E185: Ethena CEO: This $7B Crypto Company Just Launched An App That Pays You To Spend Money

20:08Guy Young:So I think you've kind of seen that a little bit with, you know, people speak about a lot about the Coinbase and Circle deal where, you know, Coinbase makes whatever it is, 60 % of the revenues of like USDC that's sitting on there in the same way that Athena has got a bunch of distribution relationships with centralized exchanges, you know, including finance, Bybit, etc. That's great because you can like access an enormous user base that sits on the other side. But the drawback of that is that if you never own the user and get one step closer to them, You can never control that economic relationship in a much more powerful way.

20:39Guy Young:And we just don't want to be in that position in three to five years where the distribution of our products is entirely reliant on other people. And we couldn't think of a better way to try to get closer to hundreds of millions of users than a product like this, which is what is the one product that you actually think can reach 100 million users plus in crypto outside of trading on Binance. I think it is a dollar with a yield in a mobile app experience. It sounds simple, but that's actually the thing with the largest TAM.

21:07Shift Happens Podcast Host:The TAM is much bigger. Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of speculation and a lot of degenerate gambling addicts, obviously, but the TAM is like gigantic. Yeah. So it makes sense, obviously, as a business. But we know there's a bunch of solutions out there doing similar things. do we really need another crypto new bank everyone always asks that by the way with any good idea i

21:35Guy Young:think we see within the space it's like did we need another stable coin or another yield bank stable coin two years ago did we need another papdex like six months ago i think all the good ideas people now naturally sort of gravitate towards them in this fierce competition but that's because there aren't that many great ideas within the space or at least businesses that you can actually see getting to you know multi multi-billion dollar outcomes um so i think naturally when there's a good idea within the space that's like uh doesn't have that many around naturally people are going to flock and try and compete i do think we're um we don't really think about even this product like relative to other people who are building within cryptoges because and i don't mean that in a dismissive or like arrogant way i mean it more in the sense that like the existing products out there have literally tens of thousands of users that's like the user account for um the the current products at and if you even compare that to like localized fintechs that are sitting in just one country in South America it's like nothing it's literally completely irrelevant versus like the user cancer you see with these products in the real world so I think trying to focus in on you know competition within a product category which hasn't even really taken off in any sense which is tens of thousands of users isn't the right way to think about it we're just trying to think about how do we access users that would never log into Metamask and come on chain and put their money into our app uh within crypto and gonna go and find them and meet them where they are with with an experience that they're used to so uh yeah i think that there's naturally people who are trying to build similar products i think we also are in an interesting position where uh i think we've demonstrated over the last few years that one of the most important pieces to get right with this app is actually can you produce a structurally higher return on the dollars that are actually within the app i.e if you produce the highest cashback on the card or the highest yield within the account i think that's like a structural moat that you can create versus other people that are in the market and i'd like to think that you know over the last two years that's kind of like the area that athena has excelled which is like you know yield on dollars at scale um so i think from that perspective we're in a decent position there but i also just think that like trying to focus in on the tens of thousands of users that are using these products at the moment is kind of missing the bigger picture of where you can

23:49Shift Happens Podcast Host:where you can take it yeah i was discussing a big issue with the lily from solana foundation gavin from polkadot emin from avalanche and toli from solana that everyone was competing for the same liquidity and the same users instead of working together to grow the pie but i was for layer ones which is much more abstract an abstract concept than some actual apps uh for that is targeted at a lot of users you believe the same it's about to happen for crypto finance apps and neobanks yeah i think um uh today we have just been shuffling the same

24:34Guy Young:chips around i think it goes back to that comment that we're making earlier um in the discussion around the fact that like total defi tvl has not gone up since 2021 is down and so almost definitionally all we're doing is just moving around like a shrinking pie in some senses of money that's actually on chain um so yeah i think as much as people like to say we should grow the pie together etc etc like the practical reality is that you are fighting your competitor for that user to come over to you whether it's trading on a power tax using a near banking app or a dollar that's sitting within your defy money market or whatever it is um i do think though that uh generally as a space we haven't actually broken out and found those users that exist fully outside of crypto i think polymarket is probably the best example of something that truly has broken out and in some senses like almost moved entirely beyond the crypto user base that was here in the beginning to bootstrap them but i really can't think of that many apps that have sort of uh started to break out in the same way to an audience that isn't like purely crypto native um perhaps you could argue the stuff that you're starting to see now on hyperliquid with the um equity and commodity perhaps it's starting to like get to that level and i think that's an incredibly exciting piece the market right now um but i think beyond that i can't think of too many things that have like really broken beyond the initial use base within crypto yeah how do you acquire those people like

