Raoul Pal: The Golden Age of Crypto Has Begun ft. Keith Grossman

28:41And so it's like a lot of the articles that come out that are negative about crypto, in my mind, what I call jab articles, not full swing articles. A full swing article requires more editorial involvement from the top and more editors, whereas a lot of the jab articles are just pieces that somebody would write based on a whim or their feeling to publish a given day. Is it the Peter Schiff approach that if I'm just negative, I get more attention? So it gives them a space to get attention in a growing space? You know, I find it really interesting. With the exception of the New York mayoral sort of situation, my view on public postings are always to be positive, right?

29:31Because it's really easy to garner attention on negativity. I have no, like, I have, I have like very little time or patience for like people who only write negative articles. You know, what I don't get about Peter Schiff is, you know, he seems like a very smart guy and I've never met him before, but like the world is not black and white. Like there's room for gold ownership and Bitcoin ownership. And so like, and by the way, there's room for tokenized gold ownership, Bitcoin ownership, physical gold ownership. If you want to make a difference, like it's not as if you have to put all of your assets in one class.

30:11And by the way, you shouldn't be putting all of your sort of like assets in one bucket. But like, I think that I think that people sometimes dig their heels in and it's hard to undo people's perspectives. Like when I I'll never forget when I took time into Web3, right? A lot of people called me up and were like, what the heck is wrong with you, right? When the article came out, you know, in Yahoo back in, I think it was like March of 2021. And when the article came out that we made as much money as we made, you know, a lot of people changed their mind. And we're like, Oh, my God, this is a real business that you can actually launch.

30:51At the same time, it wasn't until we did artists for peace, and we started to use crypto to start to show that it can be used for good efforts, that people started to really change their tone. And one of the things that I feel has always changed people's perspective is when you could show that the crypto community is actually providing good to the world and is not just a financial tool or an efficiency play. And that's hard because it really is an efficiency play and a financial tool. And so I try to apply it wherever I can, which includes like my initiatives with New York Cares. And you're going to see a big one come out, you know, in a few weeks for Stan with Students, where I, you know, with everything that's going on in New York, I went to a bunch of these New York based companies.

31:44And I said to them, I said, look, like I sit on the board of New York Cares, the largest volunteer network, you know, in the city. I oversee and chair Stan with Students, which I've done for the past five years, which helps the Title I schools, right? And what I'd really love to do is I'd love to show that the crypto community cares about people other than themselves and the community in crypto technologies. So I'd love for you to participate in this, right? And, you know, like the overwhelming response has been incredible. You know, everyone from the Solana Foundation to Ripple to Dapper Labs to Exodus to, you know, Broadlight to Falcon X, and I can continue to name on and on and on, have stepped up and said, we want to participate and have donated.

32:34And Cake Wallet was another great one where it's like people you wouldn't even expect, but are building a business in New York or saying, we want to stand up to help this New York environment when there's a little chaos. And we know that New York is trying to do good for the crypto ecosystem too. I think that helps people wrap their head around crypto and starts to nullify this. I don't know. The FT will say crypto bros try and bribe the city by... It's just a very frustrating thing. And again, as you say, once social consensus is fully behind something, the opportunity has actually been captured already.

33:12Yeah, look, I will say this is, it's really hard for me to feel like I'm comfortable being called a bro. Like there was an article in Decrypt the other day referring to crypto on-ramps as sexy. And I was like, this is fantastic. Like I'm sexy now. Like I'm very rarely sexy. I'm very rarely a bro. I just want to build, right? Like I like this, right? At the end of the day, the world is just getting faster, more efficient, cheaper. Like we're seeing that AI is accelerating things, ML is accelerating things. And guess what? the only technology that can keep up with those accelerations are blockchain technologies, right?

33:46And so it's all the same sort of trend line that's taking place. And I'm just having fun building with it. And I think you are too. So I've been writing down questions as we go, because there's just bits I wanted to talk to you about. One of the issues that's not solved in the whole stack that you're doing that I uniquely see where I am in the Cayman Islands is our banks hate anything to do with crypto. And it's not because I have a political opinion. it's because of FATCA. It's all of the US KYC rules means that they're terrified of accepting money that they can't KYC properly. Meanwhile, in Switzerland, I have a relationship with Signum Bank, and Signum is fantastic, but they do on-chain KYC.

