the D-Pin bull market, which was very short-lived, I had this amazing idea of installing a device in Uber driver's cars that basically recorded all the shit coins that they talked about.
and did like a sentiment check and created a leaderboard of all the nonsense tokens that Uber drivers are talking about.
I mean, if you, you know, they've been the ones that have been leading the XRP, you know, army bandwagon and a lot of these other things.
They've been more ranked than we've been.
So, you know, when I say we, I don't mean me personally.
I'm not saying I've been right or wrong, but the, you know, the crypto natives on Twitter, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot of the non-crypto natives, you know, have outperformed.
Yeah.
So somebody should launch this D-Pin Uber device.
I think it's a real winner.
Yeah.
I think, you know what I could see, honestly, Joshua, is like some kind of service where Uber drivers pitch you on some kind of token or some kind of equity or something like that.
And then you can pay an extra charge for them to not pitch you.
You know what I mean?
It's kind of like YouTube.
It's like YouTube.
What's a YouTube premium or whatever it is where it's like you don't get the ads or it's like this is like a new ad.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's it.
And XRP and anybody else who wants to get their token out there, you know, can partners with Uber and Lyft and then eventually autonomous vehicles like Tesla.
And you can turn it off with a fur feet.
I mean, I remember 2021, you know, height of the bull market.
Just, you know, I always try not to tell people what I do because the last thing I do is want an Uber driver knowing that I'm in crypto and trying to make any nonsense coins.
But it's happened before.
And they always somehow managed to mention a coin that I've never heard of before.
And my biggest question is, where are they finding these things?
How are they finding out about these tokens?
Like, I'm genuinely curious.
And I think some of them have made money.
I think the majority probably have not.
But I think some of them have made good money.
I would not.
Listen, you know, there's a lot of research I wish I could do, Joshua.
There's a lot of time I wish I had.
By the way, as an Uber or Lyft driver has.
Drop it in the chat.
This is what I'm talking about, man.
If you're out there eight hours a day, 10 hours a day, seven days a week, driving around, mainly people who do not want to talk to you.
Right.
What else you got time to do?
You're sitting in traffic.
So you're in New York or something.
You're sitting in traffic half the time where you could definitely just look at some other iPad or screen, look at charts or whatever.
You have tons of time to listen to Milk Road and all our other colleagues in the industry.
Go and listen to Moonshots or TVPN and cover all this other stuff.
You know, you have tons of time.
I wish I had eight hours to sit in the car to listen to podcasts.
I feel like I'd be a much better trader.
But it's funny that despite that, they still end up with things like XRP.
That's just kind of funny.
So then maybe that tells you something about XRP as well, that there's a lot more value there than we realize, at least for the more retail side, I guess you would call it.
Okay, we've gone down a very strange rabbit hole.
Well, I do think one thing to add, though, you asked about, you know, the state of fundraising broadly and capital.
One thing that I think people are not talking about, and I was tweeting about this and people were giving me shit about this a couple of months ago, is, you know, I made a tweet.
that crypto venture funds are raising a ton of money and no one is talking about it.
And everyone was like, you're wrong.
The market's dead, whatever.
And then A16Z and Han came out and there's way more capital than that that's flowing into the venture space in crypto.
I don't like to give away people's, you know, like to me, if you raise $300 million, that's your news to share.
It's not my news to share.
So I don't want to share the news for anybody in particular, but there are a lot more.
$250 million funds, $300 million, $350 million, $400 million crypto funds that have raised capital recently.
The way to think about it is there were a zillion crypto funds that were launched in the last cycle.
The ones that performed poorly are not going to raise again, but the ones that performed well are.
And there are a lot of funds that were in the $25 to $50 million range that are now sized up and they're in the $75 to $150 million range.
You know, there are funds that maybe were 400 million.
Maybe they're not 400 million again, but maybe their fund this time is 300 or 350.
You know, one thing that's very difficult about being a crypto venture investor is where do you put the money to work?
Right.
A lot of people are like, oh, you'd think you want to raise as much money as possible.
But LG, if you had a billion dollars right now and you had to invest in crypto venture deals, you'd struggle to figure out where do you put a billion dollars to work.
And so I think some of the funds are going to be a bit smaller than they were before.
But also a lot of the investor mandates we did.
I did say there's not that much new capital coming in, but a lot of the VC funds do have the ability to deploy into liquid crypto.
And so they can take maybe 20 percent of their, you know, the book.
and buy tokens for the long term and hold them and stuff like that.
And so there is a lot more capital coming into the space.
I think the capital is much more selective in that they're looking for funds that really well had a really good fund one and fund two, and they're looking to play to a fund three, fund four, whatever it is.
And also that capital that's being deployed is also going to be more selective.