25:56Shift Happens Podcast Host:what's the strategy because you said and it's true the time is gigantic so there's probably a lot of you said also in the beginning you're global directly which is amazing but it's also a problem because a business usually is easier to start as a niche or you know where where you focus like how do you choose who to focus on and where when you launch an application that has the potential to help pretty much everyone yeah it's a very good point so i think uh the normal go to

26:29Guy Young:market even what athena had in the beginning which was kind of as i said create a twitter page do you have a landing page and then you make some tweets and then people turn up and put money into a box that's not going to work here i think it's i think it's a slightly different strategy that's required i think a lot of this stuff is actually localized which is each country is actually very specific in the way that like a payment system works or a banking system works and even one example here so if you're trying to build this in brazil and you don't have access for picks to be able to deposit into the app it's just like a non-starter in the app this is going to get like zero users basically so there's very specific niches and like peculiarities with each mark that i think you need to understand um as you're trying to grow it out there but i think with any of these products and maybe just through my own lived experience with athena is like um i think it's just trying to find those first hundred like true fans of your product and allow them to become uh the voice of your product to sort of take and be on there and i sort of think about that as starting small finding those first 100 users who are actually proper fans of what you're doing and allowing them to help like grow the product in each like region so we have 20 like the rollout of the product in the beginning is really just focused on 20 countries that we see as like high opportunity and the way that we sort of define that or try to um think about how we um target is actually just looking at the incredible success of tether and how they sort of thought about um who needs dollars in the well the most and i think that was kind of probably the most important like strategic difference between the way that circle and tether approach the growth of their products through the last 10 years which was almost like tether acknowledged the fact that you the people that needed dollars the most or um would pay you the most for providing dollars actually existed outside of the u.s financial system and you know circle took the opposite approach which was we're going to go like focusing on the us be regulated within the us and uh i think in some senses the strategy that tether took is kind of how we think about this which is actually you want to provide these products in emerging markets where people need dollars uh the most and this is like the most useful product for them because in some senses like this financial infrastructure is the best

28:36Shift Happens Podcast Host:within the us and europe etc etc so the approach here is choosing 20 countries and integrating Athena pay to what people use locally so they never have to buy a stable coin correct yeah

28:53Guy Young:you just send in feed into a bank account I think this is one area which has taken a very long time for us to build out properly so we've been building this for the last six months kind of in silence until now it's really actually trying to solve for making that feared experience and on-ramping experience incredibly easy to get into and this is actually I was completely blown away with how difficult this is to actually piece together as a product where you'd actually expect that like on ramps would be a solved issue by now like 10 years into the crypto story right there isn't actually a single on-ramp provider that just provides you multi-jurisdictional out of the box you can actually just use this one provider and everything's sold for and without taking the discussion in a slightly different direction but it just seems insane to me that if you actually believe the stablecoin story of we're going to multi-trillion dollars in stablecoins I don't think with the current on-ramp infrastructure, that's like the way that this is going to operate if we're going to get to that scale.

29:46Guy Young:But yeah, there's a lot of the difficult pieces like the quirks around the edges around getting money from the existing system across a hundred different broken payment systems all over the world into one unified piece in the middle, which is USD sitting on a blockchain basically.

30:03Shift Happens Podcast Host:How do you make this happen? do you have people who go, do you build teams in every country who go and deal with this? Because you said, and that's where I will kind of challenge the, you said, hey, like we can build a business like Revolut, but much better because it's all open directly in terms of compliance. It's supposed to be easier, right? That's in theory. I mean, or with a bunch of example, if you think about the crypto user that will have like a wallet and will use a stablecoin, then it's different, right? They can just download Athena Pay or Cast or Plasma and just like send some stablecoin and start directly.