34:28So they can check. It's just a new way of doing it. We need KYC, the on-chain KYC, to get acceptance into the banking system for international. The US, they can do whatever they want, but international payments, because of US rulings, it's actually really hard. Yeah. What I would say is about two and a half years ago, we made a real bet as MoonPay on what's the future of this ecosystem. And we had a very, very serious, like most new evolutions start from purely libertarian principles, right? Like this will replace that. And most mass adoption occurs through convenience and through it's more messy, right?

35:17One of the bets that we made and I think was really important to our maturation as a company was we bet that for crypto to truly evolve, it would have to evolve in sync with the global financial ecosystem. And what that means ultimately is that licenses and the money transmitter licenses being MECA compliant, being FinProm compliant, making sure your KYC and AML is as pure as possible and as clean as possible was unbelievably important. Right. And that's what like set us into our journey to make sure that we you know, we have what's the equivalent of the golden stack in the United States with, you know, all 47 MTLs.

36:01You don't need all 50 because there's three states that like allow for or, you know, it's work. But like getting the New York license and money transmitted license a few weeks ago, you know, all really important being Mika compliant. You know, we were the first company to be Mika compliant. We were FinProm compliant in the UK. Okay. That is going to be where the rubber hits the road, is what you said, which is how money enters into the ecosystem and how money exits the ecosystem. Because particularly the EU, the UK, and the offshore jurisdictions are terrified of the US regulations. And so they just reject everything.

36:42That's half the reason the UK banks won't take crypto is this. Yeah. And I think it's a maturation globally of making sure everyone comes online. The one thing that I feel good about is whether you agree with US policy or European policy or UK policy, the one thing I'm thankful for is at least policies being established so we understand what the rules of the road are. I will say that the way that the US tends to operate from a regulatory perspective and the way that Europe tends to operate is completely different, right? The U.S. tends to say, we're going to allow you to experiment and innovate in chaos until we tell you what the rules are.

37:28And Europe tends to say, we're going to give you this box and you have to innovate within this box, right? And then maybe we'll change the rules to accommodate where the innovation goes after the fact, right? And so there's this point where both have to meet in the middle somewhere, and that just sort of takes time. And we saw that also with like the Internet. We saw that, you know, Europe was far ahead of the U.S. when it came to GDPR. Right. And like the U.S. will catch up with that. Right. Because we started to see it with CCPA and some other regulations around privacy over time in traditional media.

38:08if you go back if you step back and see what is happening it is we always said and i've said for the last two cycles three cycles that we can front run the institutions and here the institutions are right so we've been able to get to the front run and they're still coming in slowly so it's still that opportunity for every man is there to front run the wall of money from wall street But there's a school of thought, particularly around the early libertarian Genesis people. They're like, oh, my God, Wall Street's co-opting our technology, and they're taking it and turning it into equity and all of this kind of stuff.

38:43My view on this is, yes, but it's a Trojan horse, because we're actually accelerating this parallel financial system. How do you think about it? Because I can see people getting salty about it now. Yeah. So I feel like I have an unpopular opinion on mass adoption, which is what people philosophically believe and what people physically do, or what people actually do, tend to be two totally different things. The best example I could give you is if I asked you philosophically, do you believe in data privacy? You would say to me, Yes. Awesome. And then if I said to you, no cheating on your phone, do you have?

39:34And I'd say I have no idea. Would I look WhatsApp or Instagram and you would say? Yes. Right. And then if I would say, great. Do you trust Meta with your data? You would say? No. OK. And so I would be like, great. So you philosophically believe in data privacy. You actually use three programs that are like well known to exploit your data at every level, not even like remotely, like the worst offenders of exploiting your data will probably be banned for that one. Right. Like and then but then you don't trust the company that you're actually trusting to do everything on. Right. And I would say the reason is, is people default towards convenience.

40:20Right. Ultimately. And that's what happens in every type of evolution. Now, the one thing that's really interesting about this one for the financial ecosystem is this one's going to actually be incredibly disruptive to the financial ecosystem. like the tokenization aspect of it. I think that tokenization is going to actually be as disruptive to the financial ecosystem as digitization was to the media ecosystem, right? What do you mean? And what I mean by that is, is there's this great quote by Jeff Zucker about how he was, when he was at CNN, he never wanted to accept digital dimes for analog dollars, I think it was, right?

