Crypto Policy & The Future of Multicoin with Greg Xethalis

19:31Greg Xethalis:And I think it was a what I would refer to as a very cordial partisan markup. And in the banking side, they've really been working for, you know, really since before the government shutdown is when the work picked up. And they've been working very hard on trying to get a bipartisan bill through committee and getting buy in from particularly a group of 12 Democrats who have been really working hard on trying to refine the bill with the Senate banking staff and other interested members on our side. That part of the bill is still actively being worked on right now. And I think there are, you know, Alex, I may be jumping ahead of your next question, but, you know, the four sort of core areas of discussion around the banking side of the bill, which are being worked on by, you know, all hands right now are one, this stable coin yield issue where the banks have interposed themselves.

20:32Greg Xethalis:The second is Title V, which addresses tokenization and the regulation of tokenization by the SEC and CFTC. And the third segment is around DeFi, which is Title III, and some of the illicit finance controls and rulemakings that are being mandated by the bill. And then the fourth is still some cleanup and touch up items in token taxonomy, including some of the disclosure burdens that are imposed on digital asset originators.

21:07Alex Thorn:So I appreciate that overview of the sort of those core, what I talk about as sort of the tip of the spear negotiating points. It feels like stablecoin rewards, though, is sort of like the main hurdle. Is that, you know, and that perhaps those other items, there's a line of sight to a compromise that all sides could accept. Is that a fair way of thinking about it?

21:30Greg Xethalis:I think that's correct. I think there is a line of sight towards a compromise and a bill moving forward on all of these items. I think one of the distinguishing aspects of the stablecoin yield issue is the parties that are coming at opposite ends are different from everywhere else in the bill. So, you know, the issue around stablecoin yield is in the Genius Act, an issuer is not allowed to pay rewards to the holder of a stablecoin. It's a payment instrument. It's not a deposit account. It is not like other interest bearing investments. It's a payment instrument. Now, that payment instrument will hold the issuer of the payment instrument will hold typically U.S.

22:26Greg Xethalis:treasuries or other relatively safe assets as strictly governed by genius. And it will earn rewards on that. It'll earn income on that reserve. And what we've seen emerge, notwithstanding the prohibition on yield bearing stable coins, is that a company earns rewards. It's going to use those earnings for marketing and distribution arrangements. And those can be very diverse in their structure. What the banks are particularly concerned about is some of those distribution agreements look to them like yield bearing stable coins, just indirectly. I have some criticisms of their analysis of this. I think it's a little myopic and they're not necessarily they need to broaden their aperture to understand the entire environment.

23:24Greg Xethalis:I mean, Alex, when I first opened a SunTrust checking account in Nashville when I got to Vanderbilt, I think I got a toaster when I got that. And that's a reward for holders. Now, obviously, that toaster didn't come in the form of 3 % or 4 % rewards for holding a balance. But this is not something new that parties in business will deploy capital as a customer acquisition cost. And from the point of view of a stablecoin issuer, they are paying distribution to partners in a number of different structures to help broaden the use of stablecoins. It is not simply, hey, I'm going to give you money. Can you go pay it to someone who holds my token?

24:12Greg Xethalis:That's not the way this works. And I think we need to assess the issue of stablecoin yields more from the idea of, are we going to make it impossible for stablecoin issuers and their partners? Are we going to hamstring them from business development work? Because that's functionally what this is. And I did attend the first of two crypto industry and bank meetings last week at the White House. So I got to participate and see a lot of the discussion there. And I do think progress is being made there. But the unique part of it that I was getting towards is in this particular issue, the discussion is not between crypto and Republicans and Democrats.

24:59The issue is not Senate banking and Democrats discussing.

25:04Greg Xethalis:The issue is not traditional financial services and any of those parties discussing. It's specifically, you know, the banks and the crypto industry participants who are interested getting into a room and trying to come up with a compromise on what works for both industries and then having it subsequently vetted by banking staff and the Democrat leadership in the Senate. And eventually, by the way, this will have to go back to the House and be looked at

25:37Greg Xethalis:as the two bills, the Senate version and the House version, get consolidated into one bill that hopefully goes to the president's desk at the start of the spring.

