From NYSE to Crypto: The Next Financial Revolution | Raoul Pal The Journey Man with Tom Farley

25:47And now what you'll see, all of a sudden, boom, Aave, there's a Lend-Redeem market or Morpho or Uniswap. You'll see it get listed because people are leaning on the liquidity that we have. And so the value that we're providing is actually over and above the value we would otherwise receive at bullish, if that makes sense, because the fees may be on other platforms. And that's why we've subscriptionized that and makes for a more predictable revenue stream.

26:12Raoul Pal:Yeah, it feels that, you know, you've come at this with a very different angle because of where you came from. So if you think of most of the existing exchanges, it's all retail based first. Then they built an institutional business. you've gone the opposite way around which is we'll build an institutional business and think of it as a services business as well which i think is a whole different model and is interesting and it it makes it a lot easier for people who are coming into the business to then go somewhere where they can get kind of help getting set up in whatever it is they need to do i guess the next extension of that is going to be listing other types of assets on chain now because we're going to see all the asset management firms, because even in your list, you didn't have asset managers because they're not huge players outside of the ETFs yet.

26:57Right.

26:58Raoul Pal:I mean, they're not really there. Yeah, the hedge funds are there, but they're being serviced by Galaxy and others. Okay, great. But the whole institutional business, they're going to come on chain and they're going to look for the same liquidity as a service idea from real world assets. And two things on that before we get to the meat of it, the most interesting part. Yeah, the asset managers also are a little bit present with ETFs. And as ETFs move into in-kind where you just take the Bitcoin and you hand that in for a share, the asset managers are getting more involved. But I totally agree with you.

27:32They don't really exist in a meaningful way. The other thing I will say is you're absolutely right about how it came to be. and it wasn't always comfortable because first of all the the original crypt you know libertarian ethos of crypto looks at someone like me who's been in regulated land my whole career talking about running a compliant exchange and they're like gtfo like do we really do we really need this guy i get it you know i get it um number one number two the retail exchanges were the ones going to the moon, right? 2020, 2021, 2022. So it was painful. And there were some tough conversations at the board, like, have we just planted the flag wrong?

28:20It does feel like it's swung back in the sense that, first of all, the retail competition in crypto is crazy. Like, as if it wasn't enough, now it's, you know, Schwab is coming in and E-Trade is coming in and Revolut is really good at competing. And even this Futu company, This company has a frigging$20 billion market cap, I think. And nobody's heard of them yet. They run Moo Moo here in the US. Weeble, so on and so forth. So I do think retail is going to be a tough spot. And I do think institutions are going to continue to come in in big ways, especially if, and now we get to the point of your question, especially if we see more and more asset classes move online.

29:03And so let's talk about this tokenization thing. So is the blockchain technology going to be helpful and additive for the market writ large for some of these asset classes? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. And it certainly is yes in specific cases. But I think the ability to have 24 by 7 trading, I think the ability to more easily lend borrow these assets, I think the ability to give issuers more transparency about their holders and the patterns of buying and selling of their holders, and I think the ability to rewrite certain corners of market infrastructure to cut costs, when you package all those together, I think they're worthwhile.

29:54And so I tend not to think this is a hype cycle, but I'm also monitoring it closely because there have been some hype cycles. Like, let's be clear. I mean, it was way back in the year 2025 when people were hyping up creator coins. So, you know, we're circumspect about it. But my sense is it's a big deal. and in that world you have a perfectly established financial infrastructure for trading equities or bonds or mortgages or whatever with liquidity and now you move that shit onto blockchain technology whatever blockchain wins uh we work a lot with solana but clearly ethereum cardano uh ripple i i don't know i really i think i think there's room for several winners um and uh permission chains, midnight, so on and so forth.