41:05And because the CPMs were incredibly cheaper and like the way in which the financial ecosystem has evolved over time has been by being an intermediary and a gatekeeper on the movement of money globally or around the world or even locally at times. And for the first time ever, what you have is a technology that removes that intermediary aspect. You could move money at a fraction of the penny, right? And what people are not seeing with this evolution is the internet is absorbing an embedded finance layer, right? And stable coins are ultimately providing that money movement. And if you want to see how disruptive this can ultimately be, just think about the telcos, for instance.

41:47When I grew up, there were these ads on TV for AT &T, and I'll never forget them. It was like, call Japan for$2.14 a minute. You know exactly what I'm talking about, right? Right. Right. Like call, but call France for a dollar 19. Call the UK for, you know, two dollars. Right. Those ads don't exist anymore. Right. But those ads really disappeared in 2007 when voiceover IP emerged. Right. And when the Internet absorbed telephony and now today. Right. Like think about this. You're in Texas. I'm in New York. I'm I'm literally doing a video chat with you. You know, sometimes you're in Cayman Islands and we're doing the video chat, but like we're just doing the video chat.

42:34It's costing us a fraction of a penny to do this. Right. I'll then use my phone and FaceTime someone anywhere in the world. It doesn't make a difference. I don't even think about the cost. And it's because all of that's happening over the Internet. Right. And I think that people have to understand that money movement has been a very clunky business. Right. For me, it was so interesting. I had to learn this industry over the past two and a half years. Right. And what I've seen is a lot of the industry, which is fascinating, is held together by duct tape. And you would think that it was way more efficient and fluid, but it's not.

43:10The systems are really antiquated. And now for you to be able to move money without intermediaries is incredible. And if I was to give one example of a non-blockchain technology, and this is an example that Mike Milken always gives, and I absolutely love it. But if you looked at the digital movement of money in Kenya, when they rolled out M-Pesa, which had nothing to do with the blockchain at the time, everyone in Kenya thought that they were getting 20 % raises. And that's unbelievable because what was really happening was people weren't getting 20 % raises. All the intermediaries were getting cut out of the equation, so people were receiving 20 % more.

43:50Now, why does this matter? Well, look at Venezuela, for instance, right? Last year, I think Venezuela's, you know, 5 % of their GDP was remittances. This was like something like$500 billion, right? Imagine if you think about what's really happening, because 80 % of global remittances in this world start in the US and push out, right? If you think about all the fees that go on all of those monies, that 7 % to 13 % is going. So for every$100, we're going to say$93 to$87 makes it to the person on the other end. And the inconvenience factor, that other person has to go to a physical store. They have to prove them who they are.

44:31They have to do this. They have to do that. Now you could move money and 100%, 99.99999 % can make it to the other person. That's amazing, right? Because the multiplier effect of centralized sort of financial institutions capturing 7 % to 13 % is going to be so incredibly impactful when that money can ultimately make it to the recipient on the other end and they can all of a sudden spend it at a level that they couldn't spend before, right? Right. And then you're like, well, isn't that going to impact companies? Well, yes, it will. Right. But companies will have to evolve. Right. And those companies where they were making all their money will probably make money on FX or other areas within the financial ecosystem.

45:17And that's just a natural evolution of like how an industry is going to have to take place. Certain jobs are not going to exist in the future the way that they exist today, the same way that, you know, bank tellers don't really exist anymore within sort of bank branches. And then the final aspect I would say, and what I love about this more than anything else, especially with the rise of stablecoins, is you're actually seeing an incredibly responsible, now that it's being regulated, and an incredibly powerful vehicle to park U.S. Treasury bonds. And so for the first time ever, you're seeing a vehicle that can absorb the U.S.'s debt in a distributive manner that ultimately cannot be sold by any one given person.

46:01Right. So Paolo at Tether can't all of a sudden wake up one day and negotiate with the U.S. government the same way that, let's say, China can. Right. And dump all of these treasury bonds because where Tether or Circle or any of these companies make their money is in the earned interest of the T-bills. Right. They don't have the control to ultimately be able to dump them. Right. So this is an unbelievably powerful thing to say we're able to all of a sudden distribute the U.S. debt globally. provide people with access to stable US dollars for the first time ever globally, and protect ourselves from political leverage of having that debt being dumped on us should we not come up with certain trade deals.

