Episode 28: Hiding the Wiring

The most important milestone in crypto, argues Nic Roberts-Huntley, will be the one that goes completely unnoticed. In this episode of Exponential, the founder and CEO of Blueprint Finance sits down to discuss how his firm is building the infrastructure for institutional-grade DeFi yield — and why the endgame is a world where the underlying mechanics of onchain finance quietly power everything from savings accounts to credit card rewards without anyone realizing it.

Blueprint Finance operates two protocols — Concrete and Glow — and positions itself as a counterweight to the degenerate, high-leverage yield strategies that proliferated during the last bull run. "We're kind of trying to be the next wave of institutional-grade yield with onchain finance," Roberts-Huntley explains. 

Read more on the Nexus blog.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Exponential, a Nexus podcast where we talk about people, code, and capital. I'm Daniel McGlynn and in this episode I talked to Nick Roberts Huntley, the founder and CEO of Blueprint Finance, about building institutional grade DeFi yield. Okay, uh Nick, welcome to Exponential. It's great to have you today.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Thank you very much for having me, man.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Yeah, so uh lots of interesting stuff happening on your end. I thought it'd be a great time to kind of catch up and um talk to you about Blueprint Finance and then also talk to you about uh a major launch that just happened for you and kind of walk through some of what you're building, uh, especially given some of the attention happening right now with uh DeFi yield. It seems like a great time to kind of walk through these topics with you. But before we jump into all that, uh I thought a good place to start is maybe you could just tell us what is Blueprint Finance.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Yeah, sure. So, you know, we're a venture-backed DeFi platform. Um, we are a team of about 35 people. We're backed by a whole slew of fantastic investors across the venture ecosystem. But in a nutshell, what we do is I think we provide really durable risk-adjusted rates of return across networks within DeFi for people basically saying, how do we make the assets that we care most about within the digital asset realm more productive over longer term? You know, we're not a degenerate kind of max looping environment for people to chase these kind of crazy APYs that we may remember from 2021. We're kind of, I think, trying to be the next wave of institutional grade yield with on-chain finance and getting people comfortable with the right amount of risk to take to get a risk-adjusted rate of return, which is higher than what you would typically see from traditional investment grade instruments like a money market, um, but without taking on these kind of very, very risky strategies that we have seen proliferate across the ecosystem within the last few years.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Yeah. And and I'm curious, Nick, how did you uh how did you get into you know the founder and CEO of Blueprint? Like how did you how did you arrive there? And and like what was sort of that, you know, the founding story like? How did how did that all come together?

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Well, uh the the furthest back I can tell you is that I put together probably the worst investment uh memo you've ever seen in your life when I was still a med student a long time ago to my dad asking him to buy a bunch of Bitcoin. You know, I had like two pennies to rub together, so I didn't have much to get. Um later on I kind of became more interested in like novel mechanisms of encryption and finality, got me into sort of the world of reading and understanding the principles around ETH. Um that was sort of 2017, 2018. I irresponsibly bought a little bit of Ethereum at around 35 bucks, and promptly sold it all at around 100, uh, which for me at that time was you know a big win. Um it was only really during the pandemic when I got like really, really down to bare metal. Uh, the timers at 0.72, uh large investment firm, and had just kind of got you know fully pilled, as such, I think is the term, but really obsessed with kind of what this could do at scale, looking at a more global macroeconomic picture. Um, and so started the company just a little after the FTX collapse and said, way too much risk on the system if we believe over a 10-year horizon this is to become a really productive asset class. How do we build the right infrastructure and the right rails in order to afford that?

SPEAKER_00 3:17

Yeah. I like that approach too. It's kind of uh refreshing of like, okay, what what are the fundamentals here and what's the long-term game? And then, you know, how do we build in a way that you're not gonna get wrecked every cycle or whatever it is that that we've seen over and over again? And and good ideas and good companies get washed out just because of the volatility and um, you know, not to mention individual investors and uh, you know, people trying to to come to crypto and and explore, and then all of a sudden, you know, things go sideways on them. So um kind of a refreshing take of like how do how do we kind of harness the the potential here, but do it in a way that um, you know, makes sense for people who who want to stay in and and and play long-term games, I guess. Um so okay, blah back to Blueprint. So uh you founded the company uh and um you you talked a little bit about your mission, but I'm kind of curious, like just to kind of frame it up a different way, in terms of like, you know, when you explain to people the number one problem you're solving, and I think you have alluded to it uh in in both of your answers so far, but maybe we could just put a finer point on it. Um the problem Blueprint solves and um, and or like sort of your your core value proposition for for users of Blueprint Finance.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