30:52So now this stuff moves there. You're going to have a gap in liquidity because it's just not going to move right away. I've seen this before. I've seen it a million times and nobody likes to trade on illiquid platforms. And so we believe there's a role for us to play much like today. We're providing liquidity between Fidelity stable coin and USDC, tomorrow we can provide liquidity between NVIDIA's certificated share and their tokenized share and a million other examples. So yeah, that's definitely something we're keeping an eye on. And do you not find that you're sort of a technology plus balance sheet business in

31:34Raoul Pal:the end? Because if you're providing liquidity, you're more of a balance sheet business than, let's say, Coinbase would be. So this is, again, a different model. Yes. Yes. However, we've got several billion of net cash and all in, in terms of liquidity deployment, don't hold me to this number. Maybe we're deploying 150 million, 200 million, something like that. We disclose it in our financials. It's really, again, Raul, we're not trying to be the market. We're just, hey, when the markets get crazy and market makers pull out, hey, we're there with small order size to maintain a reasonable price.

32:13And we don't do any of the liquidity provision in options. We don't do any of it. Well, don't hold me to it. We may do a little bit in perpetual futures, but I don't think so. We don't do any in dated futures. And so it's not a huge part of what we do. And I think investors kind of like it that way. If we were punting around big, big values, they wouldn't they, you know, they wouldn't love that.

32:36Raoul Pal:So a quick break in your regular programming. If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called Prepare for 2030. I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible. And this guide will help you navigate what's coming. The link is in the description. Download it now. And, you know, when I look at the kind of institutional landscape, it's still very nascent because there's one dominant player, Coinbase, who built a great institutional business under Brett. Then we've got Kraken who are trying to build stuff. And there's you guys. I mean, that's it. I mean, Robinhood are making some headway into this as well.

33:15Raoul Pal:But it's still very early stage, considering if we look at the asset pool that is off-chain, that's likely to come on-chain, just because it's more efficient, it's faster, it's a better way of doing it. Well, we have to move that on-chain. And we really only have three service providers to do that. Now, yes, there'll be new entrants and other people try and build consortia and all of that stuff that we've seen in the past. But it feels like the opportunity set is still very big. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. I agree with all of it, including that there will be more competition. And I never shy away from that from investors because I've just been in markets long enough and I know how big this opportunity is.

33:53And when there's a big opportunity, others will come in. Now, I think in point of fact, if you look at the largest exchanges of the world, in the world, Hong Kong Exchange, LSE, SIBO, NASDAQ, NYC, ICE, Deutsche Börse, by and large, that group, I don't know how many I rattled off seven, did very, very little in crypto. Very little. Georgia Berza has done a few acquisitions. CME launched the Bitcoin futures. Intercontinental Exchange built back. But if you go back for 10 years after our original Coinbase investment, those firms didn't do anything. And they're not dumb. There was just a lot of fear.

34:37Like, you didn't want to catch a lawsuit from Gary Gensler. you didn't want to get on the wrong side of Elizabeth Warren. And so those of us who were going after institutions got a little more of a headstart than we might have otherwise. But I have no doubt those firms are going to look to continue to build out businesses in that regard. And perhaps a couple others of these other exchanges out there that aren't quite legitimate or legitimized, we'll figure out how to tread a path there. So the competition will increase because I think this has a potential of being a 25, 30-year trend here to reshape all financial markets.

35:12So we're definitely not betting on being the only ones.

35:14Raoul Pal:Because I was around when Goldman, when I was still working at Goldman, when Goldman bought Hull Trading, everybody started buying electronic market making firms, electronic option, and everything changed. And your career has seen that entire thing. And this is just an extension of that. Technology is always the path. And there may be some reticence, But in the end, because it's faster, cheaper, more effective, shareholders at that end push it as well. So it always goes this way. And also, the technology, by and large, is fixed cost, by and large. In other words, you put two of these together, fixed cost of$100 million here and fixed cost of$100 million here, and you put it together, and maybe the fixed cost of the combined business is$120.

36:01So the industrial logic, I think, will be strong just like it was when Goldman bought Hull. And then the New York Stock Exchange bought ARCA and ICE bought IPE and CME bought NYMEX. And I think you're going to see some consolidation. We want to be a consolidator. But I do think that day is coming.