25:49Alex Thorn:It seems like there's there's such a diverse range of stakeholders in this debate. Whereas during Genius, which was also quite a complicated legislative package to advance, it was a bit more narrow in terms of who cared about it. And the banks didn't seem to be nearly as active and activated in advocating during the Genius Act negotiations last year. Is this too complicated to get done? in this Congress, or do you think it's still got a good chance?

26:25Greg Xethalis:Well, I think, so the banks were at the table in Genius, and Genius regulated stablecoin issuers. What, I think the distinction is now market structure is regulating additional intermediaries, exchanges, brokers, dealers, other platforms. So where the banks have come to the table with a very hard line on this is they want the prohibitions on yield from genius to be extended to marketing arrangements with these newly regulated intermediaries. So again, the ag side brings digital asset platforms, custodians, brokers, dealers, et cetera, et cetera, all into line here. And the banks are looking to expand the restrictions to broader market participants.

27:14Alex Thorn:I think that's a fair distinction, by the way. I think a lot of people feel like the banks are trying to retrade on Genius. But your point is Genius didn't impose new regulations on intermediaries. This is the bill that would do that. And so here they are again saying, well, if you're going to have intermediary regulation, it should also include, it should extend. But it does feel like the banks are the ones asking for something beyond what exists in current settled law. And so they're kind of the ones that need a restriction to be added, whereas Coinbase is paying rewards on USDC today. So shouldn't they be the ones to blink here?

27:59Alex Thorn:It feels like they're digging their heels in though.

28:01Greg Xethalis:Yeah. And I'll say the more generous interpretation for the banks is this is not a retrade because now we have regulation of the intermediaries. I think a more practical interpretation of their actual asks is they are looking for a retrade. You know, they, at the meeting yesterday that took place on a Tuesday of this week, you know, we did see the banks put forward a document of asks, and those asks are dramatically more than anything that appears in the current version, the ANS of the Senate banking draft. And it does look like a retreat. Now that's a starting position. And obviously you don't start from what you want to accept.

28:45Greg Xethalis:But it's a pretty aggressive, it's pretty aggressive. And again, having been in the room and heard what I heard last week, and, you know, having been involved in discussions, I do think they're looking at this from a very Sith-like absolutist perspective, that being able to deploy reserve earnings in any way should be prohibited under the guise that this somehow will crush community banks and the deposit flow. And there's quite a bit of, I'll be generous again and say exaggerated discussion of the risk there. And we saw this when money market funds were first introduced and presented a challenge to business accounts and saying this is a disaster for the banking system.

29:37Greg Xethalis:This will cause deposit flight. There's an off-site cited number that's attributed to Treasury when, in fact, it was a bank report to Treasury saying that there's$6.6 billion of capital at risk from stablecoins for deposit flight out of banks, particularly community banks. That's like saying Bad Bunny did a Super Bowl concert in Spanish, and therefore there were risks of 330 million Americans moving from English as a first language to Spanish as a first language.

30:08Alex Thorn:6 billion or 6 trillion?

30:11Greg Xethalis:They say$6.6 trillion of capital at risk. And to be clear, that is all of the capital in deposits. That is not actually what is at risk of departing, nor do stablecoins reasonably present a material risk to that. There are a lot of factors at play that impact deposit flight. Most notably, we perhaps need to revisit FDIC limits because FDIC limits certainly give the perception of greater exposure for people at community, small, regional, midsize banks versus someone who's parking their capital at a G-SIB or bulge bracket bank, which is too big to fail. So if we're really looking and concerned about deposit flight, particularly small community banks, we need to be looking at what are the risks for bank failure.

31:08Greg Xethalis:And I think people colloquially think of banks as this hugely stable thing. My money's parked in a bank. No, it's rehypopulated. And banks actually fail all the time. It doesn't just take a banking crisis. We had a bank fail last week. I'm blanking on the name of it.

31:26Alex Thorn:Yeah, the one in Chicago, a metropolitan or something. I forget the name.