I think, you know, obviously, people are looking for later stage, they're looking for growth, they're looking for success.
And I think now, whereas there were a lot of funds that were like, I'm 100% tokens only, a lot of that is now people are, it seems like a lot of people are agnostic.
They don't care if it's token or equity.
They're just looking for good investment opportunities, right?
And it also creates the right kind of long-term, I think, alignment between investors and founders as well.
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Do you think that people that are listeners of the show, and me included, people that are not in venture like you, let's say, and are not VCs, are not accredited investors and all that kind of stuff, but are still keen to get a piece of the private market, do you think it's a good idea at this point in time, in this point in the timeline of crypto, where we know things are going to go up long term?
There's a lot coming, but we don't know.
We're still looking for where that value is going to aggregate.
Should we be looking at some of these kind of private market platforms like Echo and all the other ones that are like that, where it's like you have some of these companies coming into crypto, raising some form of like a public round in these kind of private groups where more, I guess, kind of like average investors like us can actually get access to these in exchange for probably a future token or something like that?
Is that a good place for us to maybe look for some of these types of companies?
Is it worth the work?
So my view on that is...
are they raising through the platform solely because they were unable to raise from VCs?
Because if they're only raising from the platform because they were unable to raise money otherwise, then definitely not.
If they're raising from one of these public crowdfunding platforms because there is a reason that they want to do that, it could be about building a community of token holders.
It could be about getting users of their platform.
You need to kind of look at these things and try to get a gauge of like, Are they doing it because they had no other option or are they doing it because there's a strategic reason that they're doing it?
If they're doing it because there's a strategic reason that they're doing it, I think it's definitely worth considering.
And by the way, if we look at, you know, crypto in the past, you look, I think CoinList is an amazing example of a platform.
You know, Solana, I think, had an ICO on CoinList.
You know, there were so many different tokens that launched and listed through CoinList.
flow, which obviously is not worth much anymore.
They sold for $0.10.
That was $0.10.
And that peaked at like $10.
Yeah.
I mean, there were some mega returns.
So I think there's definitely opportunity.
It's just got to be for the right reason.
Got it.
Okay.
Okay.
I mean, definitely worth it.
Maybe definitely worth it.
But there's also a lot of stuff that's out there now that's enabling retail investors to get exposure to private companies.
And my biggest pet peeve or thing...
is making sure that you're not stuck in layered SPVs.
So for anyone who doesn't know, an SPV is a special purpose vehicle.
It's basically an entity that goes out and raises investor capital to invest in something.
So for example, a VC, let's say a VC wanted to do an $100 million round.
Like they want to invest $100 million, but they only have the ability to invest $20 million out of their fund.
They might go raise an SPV from their existing shareholders.
to get an additional $80 million to actually do the $100 million round.
So a lot of the times when you see somebody invest in a round, sometimes it could be them combined with an SPV, but there's different reasons to do SPVs.
But SPVs add fees.
And a lot of the public companies or a lot of the private companies that are out there, sometimes you're in layered SPVs.
So imagine you want to invest in Anthropic, which I think has banned, said basically, absolutely not.
But let's take...
SpaceX, you want to invest in SpaceX.
You want to know how many fees you're paying when you're investing in SpaceX.
If you're one SPV away, maybe it's a 2% management fee and 20% performance fee.
If you're two SPVs away, it might be another 2% management fee, 20% performance fee on top of the 2% management fee, 20% performance fee, which then holds SpaceX.
It might be, I've seen third and fourth layered SPVs where you end up actually owning.
50% of what you thought you owned and you end up paying 70% of the upside in fees.
And so it's also very important to understand the structure and how you're actually, like what the exposure to the underlying product actually is.
Oh man, that does not sound fun, man.
I'm glad I'm not in venture.
And this is, I'm happy to be in here on a podcast.
That sounds like a lot of stuff to navigate.
Well, venture investors ideally are not in layered SPVs.
that we've seen it made available to retail are layered SV.
Oh, I see.
I see.
I see.
So something like an Echo, and I'm not saying that Echo does this, they would be- No, no, no.
It wouldn't be like a token, but a lot of the private company platforms that allow you to invest in private companies have layered fees behind them.
They have some layer fee.
Yeah, I guess.
Okay.
An obscene amount of layered fees behind the scenes.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, we're going to stay away from that.
Okay.
For everybody who's listening, just do your own research if you want to get into it.
We're going to come back to just crypto tokens on the market to wrap this up, Joshua.
It's just something that's a little bit more accessible, something that people can just go into their Coinbase or whatever and just buy today.
Is there anything, Joshua, kind of like in the conversations you've been having the last five or six months and the trends you've seen kind of change or permutate or whatever, are there any particular areas that you, and I'm talking like altcoins, jitcoins, whatever you want to call them.