36:21Raoul Pal:So what gets you excited? What part of the business are you focused on? Apart from just building the businesses, getting more customers, getting more things. but where's your real focus here? So thank you for asking that. I, I, I didn't do, you know, between the, between the time I spoke to you, Raul on a, on a podcast years ago, and now I've honestly done maybe three. Um, and this is after living in somewhat of a spotlight with that New York stock exchange role and doing a lot of, you know, kind of out there talks or what have you. Because there were things going on I just wasn't excited about in crypto.

37:06And I don't want to be specific because I don't want to be a jerk. And I'm not even against it. I tend towards libertarian ideas. And if people want to do certain things and trade certain things, have at it. It just doesn't get me fired up to get out of bed. What does get me fired up, because I'm a frigging nerd and maybe because I've spent my whole career in it is this whole free enterprise system, can we do it more efficiently? Because a rising tide lifts all boats. Like there is no more powerful force in the history of the world than free enterprise. And it's lifted in our lifetimes. And we're both super young guys.

37:45In our lifetimes.

37:46Raoul Pal:Extremely young and good looking. We'll give ourselves that as well. Yeah, the whole deal. global poverty has declined something like 70%. It's all part of free enterprise. And to me, you're not going to get that by some of the practices that were in crypto. You're not going to get that by charging just massive fees for trading puppy coins. You're not going to get that by offering 100X margin and ADL. Again, I'm not against it. I'm not against it. It's just not what gets me excited. Never has been. And so I didn't want to go out publicly because everything would come off negative. What does fire me up is exactly the stuff we're talking about.

38:34Can we create, can we improve, can we create a new model for global financial markets? U.S. equities, global equities, global fixed income, mortgages. run it on the blockchain and reduce the cost, increase the access, bring more liquidity and capital formation into business building, which will only be a great thing in the free enterprise system. And it feels like we're on the cusp. And I think we had to go through this period. And by the way, I don't think frog coins were a bad thing. I think they brought people to the yard. I think they brought attention. They brought investment dollars. And then they allowed blockchains to break.

39:14They allowed the world to find their vulnerabilities.

39:19Raoul Pal:I think mean coins are really important because A, we hyper test everything at speed and break everything and understand what business models work. We're really good at that because we have the speculation layer that actually allows us to do this really fast. I think what we got out of it, most importantly, was instant capital formation. That's the future of VC. That's the future of how agents will raise capital in a agentic world that's what mean coins were so yeah it might not matter now but there's the signal in the noise i think i i agree i didn't always love it in the middle of it um and and and and i agree with you but my colleagues have said over the last year like hey tom you you seem more fired up than ever and it was so true i remember one seminal moment uh We have a Wednesday morning management call.

40:11It's how we manage the company. And we have a crew of us. We get on and we talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly. Mostly the bad and the ugly. We don't take a lot of time to celebrate. Maybe we should do more. But somebody after the call called me and said, hey, you seem really fired up. Like, are you really excited about things? And I was like, oh, my God. He's right. I am really fired up. I do think that this is, to me, the most interesting time in digital assets.

40:37Raoul Pal:But when I, I mean, I was like first going to Bitcoin in 2013. And I think I wrote a paper like in 2015 before I even knew about smart contracts. And I said, the obvious thing is the entire financial industry is going to go into blockchain rails because of a number of things. Obviously, it's cheaper and everything else. The other is the trust layer of when somebody goes bust on blockchain, it's immutable. You kind of know who owns what asset. And we have so much issue with collateral where the collateral is this big and the amount of rehypothecation and lending is that big that when somebody goes bust like Lehman Brothers, you suddenly realize that nobody's got any of the collateral that they thought they had.

41:19Raoul Pal:And so I looked at this for a long period and I thought, well, blockchain sells 90 % of this. And the big one for me that it's still surprising nobody's gone after fully is when you think of a smart contract, where is the greatest example of smart contract use? It's OTC derivatives. It's a multi-quadrillion dollar marketplace of which when I was at Goldman and other firms, there would be boxes of ISDA docs of which nobody knew the fuck what was in them because the industry was going too fast. Everyone had different conditions and, you know, an amendment A and yeah. And then nobody knows what happens if something goes wrong.