46:45So I think this is the most exciting time in the world. This is not the story that's being reported, right? But it's misunderstood right now. The other part of this is the tokenization of capital markets. So let's just talk it at the simplest level, equities. Soon, every person in the world will get access to the highest growth companies anywhere in the world, whether it's Tesla or a Chinese company or wherever it is, right? Again, it happens to be US dominant right now, but the world is not always US dominant. It's dominant for periods of time. And it gives people access. Why should somebody in Kenya not be able to invest in Tesla?

47:23It's stupid. So I have no - It's the same form of, it's a different form of financing the dollar and the deficits because it's capital inflows. It also accelerates US innovation because it's capital inflows. So I'm not going to, like, I agree with you. It is stupid, right? Like, all that is happening in the world is the world is becoming more efficient, faster, and cheaper, right? And as you said, just to step back, the internet is consuming it all. If you just think of it in that term, the internet is going to consume NASDAQ. That's how it works. 100%, right? And you see it. Everyone can say that they resist things, right?

48:05If you want the greatest clip of all time, one of my favorite clips is just go onto YouTube and go, Steve Ballmer, iPhone, right? Yeah. And that clip, if you've watched it, is amazing because he says they have their strategy, We have ours. They think that they could sell a$500 phone without a keyboard. Let's see, let's see, you know, who wins this one, right? Talk about a clip that doesn't age well. But like the reality, by the way, when that clip came out was I was at Wired, right? One of the most progressive technology brands of its time at that moment. And our IT department wouldn't allow us to have an iPhone for two reasons.

48:50One, they said it was a consumer device. It was not a business device. Two, they said it wasn't secure. The irony of saying that the iPhone was not secure when BlackBerry was running all of their sort of data through one server in Canada is amazing. We don't have to talk about that. But the reality is, is that what ultimately overcame all of the resistance to the iPhone in business was the consumer demand for it. And so if all of a sudden consumers start to see over and over and over again that the they have access to tokenized assets that they could get in the United States here, there, or whatnot, they're going to start to go towards that.

49:32And the most important thing that we could do as a country, and that countries can do, is regulate it properly so that way consumers are protected and that the right sort of assets are presented to them in the right manner. RAOUL PAL There's another thesis that I've got on all of this is that crypto users are young. They're incredible risk takers, i.e. they have a huge appetite for risk, preposterous appetite to risk. So anything that is being battle tested as an idea is first through speculation. And I look at two of them. One is meme coins, right? So meme coins is two things. One is, can memetics have value over time, whatever?

50:16Of course they can, right? But it's a way of showing that and how the internet works, spreading memes, whatever. But that's not the big thing. What it is, is instant capital formation on a global scale of a scale we've never seen at a speed we can't even understand. And nobody sees it. That's what we're battle testing. And we're doing it via an internet native thing, which is a meme. But it's not about memes. Well, it is partly about memes, but really it's about how do you coordinate a vast distributed network to raise capital instantaneously? I mean, you're spot on, right? So meme coins are essentially the gateway drug into the people feeling comfortable with the tokenization of everything.

51:04Yes. I'm so glad I caught you off with that one, right? I'm sorry, the enthusiasm is infectious. No, it is, right? Like, it is. Meme coins are, like, the people who are playing with meme coins today are showing that you could digitize anything, you could tokenize anything. Anything can ultimately have value in capital formation. And ultimately, like, meme coins will give way to the tokenization of more valuable assets that have fundamental - But more than that, Keith, it's the end of the VC model as is. because don't forget, one of the issues with VC is you can invest, but you can't. You're not an accredited investor.

51:45You are. That's all going to go. And we're ripping it apart in high velocity mean trading in front of our eyes. So I can't speak to that. I'm learning the VC ecosystem for the first time in my entire career since being here. So I don't have as much familiarity with that, but I do have very familiarity with the way in which people can access capital, form capital, and deploy capital is becoming far more efficient than anything else on the planet. The other one that's interesting is what else are we testing? What is a PFP? Okay. Firstly, the PFP idea is, can we build communities online that have value?