30:44Shift Happens Podcast Host:But here, the thing is actually, we need to go and get these people who are non crypto users. And therefore, we need to go and use what they're using and integrate what they're using, which means we probably need to put in a lot of people and investment in terms of in order to be able to do this actually i think cast has like 300 people and it's not because it's not because i mean they're playing the revolute playbook let's go hard and big but actually rags the the co-founder ceo he's saying we need to go everywhere and make this work happen and we need people and we need compliance and all this thing that that in crypto often is kind of like a bit overlooked.

31:29Shift Happens Podcast Host:How do you approach that with a team of 30 people?

31:33Guy Young:We did expand the team as we're building this out by 25 % over the last six months. Yeah, it's not to say this is like an entirely unregulated application, by the way. So anytime you're touching that custodial fiat layer that I described, that's obviously a regulated activity. It's just the way that we've designed things is trying to provide that experience where you can send fiat into the account. as quickly as possible try to get the user out of a fiat iban account into self-custodial stable coin wallets within the same experience so it's not like a clunky experience of saying send this over to this wallet whatever it is it's one click to say out of your fiat into stable coins within the same balance that you're looking at and the whole idea there is that you're trying to move away from as much as possible touching like custodial funds that are sitting within a regulated like banking like activity and into self-custodial wallets where then they can interact with define all the financial products that sit there it's not to say you don't need any of those functions that i was describing i'm just saying that the burden and requirements for uh that second base is obviously much lighter than going to set up all these operations in every single country as you do it i think it does come down to a design decision of like are you actually keeping user funds within an actual bank or trying to move them into a self-custodial wallet yeah

32:46Shift Happens Podcast Host:you mentioned before the moat which is mostly what's the apy you can give on a user funds and the cash back, right? Where you can basically differentiate yourself from a competition. Because for the moment, everyone is going to say, everyone has the best product, right? Last time I will say we have the best user experience, it's the easiest. Casp will say we've been in the market for a year and a half, two years. We have a big head start. Etherify will say we have the best cashback Drup Global will say we're integrated everywhere with the QR code everyone has the best cashback, everyone has the best yield everyone has the slickest app what makes Athena different?

33:31Guy Young:I think when I was describing winning those numbers I think that's important on the go-to-market in the beginning but you can never you never want to be known just for a number basically because someone can always beat that number you need to be known for like a qualitative thing that is the best so maybe one example here it's like you want to be known as like the cheapest perp decks to trade on chain you want to be known as the best place to trade on chain and so that's like ultimately where you need to end up which is a qualitative statement to say this is the best product or the best experience or whatever it is around the app but getting those numbers right in the beginning i think is a very important thing on the go to market because at the moment that is a simple comparison that people are making around like which of these four or five different apps that you're describing are people going to jump on to so um i won't reveal like the full commercial deal around what we've done with the cashback but uh what i can say is that that is like categorically the best cashback that is in the market with the largest budget uh that we've agreed that's where we feel like we've demonstrated an ability through the last few years to actually be able to create a structural advantage at scale uh to be able to um to provide that for users um i think in an end state though you do need to think about like what are these other features that you're bringing around the product i won't fully reveal what else is sort of coming in that actually looks very different to what these other apps are using but i maybe just like one hint on this is like the multi currency support i think for a lot of this stuff is actually extremely weak which is we really thought about like savings products within crypto as dollar focused only right can you get a yield on anything else except for euro stable coin plugged into ave on chain at like tiny size that's really the only thing that isn't dollar denominated in the whole space for yield well there's like a lot of people in the world who don't want just yield on dollars they want yield in their own currencies and one extremely interesting piece that we bring out with athena pay and this is like the platform where where users can get access to it is taking usd as a core primitive and then turning it multi-currency into yen gbp euros basically translating that spread that usde captures versus risk-free rates in dollars into other currencies so essentially what you're doing is you're picking up usde you're saying we're going to put an fx hedge on top of that into another currency and then you're basically creating these bolts which are like high yield savings savings accounts in other currencies uh that type of thing again sounds like very simple and like a very simple product but like how many people are out there that want a yield on non-dollars with a spread above their own like risk-free rates uh we think that that's like enormous and there is literally no one else out there trying to compete on that side.