41:56Raoul Pal:They literally can't because nobody knows what's in what ISDA docs. And that came out of Lehman too. And yes, some of that's gone on exchange now, but it's so obviously a smart contract where it just instantly settles. I just don't know why that hasn't happened yet. Yeah, I bet it will. The logic's too persuasive. Yeah, I mean, options are so obvious for this. I mean, you know this. The big players here are the big banks, and they're just scared to death. I mean, Raul, it was ugly. like they what if they had a meeting with a crypto company they had to provide it to the they had to do a write-up provide it to the regulator they had to go in front of the pcaob to justify why they were doing business oh no this is the audit firms if the audit firms took on a crypto company but the but the banks would have to go in front of the regulator with every with everything crypto related they would get threats and calls and i i think that's your answer but they're coming in and though you know that example you gave is a perfect one and how do you but you can just enshrine all that logic in the smart contract which is your point that's right um so how do you focus your time then because you can see the opportunity set but it's a slow laborious process to get financial institutions to move um how do you do that do you think about build it they will come or do you spend more time with them well like a relationship yeah i mean just to lay in the the inside of bullish so we have a handful of priorities and so when i roll in in the morning i'm just kind of looking at we have we have a list of one two three four five six seven eight goals um for for the business for for this year We're really building out our options platform.

43:46As I said, that's going well. The decision we've made is to put all of our trading globally. So if you're anywhere in the world, even if you're trading under a Hong Kong regulatory license, or maybe it could be a German regulatory license, you're interacting in the same central limit order book, and you can trade any product that we offer, spot, perps, options, and we can provide portfolio margining. So making sure we continue the momentum in options, a big one, make sure we continue the momentum in this liquidity services, make sure we're ready for this tokenization wave. On the CoinDesk side, it's making sure this Consensus Miami conference is a home run.

44:25And it is going to be a home run. The timing is perfect because everybody's kind of woken up to the institutional opportunity. And that's a really strong pillar of what ConsenSys does. So there's going to be tons of great conversation about stable coins, this Clarity Act bill and tokenization in Miami, May 7th and 8th, I think, or maybe 5th, 6th, 7th. The news business, we're on a roll. So we now have 55 % market share as of last month of all what we track as kind of crypto news sites. That's up dramatically, I want to say, from like 30 % a year ago. So that's going well. We have a data business.

45:07We've just licensed our indices to Morgan Stanley. You may have seen Morgan Stanley is doing a sweep of ETFs. They're all going to be based on the CoinDesk data indices. um and then the the other goals are kind of internal goals i'd rather not share too much about um but obviously making sure that we're husbanding our cash wisely and our balance sheet wisely and then any anything else oh and that last the i missed the eighth one which is just expanding our regulatory access all around the world that is a forever game a forever game truly because new jurisdiction you know the uk is going to come out with a regulatory approval and you We need the MIFID uplift in Europe if we want to have options in Europe.

45:48And hey, do we want to operate a clearinghouse for options, in which case you have to be? So that's another kind of just day-to-day grinding initiative.

45:58Raoul Pal:How about bringing the traditional market makers into this new world? Because they come with a lot of capital and huge amounts of experience and risk management skills. just you know that getting people of the scale of virtue and citadel and all of those guys to be more active participants in this overall new market it'll make a massive difference i mean they're there but not in the same size and some of the capital constraints and the margining issues and stuff like that yeah it's it's happening you know citadel for example and virtue has been a customer of ours for many years um but the they were similar to the banks like if you're ken griffin and you're running citadel and you're and you're killing it i mean the citadel's terrific on both sides of their business the citadel securities um which is kind of the i'll call it the broker but there are a lot more than that and then the hedge fund if you're ken griffin and the regulators are telling you hey don't get involved in crypto why are you going to fight town hall when you have a business making all this money over you're just not you're just not it's not it's not like he's going to take on some religious cause when when they have that business over there or if you're virtue hey you're only going to do it out of your singapore entity let's say just to have this thing outside the united states the first thing we needed was a new regime in washington we got that the second thing we need is a market structure bill i don't know if we're going to get that candidly what yeah what is your what are your odds everyone's odds are shifting around all the time it's so hard because it's so close yeah it's so binary it it It doesn't feel close to me, but I'm paranoid.