52:28Okay. That's a very interesting proposition. And I think we've proven that out and it'll only continue that way. but also it's front running at speed digital id people don't understand that but in a ai driven world we need digital id and we've stress tested that in all sorts of ways then you see the massive rise of the art market the digital art market which i'm heavily involved in what is that all about that is proving that you can have vastly valuable assets have proven provenance and storage and transfer in the digital world. And people don't get that all of these are proving out points to much bigger parts of this whole equation.

53:12Yeah. You're preaching to the choir on this one, right? Like if you take just digital art in general, right? Like the art market has been notoriously opaque, right? So to have token authentication against art in general is amazing, right? Right. Second, the idea of saying that digital art is not art is the defining factor of what makes it art, because the history of art has been the critics saying that is not art. Right. And that goes back to like Duchamp and goes back to every it goes to Warhol, to Herring, to every to Basquiat, to every artist on the planet. And the history of art has been the current critics saying that is not art.

53:59Right. Right. You know, I am honored. Right. I sit on the board of the Digital Art Committee at the Whitney Museum in New York. I love that this museum that, you know, focuses on American artists and the history of American art takes this so seriously. Christian Paul, right, wrote the book on digital art. The book is actually called Digital Art. Right. Like, I love that. And, you know, we we spend a considerable amount of time, you know, discussing digital art pieces. You know, most of them are things that she curates. And, you know, you know, they're they're absolutely incredible on every level.

54:41And there's so many people in the space that I think are pushing this evolution forward. You know what? Sometimes things are just generational, right? Where, you know, as much as I hate to say this, sometimes the previous generation just has to die and the new generation has to be born for, you know, acceptance to hit critical velocity. And like, you see that in everything, right? When people would ask me about magazines, they'd say, is print dead? I'd say, I don't know, but I know print is dying, right? Every day a new person is born on the planet and every day someone dies, a new print reader's not born at a one-to-one ratio to a print diary.

55:16But the same thing goes for digital ownership and the comfort of digital ownership, right? Whether it's meme coins or digital art or Bitcoin. Every day that someone's born and every day someone dies, someone who feels comfortable with owning something digital is born at a higher than one-to-one ratio than someone who passes away, right? I don't know what that trend line is in terms of is it this way, this way, this way, but I know it's up and I know the other is down. And I think when you build against that trend line, you could have a lot of success, right? And if you can be open-minded, and Mark Benioff used to always talk about this, where it's like, have a beginner's mindset on everything, right?

55:52And I think that that's what makes crypto so exciting is things that I thought five years ago were wrong have proven to be right. Things that I thought were impossible have been proven to be developed, right? The best part about this ecosystem, the thing that I love the most happens to be that I'm eating my own words like every day in terms of how I thought about something and what new and potential is available. And I think you are too. And that's what you like about it. Right. Right before, you know, you started recording, we were talking about Hyperliquid is fascinating to see this ecosystem evolve and the efficiency that it could play.

56:28Tan is a fascinating ecosystem to evolve within a traditional communications network. Right. To watch what MasterCard's building is fascinating. right from a product perspective um and i'm biased on them right i and i say that all the time you know that's a quick question i've not i've not really understood i mean i remember interviewing visa in the last cycle but what are they thinking they're just thinking it's a much faster efficient way but then how do they capture as much value or they understand that they can't so they have to go for velocity and other methods? Well, they capture money on the off-ramping, right?

57:09And so ultimately, as money leaves the network is where they could make money, right? And so, you know, like, there's a recognition that the network is going to become increasingly fast and more efficient, right? And so maybe there's new areas for them to make money, right? And ultimately, if you read the book, The Founders, right? And I think that this is really interesting. and the founders about PayPal, right? Like PayPal grew up and MasterCard and Visa kind of ignored them at first, right? And then it emerged and PayPal exists today very successfully, but it didn't replace MasterCard and Visa.

57:46Like MasterCard and Visa are very strongly rooted foundational elements of the global financial ecosystem. And I think this time around with the blockchain evolution, and I could only speak to this from the MasterCard perspective more because I speak to them quite a bit on this topic in particular. This is a company that takes it very, very seriously. They're building products to look at KYC. They're building products to sort of help on the off-ramping. And we deploy what's called MasterCard Move, which does their off-ramping. They're making it more simple for people to enter into the ecosystem.