36:06Guy Young:Anyway, there's a bunch of other product features that sort of look and feel like what I've described over there. But I think ultimately you can't only be known for those numbers that I described in the beginning. It has to be like a full experience that brings together these different pieces. What I would also say is like, ultimately what are these apps? They're like a AUM aggregation sort of game, right? It's like how many users can you get with balances that come onto the app? Has there been anyone in the last five years who has done that better than Athena with like zero to$15 billion in under two years in terms of the supply for USD.

36:40Guy Young:I think no one has been able to scale as quickly and aggressively when it comes to like AUM aggregation as I think we demonstrated in the last few years.

36:50Shift Happens Podcast Host:Can you explain the cashback part simply? How do you or another app get 3, 4, 5 % in cashback on USD, it's not like a token, right? How does it work?

37:08Guy Young:Yeah, so I think a lot of them at the moment, by the way, are unsustainable in the long run. There is obviously a revenue line item that comes through in terms of interchange fees that you get coming back, but most of these cashback programs are loss-making in terms of the cash that you're paying upfront, but the view is you're getting the user on board, they might do other things within your app and you monetize them in different ways afterwards i think one interesting piece that's fallen out of these is strong commercial agreements and arrangements or partnerships with others where you might share that cashback expense with another partner so i think etherfy did this with scroll for example where they launched their product on scroll i think scroll was actually funding the cashback on that product and then etherfy could internalize the revenue of the interchange that was sitting on the other side so that obviously changes the maths for this equation very significantly when uh you know someone else is helping to fund that up front uh but yeah generally i think about it as more of like an expense rather than some uh backward way that people are generating revenue okay so if so if

38:10Shift Happens Podcast Host:the business is profitable it's basically part of this profit that's going yeah i sort of think about

38:14Guy Young:the main the main revenue like line items for this kind of business is like interchange fees on payments fx fees is actually a very big one uh when you're just changing fx within the app or when you're spending and then uh the nim generational the the spread that you generate

38:30Shift Happens Podcast Host:on the deposits one of the big complaints of a lot of people are these uh fx fees on non-dollar spending yeah one one point five two percent how can you reduce that and what's you what do you

38:50Guy Young:is acceptable for an end user i think it depends massively by jurisdiction so like in europe and us you're not going to get away with the numbers that you're describing over there but i think uh a lot of this as you're describing just takes like time actually building up their relationships with like wholesale brokers effect wholesale broker fx brokers that sit in the background rather than just taking like off-the-shelf offerings that exist from service providers so that's why it's hard i think to actually build this app uh properly in a cost-efficient way at scale through time because each of these service providers that you're plugging in to create like the product experience you need to be constantly improving and iterating through time because instead of getting charged 100 basis points you're trying to bring that down to 20 through time um but obviously doing that for every country that you're operating in is yeah time consuming uh

39:37Shift Happens Podcast Host:this work so that was for cashback and now for ap ap apy savings rate i mean there's different numbers 5%, 6%. Some people say they're going to come out there with 10%. I've heard even more. This would be the same thing. Would be, I mean, actually you would say, ah, we're AT &T now, we're actually generating a lot of cash. Therefore, we can take a bunch of that to finance the yield and attract people's interest. In a bear market, how do you do that? Or how do you get the best yield?

40:12Guy Young:Yeah, we're not, there's no intention to run like some super unsustainable 10 15 in like the current market conditions i think um all i'm saying is that like the core product for athena can stand on its own two-piece in that regard in terms of generating yield on dollars at scale um so all i'm saying is like historically if you just look back in the last two or three years for products that look like athena's it's just like factually speaking the highest yielding dollar at above billion dollar scale uh that's been in the market in the last few years so it's more leaning in on that as like a core product that can stand on its own two feet rather than saying like we're going to fund something that's unsustainable in terms of adding to that yield and i think a lot of the pieces that you're quoting around those numbers they all have like quite a lot of fine print in every piece that's presented right so it's like cash back on this up to like 500 or you 10 yield up to 20 that's like within the account so like i think we need a bit of alignment in terms of how these products are presented externally because there's a lot of like fine print that people have to read through

41:15Shift Happens Podcast Host:yeah binance was actually pretty good at this game yeah i'll give you 30 oh amazing on 100 bucks