47:31Only the paranoid survive. I think the stablecoin issue is a real issue. And I'm empathetic to this view of like, wait, why are we? The stablecoins are fully reserved and they're federally regulated. Why can't I pay yield? They're fully reserved. So we'll see. Feels like a fairly important issue. And I'm not sure it just goes away, but it may. There may be a reasonable compromise. We can live in either world, but just on behalf of our stablecoin customers, I'm kind of empathetic with that view, number one. Number two, honestly, Raul, maybe you're a better place than I am on this. I'm not sure how the DeFi conversation ends up.

48:22That has yet to be resolved. So in other words, we're going to put in place this whole rubric about regulating exchanges and brokers in crypto and what's a crypto commodity and what's a crypto security. We're going to have this whole law and we're going to say you can do this and you need a papal blessing for that and you need a different type of blessing for this other thing. Unless you call yourself DeFi. Yeah, and then you can do what you want. In which case you don't have any of that. Obviously, that's not sustainable. So then you have to get into, okay, what is DeFi? Maybe we can all agree that Uniswap's main protocol is indeed decentralized.

48:58What about all the other applications? What about the ones where the guy who wrote it just can publish new code? What about the one where the guy who wrote it owns 80 %? What about the one where the guy who wrote it is the biggest trader on it and has access to the code? Are those DeFi? What is DeFi? And I don't yet know what the zone of agreement is on that. or if the answer will be, let's just punt it and let's punt it to the regulators and they can figure it out for a year and a year and a half.

49:26Raoul Pal:And the issue is, is there's too many smart people moving too fast for the regulators to actually deal with anyway. It's like trying to regulate AI. It's literally impossible because it's moving too fast. However, if you think of the density of intellectual capital, because this is around capital markets, it attracts a lot of people. The moment you regulate this way, somebody finds a new answer that way. I mean, it's almost impossible to deal with. That was the point, I guess, of crypto in the first place. Well, yeah. And with DeFi, you can simply say, hey, look, you can do whatever you want outside the US.

50:02But you can't have access to the US, right? That's one answer. So then that raises a question. But we know people just easily download a VPN and they evade it going on a VPN. But maybe we're OK with that. And in fact, I think we probably are. So it's not incumbent upon the DeFi protocol to make sure that people aren't lying and using a VPN login. I think that's all fine. But if you say, hey, you can do whatever you want outside the U.S., but if you want to come in the U.S., then you have to do full KYC AML. then it begs the question, okay, cool. But the person who I've KYC to AML in the U S can they interact with the non KYC AML X us person?

50:45I think if the answer to that is cool, um, I still, I'm not a hundred percent sure what the path is for DeFi in the future, because I think the way DeFi gets super duper exciting to me is institutions feel comfortable using DeFi. and I'm not sure it gets there with that pattern. So I'm hoping that there is a definition that comes out, hey, this counts as DeFi. It's perfectly okay to use that within the United States. And then over time, I think innovation could go up like that. I don't know. Is that a bit of gobbledygook to you or did you follow what I was saying?

51:20Raoul Pal:No, your answer is right. We don't know. My general view is if there's money and it can be solved by technology, people find a solution. and whether that's using some sort of passport, ID that allows you to operate within spaces, stuff like that. I think we have to go towards that anyway. We need some sort of ID system anyway because of AI and we're going to need it for some of these kind of things because some countries want to regulate more than others and capital is freer in other countries than others and it's just the way of the world. And you don't want to go and fight every single nation's state for their regulatory terms.