31:30Greg Xethalis:Yeah, that's correct. This does happen. And the FDIC Act established a system to provide greater security, but those limits are$250 ,000 for a customer account. and looking at different ways where we can both improve the business opportunities for smaller regional, midsize, and community banks, improving technological opportunities. And there's actually a lot of things in Genius that are very interesting for tech forward smaller banks to be able to leverage this technology to use these open neutral networks as a way to get an edge or come closer to a playing field with some of the larger banks by improving the payment systems writ large.

32:22Greg Xethalis:I mean, we've seen, you know, Erebor launch as a new bank this week. They got their charter on Friday and they are a bank that is leaning steadily into the narrative of new payment rails. They're going to be stablecoin supportive on day one and are building from a tech first basis. Now, Erebor is not going to be a small bank for very long. I think it's going to grow pretty quickly. But there are opportunities to leverage this technology that come both from Genius and also from market structure itself in improving the Fed, the payment rails globally and within the nation. I go back, you know, 2015, the FedNow, Now, initiated the FedNow effort to modernize the American payment system.

33:11Greg Xethalis:And crypto is a part of that. Stablecoins are a part of that. And when we look at deposit flight, when we look at the challenges of our distributed banking system in the United States, there have been a lot of pressures, both from the government as well as from the market uncertainty overall that have been pushing towards more bank centralization. That's not a good thing. We want smaller banks to be able to succeed. We want bank credit to be out there on the street. We don't want deposit flight, but this is creating a boogeyman out of stable coins, which is not the issue at hand. Stable coins are not a material threat for deposit flight, particularly when looked at and ranked relative to some of the other risks.

34:03Greg Xethalis:And there are efforts that are out there. Senator Hagerty has a bill to reassess FDIC limits. You know, French Hill has been a champion of community banks for a very long time. And there are things that can be done to improve the situation for smaller banks that don't simply rely on tamping out a technology in an industry that when you draw back and expand your time horizon could actually do a lot to help these smaller institutions.

34:30Alex Thorn:That makes a lot of sense. What about just before we move on from clarity, a couple of the other issues you mentioned, you talked about Title III, which is sort of where all the DeFi related stuff is. I know this bill has some enhanced clarifications on front end DeFi website compliance. I know with OFAC sanctions, actually, my understanding is that's not enhanced. I mean, all American legal persons are required to comply with OFAC sanctions, whether or not you're a website or a person. But there's other stuff in there about a non-decentralized financial ledger, which seemed to set some thresholds on what would what type of even possibly an L2 might have to perform.

35:11Alex Thorn:You know, it might be an intermediary and not a decentralized ledger. Where do those issues stand? And do you think if we get through some compromise between the stablecoin wing of the crypto party and the banks on rewards, will these present problems or have the industry and have lawmakers reached what seems like a viable compromise on the DeFi issues?

35:34Greg Xethalis:I think there's a path there. You know, language isn't set yet. In addition to my role at Multicorn, I'm also on the board of DeFi Education Foundation, which is one of the two entities associated with the DeFi Education Fund. And Amanda Tuminelli and the team at DEF have been doing a remarkable job sort of assembling feedback from the entire industry, both the larger stakeholders like venture funds or exchanges or what have you, but also the cadre or cohort of the industry that they represent, DeFi protocols. And they've been working very hard. Amanda's been doing yeoman's work on working on solutions with banking and the Democrats.

36:18And I think one of the issues that it is really hard to get legislation or regulation on DeFi right.

36:28Greg Xethalis:It's really hard because where these things are truly neutral networks and truly decentralized, like Paul Atkins said this in his Project Crypto speech in July of last year. To paraphrase, it's we shouldn't speak into existence intermediaries. Just because 90 years of financial regulation in the United States has relied upon highly regulated and deputized intermediaries to fulfill the objectives and policy goals of the government doesn't mean that non-intermediated systems can't exist and be legal. The first guidance on crypto from any government entity in the world was the 2013 guidance from FinCEN.