Is there anything that maybe some of your personal thesis has changed?
Like have you become more or less bullish on something like an Ethereum or Solana or Hyperliquid or any other kind of the...
the popular kind of protocols and chains that we hear about, especially as a lot of this adoption starts to kind of take place and take a bit of shape.
Yeah, I think the question is, where does this adoption happen?
What chains do they use?
How do they engage with those chains?
And how does that accrue value to token holders and your chains or applications or anything else?
And so, you know, I think some of the really interesting things like seeing, I believe it was Apollo partnered with Morpho.
seeing BlackRock partner with Uniswap.
I think those are the types of announcements where they're really, they're investing in these applications, they're using those applications, which are extraordinarily interesting to me when like these, you know, large asset managers are tokenizing things, but it's more than just like, hey, I want to get somebody to buy the product.
It's like, I'm really engaging in this ecosystem and like building in it.
So I think anything in that realm is really interesting.
And I think there've been a few announcements.
I gave a couple of examples.
I think obviously Canton.
fits that amazingly with the amount of institutions that are starting to engage and use the network.
And you can see a lot of this public, you can go look at the Canton governance forums and a lot of the stuff that haven't even been announced yet, like teams getting super validators or validators or anything else, a lot of that is public information there.
And I think it's teams that are designing tokenomics to take advantage of those things.
And so I think ultimately, the market is clearly going very institutional.
And so it's who is aligned and who is ready for those institutions.
But that doesn't mean, by the way, like pump fund is still printing money.
There's still retail things in this space that are printing money.
But I think it's looking at either folks that are aligning well with institutions that aren't just like, you know, there have been so many announcements of just like, you know, somebody is launching a tokenized money market fund.
And the reason they might be doing it is because like a foundation behind the scenes is like, I'll buy a hundred million dollars with your money market fund if you launch it on my chain.
And that's the reason that it's happening.
I think looking for these like very deep, real, you know, partnerships that feel a lot more than surface level is important.
I think looking at, you know, protocols that are starting to grow, you know, generate revenue.
And I think the number one most important thing is non-incentivized revenue.
So much of crypto is airdrop farming and points farming and stuff like that.
And so, you know, when the, you know.
When you run out of Chuck E.
Cheese coins and you got to go up and buy more ones because you don't have any free ones left, are you still going to play the game?
I think that's the question is what games are people willing to buy the Chuck E.
Cheese coins?
And then the third one is anything with real retail traction.
Man, you know, I've heard a lot of analogies for like the crypto trenches and the DJs stuff, but Chuck E.
Cheese coins is a good one, man.
That's a good throwback.
I mean, that's effectively what most of these things are, right?
People love Chuck E.
Cheese coins though, man.
I would kill to be back at eight years old and be stuck in a Chuck E.
Cheese with infinite tokens.
Well, growing up, you went and you showed them a good report card.
You got Chuck E.
Cheese tokens.
It's the same thing.
It's like instead of showing them a report card, you're showing them all the farming that you did and then you get their Chuck E.
Cheese tokens.
And they gave you ambiguous rules for the farming you were supposed to do and then see if you were able to follow, read the teamers properly.
Before, people wanted to buy your Chuck E.
Cheese tokens, and now that's ended.
The best Chuck E.
Cheese story, though, is during COVID, I don't know if you remember seeing this, they were selling pizza on Uber Eats as this fancy pizza place, and it turned out it was Chuck E.
It was like, you know.
Oh, no.
I didn't see that.
It was like, you know, something rat pizza and it was really like Chuck E.
Cheese.
Listen, I was going to throw this out there, man.
As somebody with young kids, I wish Chuck E.
Cheese was still a thing in like every town.
And I don't know why I talk about this on the show, but I wish McDonald's still had a play place.
Like I'm like, I need to bring them to a place where I can give them pizza and they can play games.
And like this doesn't exist anymore, at least not in the prominent way that it used to.
So I'm all for it.
Jesus.
What's that?
We got to tokenize Chuck E.
Cheese.
Here's how we're going to bring back Chuck E.
Cheese.
We're going to tokenize them.
I heard that people are bringing back Pizza Hut's, like the original Pizza Hut buildings, or some of them are being converted back to the original Pizza Hut layout.
So that's good.
Maybe there is a lot of traction in the 80s, 90s trends.
And maybe there's room for them on chain.
But that's something we'll save for a startup pitch for anybody who has that idea and wants to run with it.
Sounds like maybe Joshua would be open to it.
And devices and tokenized Chuck E.
Cheese's are the two.
That's awesome.
Joshua, pleasure to talk to you, man, as always.
Thank you for all the great insight.
And I'm sure we'll see you again this year, man.
Nice to have me on.
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