52:00Raoul Pal:So, you know, I think it's like all of the above. I think that's the sort of lazy answer, but usually works. Yeah. No, I'm at my wit's end. I actually put a tweet out. I've done two tweets just looking for answers out there in the sort of exosphere. I don't know where – that's where I started. I just don't – in terms of the bill, the two big issues, I think the conflicts issues around Trump and the Trump family, those are solvable. Those will be solved. The Dems want a bill, Raul. The Dems want a bill. They don't want to run against crypto in the midterms. So they're looking for a bill. So if the industry can come to an agreement on stable coins, the two industries, and if there's a reasonable solution on DeFi, then we have a bill.

52:43Raoul Pal:So what else are you most excited about next 18 months? What thing now is like, OK, I can feel this. I could taste it. I'm getting excited. You know, I think we've I think we've hit on it. I just be repeating myself. I, I, let me give you another one then. I think the, the time of crypto has just gone to infinity because before there's like X billion people, there's X amount of capital. I just think this agentic thing is bigger than people understand. I think it's the destruction and rebuilding of the entire asset management industry from scratch. Well, I, so I, yes, I would add to that. I agree.

53:26I would add to that. And it's happening at the same time as tokenization of major global asset classes. So you put those two together. And I've said this publicly and privately that up to now, crypto's really been a hobby. It's small. It's tiny. What's the aggregate market cap of crypto right now? I haven't looked in a while.

53:47Raoul Pal:2.7 billion or something. A trillion. Yeah. So it's smaller than a couple of listed companies. It's a hobby. And you're absolutely right. I think those two trends potentially equal in sizing could take this little teeny box of crypto and say, no, the TAM is all of financial markets globally. We do have a debate though. I'm curious to see what your reaction is to this, Raul. We have a debate internally. There's a reasonable view by smart people that stable coins actually will not be the primary way of paying and receiving in agentic finance, and that agentic finance will actually rely on the existing fiat rails or new fiat rails, as opposed to whipping around stablecoins.

54:34Do you have a view on that?

54:35Raoul Pal:Yeah, I do, actually. Generally speaking, you can't reduce the denominator of a dollar down to less than a cent. A lot of these payments are micro payments. Right. So that's one. The other one is the speed required for some of these things is it rules out some of the ecosystems and not others. I think an agent is wildly indifferent, whether it's an underlying protocol token or a dollar token, as long as it's faster, efficient, cheaper. But I do get to the stage where, like, if somebody needs to do something in Solana world, SWE world, Ethereum world, an agent is going to end up managing his own treasury.

55:20Raoul Pal:That's an interesting world that nobody's thinking about. But they will rebalance and optimize based on profit maximization, if that's what they're there to do. That becomes really interesting. I also get to, you know, I'm a very visual person. I think about, like, a firm like Millennium, right? Gigantic hedge fund firm. What does Millennium actually do? Well, it has a bunch of traders in-house pods that in the old world would have been separate hedge funds, but it's not so easy to raise capital now. So they become pods within Millennium. So that's a group of managers who allocate capital. All of that can basically be done on-chain by agents.

56:01Raoul Pal:You've got your relative value bond agent, your equity the arbitrage agent, your longshore agent, all of that, that's all coming. So that gets rid of 90 % of the costs of millennium allocating capital. But then you look at the millennium mothership. What does it do? Well, it does asset allocation, risk management, regulatory, compliance, and capital raising. All of that can also disappear via AI. And then you're like, okay, then you can apply it to every asset management business. and you realize, okay, the entire industry is about to go through massive change. Not today, not this week. You know, DeFi, where does it fit in?

56:42Raoul Pal:Obviously, that's how it'll work. And so you get to a world seven, eight years where we're going to be building agentic, gigantic finance operations of which you and I won't even see. Well, you'll see them because it will be running through the liquidity layer and other stuff. But nobody's even going to see this. It's like an invisible economy. because you've the front page of the financial times is not some hedge fund guy got paid you know 500 million dollars this year because it's an agent not surprisingly you're way ahead of me in seeing this vision uh i'm looking at it well i'm wondering as you're saying that will the winners be the millenniums of the world who can disrupt themselves or will the winner be some new millennium you know some some new millennium competitor that a current you know 16 year old is going to start when they it's i think it's both again same answer it's both but you know i i was just just before year i was chatting to yoni asso's a friend you know from etoro yeah yoni's basically on the side has rebuilt all of etoro himself with agents separate from the rest of his 400 person tech team.