37:11Greg Xethalis:And it made clear that the absence of an intermediary is not disqualified. If you are a user, you're not a regulated entity. If you're an exchanger, you're a regulated entity. and if you're an administrator you're a regulated entity so to your point of the non-decentralized systems i think one thing this bill does uh which has hasn't been there previously is it tries to say not only what are the rules for for for defy or where where what are the obligations of participants in a defy ecosystem but it also seeks to say you know okay what isn't a defy system Because that is the biggest challenge the industry has is I genuinely believe that a lot of people say none of this is really decentralized.

37:58And, you know, in many cases, they're not wrong.

38:02Greg Xethalis:Like Celsius was out there saying that they're a DeFi protocol. No, they were a centralized lending company. So just calling yourself DeFi doesn't get you out of the scope of some doesn't give you some regulatory advantage. If you actually are decentralized, that's a different story. Now, what we need to hold space for is things like security councils and some sort of sandbox environment where a protocol, when it first launches, has some controls in because those types of circumstances, whether it's a multi-signature that is governed by a decentralized governance entity, a DAO or something along those lines, or a security council that is deputized with certain limited authorities to stop cybersecurity incidents or to patch a newly identified threat, you know, those things are policy goods.

38:56Greg Xethalis:We should not be taking that away just because, you know, it might impact the definition of administration. So that's a very important, I think, good faith step forward. I think some of the concerns on Title III are a lot of the issues are punted to rulemaking, particularly from Treasury. And while, you know, you might have some more confidence in rulemaking that might be done now, you know, no one wants a scenario where rulemaking can be weaponized in the industry in a way that would kill it, because we have seen people who have sought to do that as recently as checks watch 14 months ago.

39:40Alex Thorn:Yeah. And on that point, Greg, just to wrap up clarity, how important is it for crypto that we get something to pass? Because it seems like we're going to get most of what we want in the absence of any new legislation from, you know, administrative guidance or, you know, administrative relief, interpretive guidance from the existing regulators, at least during this administration, is the primary issue here that three years is good, but codifying in statute for 100 years is better, right? It's more to prevent against a rollback in the case of another administration that's hostile to crypto.

40:17Greg Xethalis:Yeah, so the best defense against future hostility from the next Gary Gensler is build products that are good for people, that people want and that people use. It's much harder to kill an industry that has traction among real consumers. And we've seen that in some instances where things are being adopted. And stable coins is a good example of that. Another good example is even something as simple as like Helium, where there are two and a half million daily active users of the Helium network. Most of them probably don't even know they're using it. But this is the way you create a foothold. You show policymakers this is a real good that users want.

41:01Greg Xethalis:So that's the first most important defense. sense whether or not we need clarity I think the SEC has a lot of flexibility to create good rules and those rules aren't necessarily going to be everything the industry wants uh meaning it's not going to be no rules of the road Paul Atkins is an incredibly principled individual and he's driving to create real rules of the road that protect investors protect consumers but allow innovation That's what he's trying to do. It's not no-hills-barred. It's not an industry giveaway. He's putting substantial rules and imposing duties and obligations on market participants.

41:40Greg Xethalis:And most market participants are welcoming that. We want clarity. We want regulatory certainty. And more importantly than anything else, we don't want bad things to happen to good people. Where it's a little tougher is Mike Selig, who took over at CFTC at the end of the year. you know, he's got a little bit less flexibility. He needs the ag half of the bill to get authority over spot markets. And that authority over spot markets is really important for the industry as a whole. We don't want to hodgepodge of 55 different states and territories creating money services regulations that are imposed on, again, trading platforms, custodians, brokers, dealers, you want that to be pulled up to the federal level, not only because you don't have to file with 55 or 54 jurisdictions, because Montana doesn't really regulate money transmitters, only cattle, and good skiing as well, big skies and whatnot.

42:39Greg Xethalis:But you don't want 54 different sets of rules, but you also want a well-resourced regulator that can understand this industry, because it is different than that which came before. And even in New York, which has done probably the best job of any state at DFS, it's tough for them to stay resourced. And when people learn enough about the industry, they're not typically staying that long at DFS. So it's a good for consumers. It's a good for just about everyone to bring that regulation up to the federal level and cite it at CFTC. But Mike can't do that on his own. He needs some legislative authority.