58:25and they're beginning to realize that stablecoins and agentic sort of money movement is going to become a very real future for them. How I think about it is their evolution from infrastructure rails and turning it into a network where people can build on top. That's a big game changer because anything that is valued as a network is valued much higher than a straightforward cashflow generating business. And once you have open infrastructure your rails and people can pull APIs, do whatever they want, build on top. Okay. Then you've got a business that can be 50X more valuable than where it is today because that's how we value network businesses.

59:03Right. So, so it's very funny about what you said just now is when you asked me in the beginning, how's Moonpay evolved over the past few years? We are very firmly in, in our mindset building towards a network mindset, right? And we think about this every day, that like what matters to us from that perspective is, you know, the fact that we're got all the, all of our licenses, the fact that like we are, that we, you know, help assist on the KYC front, right, which is a tremendous moat, the fact that we can allow people to move between sort of products very seamlessly and the fact that we have a composable SDK offering and API solution for people to be able to connect and move and go quickly between things, I could not agree with you more.

59:59That is ultimately what we're building for and what I believe is the most valuable ecosystem you can have. And that is what MasterCard, I know from our conversations, sees for themselves too, is that they have to use that platform to build much larger. Yeah. And then what you're creating is layers of networks. So you've built an infrastructure network built on top of crypto network of which MasterCard builds their own network. And what you've created is a much bigger flywheel than anybody ever could do on their own. So it's interesting. You could do it top down. You could do a bottom up depending on how you see it.

1:00:29But ultimately, the MasterCards and the visas of the world provide the foundational elements for us to be able to build our network on top of it for them to then be able to then... Like it's mutually beneficial for everyone. Yeah, exactly. Overlapping networks. So final question, what most excites you for the rest of this year? I mean, it's okay. That's so unfair to ask what excites me at the end of the year when we have. Well, because you're a very excitable person. I understand. I want one answer from you. What are you excited about? It doesn't have to be a product. It doesn't have to be anything.

1:01:07I will say what excites me is the clarity that this space is getting and what innovation is going to come out of it from this clarity. I think that this is driven by this administration and it's driven by a lot of Republicans, but there's a lot of Democrats that have been doing a lot of really good stuff, too. And I've been talking to a lot of them on both sides of the aisle. And it's nice to see sort of the extremes move to the side. I actually think that we've entered into a golden age of crypto. I genuinely believe that where we are seeing clarity for the first time on a regulatory perspective.

1:01:41We're seeing clarity for the first time on a legislative perspective in the United States. We're seeing clarity the first time in banking and in accounting. And I got to tell you that that by itself is going to create unbelievable tectonic shifts in how this ecosystem matures and evolves. can a change of government turn that turn that around again or will it be too big for anybody to do because it's such a large part of the global infrastructure and also people's finances it's too big it's it the cat's out of the bag like so now the question is is um you know uh look regularly administrative changes can change regulations it's harder to change laws, right?

1:02:27There's too much money now at stake, right? You look at like the top 10 Bitcoin holders, you know, today versus the top 10 Bitcoin holders a year and a half ago, or two years ago, it's unidentifiable, right? Like when all of a sudden you look at it and you say BlackRock controls X amount of the Bitcoin supply is an absolutely amazing stat. like these ETFs are vehicles for the larger financial ecosystem to absorb. And I think that regardless of how infuriated you get by journalists writing about the ecosystem, and I think some journalists are beginning to come along and come around to them to see that there is positive in this ecosystem.

1:03:08I think that governments are beginning to realize that there's no such thing as an anti-crypto army, which is possibly the stupidest, you know, most energizing slogan on the planet to get an opposition rallying. And, you know, the reality is this is a technology and all that is happening. And I've said this now, this will be the third time I say this on this podcast, but all that is happening is the world is getting faster, more efficient and cheaper to move things around. Right. And, you know, AI and machine learning is accelerating the faster and the cheaper. But the reality is, is that blockchain technologies are the only technologies that can pace the speed of AI technologies.

1:03:53And it's going to become ingrained in everyday life. And at the end of the day, people are not going to talk about, you know, a lot of the infrastructure. I wrote this article called Nobody Cares How Your Toilet Works. That's sort of what's going to happen in the crypto space. But you know what? If you go onto Wikipedia and you say, how does my toilet work? You get a 10 ,000 word article with 82 references in it. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. And you know what? People just want faster, cheaper, easier. The difference is we all get a stake in this. You just have to buy a token of the underlying decentralized infrastructure rails and we can all participate.