41:23Guy Young:first 100 bucks i mean for you are you using these products like what have you found with the

41:28Shift Happens Podcast Host:user experience um i mean for me because my life is kind of run on stable coins the the exchange rate i don't care right because it's so good because you don't have to As you said before, on-ramping is a nightmare, right? Whether for a business, want non-crypto customer, or as a crypto user, just the on-ramping, off-ramping, the fees you'll pay, just the time you lose, and then it's going to be some bugs and whatnot. You're just like, I don't need to do that anymore. I'll just pay the fee. I just want to click, click, Apple Pay, pay, spend, done. It feels like it's not real money when you just do this Apple Pay thing with your stablecoin.

42:09Shift Happens Podcast Host:like it's just it's just amazing so i'm not a big user of yield function yet because i use these apps more as i don't leave a lot of money on there it's like i send 1k i send 2k i send 3k i send 5k and then i just send 1k again right so i do a lot of these like transfer because i would say for me it's not even a question of trust but I mean I will trust more a cold wallet or even a Binance than an application for the moment that is more and I hear that from a few people actually like a few whales they're like hey like what how do you do your thing and I think that that's the one of the big challenge so it's one of my questions too is how do you I mean you already manage to get at some point 15 billion of money on your platform right but this is more from again people who understand crypto how do you build trust for people to run their financial life through an Athena pay when they're not when they use banks right and they're like what is this yield

43:26Guy Young:how is that possible yeah no I think there's a huge amount of value for just existing for a long period of time without messing up like honestly i think you'd be surprised with like the even professional money managers who like really just the threshold that they're looking at is like has this thing not lost money or screwed up in x many years um i think there is actually a huge benefit even within defy that actually flows through towards the economics of these projects for exactly what we're describing here which is almost like a trust and convenience and like lindy factor so i think the best two examples here are probably um if you look at ave right like the ave business model is that a lot of people just trust them so much that they'll leave tens of billions of dollars below risk-free rates sitting on ave which ave can like earn a spread that's lent out to to others and that's actually sometimes being like 100 basis points below what you can get on t-bills sitting within ave that only comes from them existing for the last you know eight years was like zero issues at scale I think another one there is like make it down sky again people leave money with maker even when Athena was 20 30 percent interest rates make it would be paying three or four people just trust that trusted that nothing would go wrong with maker when that was happening and so in some senses there's like a direct translation actually to the more that you're perceived to be safe the more you haven't messed up through multi years and just survive through cycles people just demand less of you whether like you what i'm getting paid one percent of revolute like three in this app is actually like pretty decent and it hasn't had an issue in like eight years um so i don't think there is like a shortcut to that kind of um or like a quick fix to that question it's more actually just like doing the right thing and existing for multiple cycles um and yeah you mentioned owning the whole stack before is a massive advantage for the business yeah you can build a much better business which obviously makes

45:24Shift Happens Podcast Host:sort of sense, but it also comes with some sort of risks. If the stablecoin has some issues or some FUD, there was some recently. How do you deal with this, all this FUD? I mean, I think the first time we talked two years ago, there was people saying this is the next UST, the next Luna, et cetera. And then nothing bad happened. And then in October last year, it was like different people saying different things. you're the founder you must be affected by that kind of stuff like how do you deal with yeah i think this kind of third um because it's completely linked to all the trust right i mean we've seen the numbers too in terms of usde and now you're saying now we're gonna go for like the masses like directly to the end user