43:20There are other things he can do around the derivatives markets in crypto and other crypto adjacent areas like prediction markets where he can get a lot done there.

43:30Greg Xethalis:But if we really want a good comprehensive set of rules that improve market quality, market structure, consumer and investor protection, legislation that can lead to rulemaking at both agencies, including a lot of joint rulemaking. And one of the priorities for Paul Atkins and Mike Selig is harmonizing some of these rules for crossover areas where people are dual registrants. That's been a big focus. And Mike announced that Project Crypto at CFTC was merging with Project Crypto at ASCC. We're really excited by that. I think that if we don't get legislation, it's a little bit harder for the CFTC to accomplish everything that they want.

44:11Greg Xethalis:For the SEC, I think they have a much more clear path to execute and have a lot of stuff ready to go to get done on that end. All right.

44:22Alex Thorn:This was great, Greg. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about Multicoin. I saw that Kyle Simani, co-founder of Multicoin and, you know, original, probably general partner, I'm assuming, is leaving Multicoin. Give us an update on, I know that I saw that Multicoin put out some updated theses on their investing. Your partner and your general counsel there, what does the future look like at Multicoin? Is it different? Or give us the overview on this, you know, rejuvenated thesis that Multicoin has put out.

44:52Greg Xethalis:Yeah, so Kyle stepped away at the end of the month and has shifted into an advisory role. Kyle's still around. He's still going to be tweeting a lot about Solana and supporting our portfolio founders from a lot of different verticals within our investment portfolio. it's a big change in that Kyle has been the face of the firm. But what people see externally is very different from what folks see internally. And there is a tremendously strong team and bench at Multicoin. You know, over the course of the last couple of years, a lot of our venture work and thesis formation has shifted from, you know, Kyle and Tushar, who's the other co-founder and managing partner.

45:40Greg Xethalis:on the venture side, a lot of that responsibility has shifted already to Spencer Applebaum and Cheyenne Sengupta and the other members of our investment team, including Matt Shapiro and Bashalkan Conley and Eli Kwan. So that's been in the works for a while. And most of our recent deals for the last couple of years have really been led by Spencer and Cheyenne. And then Tushar, not as public-facing as Kyle, still pretty public-facing, but he's been the core managing partner who's sort of managed the liquid side of our portfolio for really since inception, and has also been really key in thesis formation in a variety of areas that touched on sort of market structure, also been one of the leading architects of the deep end ecosystem from his seat at Multicoin.

46:30Greg Xethalis:So it's been a very smooth transition so far, gotten a lot of positive feedback from our LPs, the portfolio community. It's been really nice to see the amount of love that Kyle got on Twitter, which is probably a bit of a new experience for him because he's a little controversial on Twitter. But I think people have a lot of respect for the ideological imprint that Kyle has had on broader thesis formation, particularly around the idea of modular and integrated chains and some of the structural issues. You know, his departure was somewhat paired with Vitalik's L2 discussion, which is something that Kyle had spoken a lot about.

47:11Greg Xethalis:So I think it's, you know, Kyle should feel really proud about his time at Multicoin, his work building up a team that's been here for really, really long. I think average tenure of folks at Multicoin is a little over five, five and a half years and for an industry that hasn't really been around for much longer than five and a half years from uh from a venture perspective um you know kyle and tushar built uh an institutional firm and you know now where it's multi-coin 2.0 and uh we're we released our first new true iteration of our investment theses since 2019. Tushar, Spencer, and Cheyenne worked really hard on that, as well as the rest of the team.

47:57Greg Xethalis:And it highlighted, you know, minor shift of focuses. A lot of those foci really relate to what it's always been at Multicoin. But we touched on about eight themes in that paper. And that paper is, and maybe you can drop a link in the show notes. You can also find it at multicoin.capital. It's a 30-page report, really some interesting stuff. And it really talked about eight core areas. Fintech 4.0 is first. That's stablecoin-enabled financial services. How do we move from traditional banking and payments infrastructure to what fintechs brought? And now the types of programmable rails that stablecoins can do to give more control to their users and more programmability.