58:04And you're like, okay, wow.

58:07Raoul Pal:He's doing this. He hasn't yet got the balls to kind of launch it and kind of nuke himself, but he can. So I think it's going to come from every angle because there's a lot of smart kids with AI and agents who can build businesses really fast that can get traction. And there's a bunch of businesses who see it and will replace themselves. and there's a bunch that won't. It's much easier. So I haven't gone into the New York Board of Trade or I haven't gone into the New York Stock Exchange or having acquired the IDC, the Bond Data Company. It's hard to take businesses with old technology and migrate them to new technology.

58:46What's far easier is doing it from scratch. I actually think the skills to build from scratch are going to be plentiful. And the more difficult skill will be, hey, I have millennium. I need the right team because I don't think you're going to be able to do this with AI to say, what are all these processes and procedures and decisions and functions that we're making? How do we build them in AI? And then how do we make the leap? Because humans are involved. Feelings, emotions. This person is an employee and they're not going to be interested in helping you do that. Why? Because they have health issues at home and their healthcare is paying for a surgery.

59:32I mean, real world issues get in the way. How do you take these businesses and make the leap? And that skill is not so common.

59:43Raoul Pal:Not when we have seen the... Crypto was the fastest rate of adoption of a new technology ever. And it's dwarfed by AI now. Yeah. It's dwarfed. It's Metcalfe's Law Squared. It's Reed's Law. It's the fastest thing we've ever seen. And now agents are building agents and, you know, it just keeps going. So I don't know how easy it is to disrupt yourself unless you're really brave. But I just think, you know, I just go back to our conversation. I just feel like all of that is such a gigantic opportunity because it all has to run on crypto rails. There's no way around it. And whether it's stable coins or underlying tokens, nobody cares as long as you build the infrastructure for this.

1:00:24Raoul Pal:and plan for the future and not the past. I think too many people are focused on building out the past and replicating what you already built, New York Stock Exchange, or what ICE have built 10 years ago. But that is not the answer. The answer is, where do they need to be in 10 years' time? You need to plant that flag. It's not easy, but it has to be done. Because if not, we're going to end up bringing the financial system into new rails, which have been already superseded by technology. Yeah, it's not easy. We're all reading about all these examples of companies doing it well. What you're not reading about is the 10 % of the developers who still are saying, oh, I'm using it, but I'm using it in a token way.

1:01:11In other words, they don't really get it. And you have to find who those people are. and you need to say, this isn't the place for you. Or, you know, every single function in our company, you have some Luddites that just, I don't believe it, you really need the human aspect. Let alone, we need a whole new frigging mindset and we need to be building for 10 years from now. So that's the challenge. Yeah, well, it's the fun part of it.

1:01:39Raoul Pal:The fun part is building the future. Tom, fantastic to see you. and hopefully I'll see you somewhere in the Cayman Islands at some point soon as well. Good to see you again. I really appreciate you having me on. I appreciate everything you do for the industry and it's an honor to have you on and I'll buy you, I don't know, some sort of tropical rum drink or something when I see you in Cayman. Perfect. And I'll see you at Consensus as well. Excellent. Good to see you. Good to see you. So great conversation with Tom and you can see where this is all going. We can see that the institutions are coming.

1:02:15Raoul Pal:And people like Bullish and many others in the market are putting together the foundations for them to be able to be active within the markets in the same kind of way that they were on the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange or some of these mega exchanges. I've always talked about this, this convergence of traditional finance and crypto. It's all coming together in one place and everything is being rebuilt. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it. See you next time. Today's episode is brought to you by Abra. Abra aims to provide individuals and institutions with a secure way to control, manage and grow digital asset wealth from a separately managed account.

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