46:17Guy Young:but it's all linked together right yeah 100 it is um i don't think we've ever done something to break the trust of users at all i think uh uh the fud has kind of changed in terms of its form since day one so in the beginning as you said it was like this is the next terra luna the yield is too high it's like untrustworthy and the yields come down and they're like oh this is a shit product because uh the yields are too low and it's too close to treasuries and so it's like through different periods of time there's different reasons that uh uh people have found reasons to um you know uh take issue with it so that's not to say that we haven't um made mistakes or reacted with the product quick enough i think especially post uh october the 10th i think we should have been quicker to recognize that actually the market conditions had completely changed like fundamentally it wasn't like a two or three month thing which is kind of what we'd seen in the last two and a half years it's like actually a structural like regime change that we've seen in the last like six months and in some senses like athena suffered quite a bit through that where you know naturally the product is extremely reflexive to the market cycle right so when interest rates are high it grows like crazy and uh you know went up to the 15 million dollar number that you mentioned and then naturally when leverage unwinds from the system and interest rates come down you'd expect it to come down with like open interest within the market so open interest for example on exchanges uh centralized exchanges came down more than the bear market in 2022 when like ftx and luna and stuff were imploding that was like the level of destruction that we saw within like leverage in the system um so naturally i think like you know Athena's product was going to come down with that but i think uh even we put out that piece to just talk about how we're thinking about different forms of collateral that sit within usd that kind of try out a bit more resilience to through the cycle so we don't go through these periods of like drawdown uh in terms of um in terms of the supply so i think a lot of this is like an iterative process that we're um you know trying to improve through time but i would disagree that we've ever done something you know people's expectations when we first came out in the beginning and a lot of the comments were like this is going to be the reason that the space blows up or we're going to have issues the cycle in the same way that we saw with luna and i don't think we've ever um yeah caused anything at that level yeah you communicate but not a lot why you mean on twitter or yeah online um i'm yeah i'm generally of the view uh it's just more powerful to kind of lower the frequency and highlight the things that you think are super important so funnily enough i'm still running the athena account if no one knows that like i'm the intern who's sitting on the main athena that's like pushing things out day to day so that's like me doing stuff over there but like my own personal account uh i just find And, you know, day to day, I don't need to sit down for finding things.

49:13Guy Young:I think the official kind of does that. And I'm just more strongly believe that actually, if you're picking the things that are important, that you really want people to grab hold of, it just has a bit more meaning than saying things every day.

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50:16Shift Happens Podcast Host:What's the key performance indicator you're looking at for 2026 for Athena Pay?

50:22Guy Young:how do measures success yes i think um yeah athena broadly i think it's just trying to get back to where we were last year so i think we're just over 50 down in terms of the um supply of usd um i think getting close to where we were peaking last year is just a bit of an internal metric that would be good to hit and we're sort of very focused on on achieving and then i think athena pay these products are going to be naturally harder to scale than like a defy product that you just open up to the world and say like anyone can come in it's a bad market people are less interested in the space yields aren't that interesting etc etc so i think we're um bullish on the product but not expecting this to like grow in the same way that we saw with usd in the beginning that's just not like a realistic expectation but i think um placing ourselves within the top sort of three crypto native providers of this product within the next sort of six to nine months is sort of what we're what we're wanting to hit but then as i said the vision beyond that isn't kind of fighting over scraps of 10 000 users that we have within the space now you want to see that to like north of 10 million like uh users uh within three years after that is kind of where we want to get to but really it's like it's simple numbers of like card spend that you're seeing coming through the platform uh i think the guys who are doing the highest numbers at the moment are like somewhere the range of like three million dollars a day in terms of spend um so it's not like huge numbers even for the largest guys at the moment and then obviously just balances that are sitting within athena pay which is quite similar to like the usd like a um yeah what's the holy grail for a stable coin native of a narrow bank i think it's just for people to log on and just feel like it's a normal fintech app and there's no mention of crypto and they don't even know that crypto is powering this at all, but everything within the app just feels better or has a better number.

52:14Guy Young:Maybe it's the savings rate. Maybe it's something else where you just look at it and say the form factor and the experience is almost identical, but like these very specific pieces have just been enhanced with crypto sitting in the background without me, like even knowing that it's there.

52:30Shift Happens Podcast Host:Quick shout out to the legendary team at Jupyter, the DeFi super app. Anything you want to do on chain from trading to earning yield, you can just use Jupyter. Personally, I'd recommend getting the Jupyter wallet on either your phone or your laptop. 10 times faster and 10 times cheaper than the competition. You're going to love it. Thank you to the awesome team at Athena for backing today's conversation. Athena is one of the fastest growing projects in DeFi with over$7 billion in stablecoin supply and an average 11 % APY on SUSDE. And importantly, zero DPEGs since launch, which is exactly what you want from a stablecoin.

53:08Shift Happens Podcast Host:Go check them out by following the link in the description down below.