48:41Greg Xethalis:We talked about the DeFi mullet. My hair doesn't grow enough to get a good proper DeFi mullet myself, but it's thinking about front ends, middleware and back ends of DeFi and how that will integrate into broader finance. It's also financial globalization, broadening access and deepening liquidity within a global lens. The new forms of credit. And as a lawyer, I always am reticent to say credit with respect to crypto borrow lend because it's not true credit in most instances outside of a handful of areas like Maple. But more efficient borrow lend that can come from protocols like Aave and Camino.

49:21Greg Xethalis:We've also talked a lot about entertainment finance, which are things like predictions and betting markets, which means sometimes a little into the financial nihilism era. We talked about programmable ownership, which is coordinating people's jobs, capital. Credibly neutral blockchains is also an area of tremendous importance, both from the policy side as well as the investing side. We think that credibly neutral blockchains are where most of this activity will be cited. And then also cryptographic primitives, some deep tech, whether it's things like FHE or quantum and things of that nature. And I think if you're looking for a change in or shift in the theses versus what we've talked about in 2019, I think part of it was that we're looking at Web3 in most instances as more longer term narrative.

50:17Greg Xethalis:And there's been some discussion about this. The rails have to get there first and the adoption of the rails have to get there first before we can see some of the Web3 economy taking off in the near term. Now, there are areas where the WET3 economy has been successful, and we've seen some tremendous work in the D-Pen area. I know D-Pen is not the hottest sector right now from a price action perspective, but from an adoption perspective, it's really picking up, whether it's things like helium or geode or a lot of the compute market type of stuff. So we see some activity there for idiosyncratic nature of infrastructure.

51:04Greg Xethalis:But the consumer web three, we think, is trailing a little bit more and view that more as a longer term thesis rather than a short to medium term thesis. But the conviction is still very high in those core theses. And as the venture market has been somewhat distracted by some of the later stage and public equity type of work recently, the builders aren't. And we're still seeing interesting things come online and are very excited by what this current marketplace is going to bring as new founders come to market. All right.

51:43Alex Thorn:And Greg, I'd be remiss if I didn't end this conversation with some discussion about the Vanderbilt mafia. Our audience probably doesn't know both of us went to Vanderbilt. And I want to ask you about, there's a surprising number of people, particularly in financial services policy and legislative, you know, and in Congress that went to Vanderbilt as well. uh would you these this is not private information but it is nonetheless not widely known who who give us a flavor of who else is a vanderbilt alumni that's in this especially in the sort of

52:17Greg Xethalis:crypto financial policy complex yes you've got kind of two generations um and the crypto native ones are in the later generation not surprisingly but this really started in the late 70s. In the late 70s, on campus, undergrad, you had at the same time, John Rose, who's a congressman on financial services and has been pretty friendly on crypto stuff. But you also had French Hill and Bill Haggerty as undergrads and good friends on campus in the late 70s. French Hill, obviously, chair of House Financial Services, the architect of clarity in the house, Bill Haggerty on the Senate banking committee, who was the architect of genius and the principal proponent there alongside Cynthia Lundas and Kirsten Gillibrand and Tim Scott.

53:09Greg Xethalis:And I'm forgetting someone, there was a fourth, may have been also Brooks. And then Bill Haggerty moved over from the undergrad campus, took a few steps over to law school where his classmates uh his roommate was a guy named paul atkins uh his their classmate was a guy named christian carlo uh crypto dad former chair of the cftc um also governor abbott of texas was there at the same time but we've got to get him a little more engaged on on the crypto side uh down in texas where they've had great boon and help from bitcoin miners with ercop but But, you know, you fast forward about 20 years or so or 15 years, and my freshman hall had myself, Bart Smith, who ran crypto for Susquehanna for a number of years and now is president of a digital asset treasury company focused on Avalanche.

54:07Greg Xethalis:Trey Shelton, who's a headhunter in the space at PositionCo. And then a little after that, my fellow Blockchain Association board member Bill Hughes, who runs policy at ConsenSys, was on campus with me at the same time. Around the same time, Colin Lloyd, a partner at Sullivan Cromwell, who's one of the preeminent attorneys representing large crypto institutions. You came along around that same time in your seat at Galaxy. the head of policy at the blockchain association, Lindsay Frazier would have started probably a little after you. So we've got a nice run of really policy focused Vanderbilt Commodores.