1:04:27We did not in the internet and here we get a second do over and the whole of humanity can get involved. There's 600 million active wallets, there's 600 million participating in this. I couldn't agree with you more. I think that this is the most misunderstood aspect of the whole entire thing. If I was to rebuild Uber today in a tokenized world, I could build Uber in a manner that benefits all the drivers. In the pre-tokenized world, I could tell you right now that Uber is going to end in a manner that does not benefit the drivers. The drivers are the biggest cost center for Uber today. They are going to 100 % move towards a Waymo model.

1:05:05You could see that. The drivers are ultimately what is driving all of the AI gathering for Uber. In a tokenized world, the drivers would have an ownership stake in the network that they're building, right? People do not understand that this evolution will actually benefit the masses more than hurt the masses. And will some people benefit more than others? Yes, but that happens in any moment of change, right? But in the grand scheme of things, the U.S. debt is in a better spot today from where treasuries can be parked. humanity is in a better spot in terms of more people gaining access to the money that should be owed to them versus intermediaries.

1:05:43And more people will ultimately be able to gain access to real valuable assets that they never had access to before. That is what the larger sort of aspect is happening with the tokenization of the world. And that's what gets me so, so excited on every level. My final thing on this is by my work, we are a$4 trillion economy today in crypto. If we extrapolate trend rate of growth and assume the network growth slows over time, I think we get to 100 trillion by 2032, 2034. 100 trillion. That means there's 96 trillion of wealth that's going to get created. So halve me, and I say this all the time for being an utter moron,$46 trillion of wealth is about to be created.

1:06:25It's the largest wealth generation event in all human history. it's fractionalizable to a rice worker in the philippines as it is to somebody in fifth avenue it is an unbelievable opportunity and to go back to it you're front-running the institutions and you get to do all of this listen i could not agree with you more and you know when it comes to macro financial analysis you are the king and i would never question your work on this one you can call me a moron you have many times but but here's here's the thing i've actually never called you a moron right like and and and i never will call you a moron but what i will say and i think this is super important is this is really a misunderstood revolution evolution it will continue to be for quite some time but this is bigger than this is bigger than social this is bigger than mobile it's the internet being redone for all of us to participate the internet is absorbing value and the movement of value in a way that is never had before.

1:07:27And that is the most simplistic way to look at it. And if journalists want to fixate on Fartcoin, that's fine. It's just a small segment of it. You're missing what stable coins are really doing. You're missing what Bitcoin's real purpose is. You're missing what these DeFi protocols are actually delivering on. And that's fine. Focus on Fartcoin. It does not matter to me. All I could continue to do with the team at Moonpay is build against the trend line that you and I are talking against. And that's why I'm absolutely so incredibly bullish and excited over this next year. And so it's such a hard question to ask me because I wake up every day and I'm so pumped to just go to work and build.

1:08:13I love it, Keith. Keith Grossman, thank you very much. Always a delight to talk to you. Love it, always. It's always a pleasure, Raul. Thank you for having me on, and thank you for the great work you guys over at Real Vision do. And I'll see you for a dinner and a glass of wine sometime, somewhere soon. You better. I want to see you at New York. You know I love seeing you when I see you. So anyway, thank you so much. This is wonderful. As ever, fabulous conversation with Keith. Always fun, always fascinating. He's super smart, super interesting. And really, we're privileged to get these kind of insights into what is really happening.

1:08:49How is adoption playing out, not just now at retail level, but within the entire financial system itself, and how the internet is consuming money. And that's a really profound concept that you all need to understand that Keith brought to us today. Anyway, let's see how this all plays out. I'll see you next time. So here we are, Token 2049. It really is one of the most energetic, incredible events. Speakers from all around the world and visitors from every country you can ever imagine, all trying to learn something together, something new, this exciting world of crypto and technology. It's where you go and make friends, lifelong friends.

1:09:29And what's so nice is to see people with big smiles on their faces, happy to be here and happy to be together. So hopefully see you next time in Singapore. Real Vision will be there. I look forward to seeing you all.

1:09:47You obviously enjoyed the episode because you're here with me at the end. But listen, don't forget to go to realvision.com forward slash join and grab a free membership. It's an incredible community packed with alpha, great investment ideas, and the research that you need to help you unfuck your future. So get started now. Go to realvision.com forward slash join.