53:38does the same thing who wins well yeah what i was going to say is i think actually

53:43Guy Young:this is probably the most interesting crowded sector right because like other crowded sectors where you have a tether in a circle or you have a binance and a coinbase or whatever it is you're fighting against like 100 billion dollar incumbents who have already kind of like won the category and you're trying to find like a space within this category that you know is going to be huge currently like you're fighting for something which you think is going to be a really big pie but you haven't got an entity like a binance or a coinbase or it has that sitting there dominating and has like the resources to outcompete you and so in some senses i think like yes it's crowded but it's also one of those categories that you can see getting to the scale that we've just described there but it doesn't have incumbents at that scale and size yet operating within space so that should be the like look and feel of something that should be super interesting right which is like we all collectively agree this is a big idea you just need to like see who's going to go win

54:34Shift Happens Podcast Host:in the next three to five years right so that would be comparable to crypto exchanges where you have a bunch that are dominating but depending on the region you have a different exchange that is bigger except that except that the time is probably much bigger than a crypto exchange

54:51Guy Young:yeah that or even maybe just like time so if we look back to 2015 or 16 like Binance didn't exist bitmax was about to be founded like it was an open level playing field right of like everyone had their own local exchanges or it was just like nothing was there and then the winners were like created five to ten years after that um i think that's kind of where we're sitting within the space which is like the thesis is like extremely obvious and extremely clear but there's no one there operating at that scale now and it's like an interesting idea of uh

55:20Shift Happens Podcast Host:who's gonna grab it what's the next big thing after ethena pay for ethena we just want to

55:28Guy Young:get this out and scale this i think we've got a lot on our plate um as i said i think a lot of um you know i think we've potentially been guilty of this as well in the past which is kind of um getting distracted with side projects when the core business uh maybe isn't doing as well as you wanted to and i think i'm a very strong believer that actually you need to do one thing extremely well and then you can kind of afford yourself the luxury to like indulge in different products and different business units or whatever it is. And I think we're in that position last year when things were going very well for us, where we could take bets.

56:03Guy Young:And I think you should always be taking bets when you're in a startup and when you're within the space in the knowledge that a lot of them aren't going to work out. But taking bets that like in a year or two, if they do work out, can be as big as the original thing that was working. So in some senses, I think we, as I said, need to get back to winning on like the core USD Athena business. and we obviously want to see these products and these new ideas do well but I think until that core piece is doing extremely well you shouldn't be starting to think about like what's next after that so but this Athena pay is is it the same thing as USD in your mind is it a compliment or is it a new thing it's definitely a compliment because like in some senses right it's like us creating the distribution channel for our own product which is saying like we don't want to just be the savings product that's sitting within Revolut like let's go force that outcome ourselves and actually build that experience with the user ourselves um which is a very hard thing to do by the way it's very easy to say we want to own the distribution we want to own the user uh we want

57:08Shift Happens Podcast Host:to be the Revolut of crypto yeah yeah the Revolut the Robin Hood of crypto sure we've heard this a

57:15Guy Young:lot yeah um but I think uh the upside of doing that well is so high that you should still take that shot and try do it yourself um so yeah i think it's very much a complementary piece which is it's really just us trying to bring up our own product and distribute it to a different channel in the same way that like us targeting defy users or c5 users sitting within exchanges or maybe it's an institutional user that's sitting within new york and hedge fund whatever it is really all you're trying to do is just identify different pockets of the world that you've never brought your product to and expand it to and think about like what is the highest leverage way for us to pick our product up and really like force that outcome ourselves and for us like mass retail user base one angle is going through you know centralized exchange distribution the other

58:01Shift Happens Podcast Host:angle is something like this yeah thank you so much guy for doing that appreciate it and for being so driven still being here when other people are leaving and for being so humble despite despite the amazing successes that you guys had in the last two years. Appreciate it. As you probably know by now, I host some of the biggest names in Bitcoin and crypto on my podcast. But a lot of the best stuff never makes it on air. The Shift newsletter is where I share that raw behind the scene alpha, the insights, stories, and lessons straight from my guests that you won't hear anywhere else. If you want the real insight take on Bitcoin and crypto, join my newsletter, The Shift, in the description down below.

58:44Thank you.