54:50Greg Xethalis:And actually as luck has it, when I was down in DC for the yield meeting last week, I got to run into a chancellor Diermeier, who's the outstanding leader of Vanderbilt and got to, thank him for the fine work he's done for the school and especially for his support of the amazing athletics department led not only by Diego Pavia, who is the man, but also the success of the baseball program, who was the number one seed in the SEC tournament and one of the preeminent programs in the country. But then our basketball teams, Alex, you know, the women have lost only, I think two games this year, like they're 21 or 22 and two, and the men are 20 and four.

55:32Greg Xethalis:And it's, it's been a generational run for Vanderbilt athletics over the last year. And for some programs like baseball and tennis and, and women's bowling, who knew?

55:45Alex Thorn:Decades for those teams and, and, and Vanderbilt football, I think peaked in the AP rate rankings in last year in 2025 at number nine. incredible I think 10 and 3 overall when I was there was when Jay Cutler was the quarterback and I think we got our first bowl game in decades by just going 8 and 8 as an SEC team like that was

56:10Greg Xethalis:unheard of at the time because Vanderbilt won I think we won a grand total of six or seven games while I was on campus yeah over four years well because you're playing against Auburn and Ole Miss

56:20Alex Thorn:and Louisiana and Tennessee. I mean, these are huge teams, right? Like Alabama, right?

56:26Greg Xethalis:I'm still convinced Louisiana State used to put their defensive linemen on horse steroids. You know, the defenses you'd face, the offenses you'd face, it's fun as a Commodore fan to actually see in this new NIL era, this era of greater exposure, the team compete in a world where you didn't think they could

56:50Alex Thorn:Well, even I watched basketball. We had a tough loss. I think we were to win last night against Auburn. I think they're ranked 19th at the moment in the NCAA, and you've got the tournament coming up next month. Great squad on the men's basketball team, Tyler Tanner and others, that just look good. They just look good. And I always laugh. People don't know the Vanderbilt basketball, I forget the name of the stadium, but it's got a raised court. It's like the only one in the NCAA. Literally, it's like a stage. Like the, the team sits and the audience, the first row of the audience is at like eye level with the court.

57:25Alex Thorn:So, you know, that was on the baseline Memorial gym.

57:30Greg Xethalis:It's, it's a magical place. It doubled as a concert venue and basketball stadium, which is why it has this odd architecture, but a really historic gym with a lot of personality and Vanderbilt's football stadium, you know, used to be mocked as something that looked like a lower tier Texas. high school football stadium. They weren't necessarily wrong, but they've done a remarkable job of renovating that. And Hawkins Field, where the baseball team plays, has for years been just one of the most fun in a sort of intimate venues with some personality on it. Got a big green monster. It's just a magical time for Vanderbilt and another example of athletics helping to boost a university overall.

58:12Greg Xethalis:And from an academic perspective, Alex, I don't know what your SAT was like, but I'm not sure I'd be able to get in if I were applying today.

58:19Alex Thorn:It's definitely improved a lot. This was great. Well, go doors, anchor down, and Greg X. Athalis, partner at Multicoin, general counsel at Multicoin. Greg, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brains.

58:32Greg Xethalis:Thank you, and happy birthday, Alex.

58:34Alex Thorn:Thanks, Greg. That's it for this week's episode of Galaxy Brains. Thank you to our guest, Greg X. Athalis, partner and general counsel at Multicoin Capital and our friend Bim Netta Bibi from Galaxy Trading. As always, everyone have a safe and happy weekend and we will see you next week.

59:03Alex Thorn:Thank you for listening to Galaxy Brains, the weekly podcast from Galaxy Research. I'm Alex Thorne, head of firmwide research at Galaxy. Follow me on X at IntangibleCoins. Follow Galaxy Research on X at GLXYResearch. Read our written reports at Galaxy.com slash research. And don't forget, if you like Galaxy Brands, to like and subscribe on your favorite podcast platforms like YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more. We'll see you next time.