Yeah, absolutely. So we allow people to own the digital assets they want, and then in order to not just hold them but make them productive, give them kind of a one-clip solution. So let's say you're somebody who owns some proportion of Ethereum. You've been responsible and you've been purchasing it over the last few years, you bought the dips, whatever it might be. And right now you're sitting on perhaps a little bit more money than you anticipated in terms of dollar value, but you'd like to make it generate some cash flow for you, make it get some yield, and really over a five-year horizon, say, like, hey, this is a bit of a kind of an investment opportunity for me to compound. Rather than have to trawl the annals of every white paper protocol, audit report, understand all of the weird and nuanced mechanisms that Great Builders and DeFi have put together to create these opportunities, we do all of that for you. So we provide you these kind of vessels in the form of vaults across our infrastructure. And then we take those assets without selling them, um, typically take a line of debt against it and run those stable coins across many, many different networks to get you the best blended rate of return that you can without taking on too much risk. So not a huge amount of leverage, not a huge amount of like novel protocol exposure. We kind of use blue chip venues with blue chip assets and make them as productive as possible, meaning that it's kind of a mechanism for you to say, I retain my exposure to Ethereum over the next five years or WBTC or insert, you know, another stable coin, whatever it might be, without losing that right to that principal asset, we then start to put it to work for you through our kind of software platform on-chain. Um, that means you don't have to spend, you know, till three, four in the morning uh in a Discord trying to figure out what the hell is going on. We do all of that hard work for you and you can come back to it whenever you're ready.

SPEAKER_00 6:24

Right. And um I think before we keep going down this path, um uh maybe it makes sense to just kind of explain um what an on-chain vault is uh and and how that's a a tool that people are using um right now. Because I think that's can that concept's important for people that might be unfamiliar with with what a vault is and how it works.

SPEAKER_01 6:48

Yeah, of course. You know, and I think vaults have caught a lot of attention and rightly so in kind of the last kind of year to 18 months. You know, we went live in December 2024. Um the short answer for what a vault is, is it is a smart contract that you are able to able to deposit your assets within. And at that point, they are effectively stored there before being delegated into some activity on-chain. When you deposit the assets into that vault, you receive a vault share. That vault share is a mechanism by which you can come back to that contract and redeem your assets plus whatever they have generated over some period of time for which they've been in there. So let's say you deposit them into a vault which has a 5% APY and you have$100 worth of Ethereum. You know, let's assume Ethereum holds a$100 price value for what you've given it for 12 months. You would then get$105 right to redeem at the end of that. Um, and that 5% rate of return is typically generated by some combination of the vault operator and what's called a curator. It's really important, actually, that I say I believe that vaults themselves should remain really, really simple. I think it's the topography, the kind of surface area above it, what you can do with the vault share itself, perhaps as a novel form of collateral where you can take that to a money market and borrow against it. And then the surface area behind it, which is where we really spend most of our time. How do you put those funds to work and use more novel nested vault infrastructure? And we get a little bit into the complexity of architectural design to make more efficient strategy execution on chain. And it all boils down to things like accounting, latency, cost of execution, and primarily risk and debt management. And that's where we spend most of our days. Excellent.

SPEAKER_00 8:33

Okay. Thanks. And that that is a great explanation of what a vault is. And then um, I think it also sets up our next question. And so, so one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you today is um you just uh announced a new a new product or a new um service related to these vaults. And so maybe you could um explain, explain that and and you know walk us through through that launch and why it's uh kind of so novel.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

Yeah, we're super excited that uh you know this morning announced a partnership with the Binance wallet team. Um that effectively means that any user within the Binance wallet application can now deposit directly into a concrete vault, particularly in this case, depositing USDT. And for that, they receive kind of our yield-bearing structure. So that makes their USDT pretty productive. I believe as it stands, we're currently the highest yield-bearing USD, USDT product in the Binance wallet application, which is you know uh great for us and great for the users that are getting uh access to that. We were a little surprised that even before the announcement went out, but it was you know quietly launched, we kind of, I think$60 million went into it very, very quickly. Um, and so since then, I think that is now a you know over nine-figure vault within uh within 24 hours of launch. So really excited to see that growth. I think obviously the centralized exchange landscape is a great way to get slightly more novel um products into a trusted environment and then get that broader distribution. The user numbers in a centralized exchange are often a lot greater than those that you see uh at the bare metal application layer. So using that as a venue for access and distribution to people who want, you know, exposure to the SASET class is fantastic. And, you know, we want to be good actors and and and responsible custodians of that kind of activity and that opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

Yeah, uh that makes a lot of sense and and it's pretty uh pretty exciting numbers there. Uh, you know, and and I think it shows just the the demand for for that kind of product, right? Where um people who have these crypto assets or you know DeFi assets are um looking to figure out how you know how they can hold them long term and maybe something like a a vault that has a yield strategy behind it uh makes sense. Um so that's exciting to see that. And um and it's pretty cool too, like you said, to just open up access, like um, you know, the the on and on ramp that we're seeing, still the most popular on and off ramp, on and off ramp um for crypto and DeFi assets is is through these decentralized or centralized exchanges. So it kind of um yeah, it makes sense that that's kind of the front lines and and being able to offer something right there from from a major wallet is is pretty cool. Absolutely. Um yeah, so you you mentioned this already, but I kind of wanted to spend a little bit more time on it. Um that uh vaults are kind of, you know, uh here on Exponential, the past few episodes, we've been really talking a lot about stablecoin and stablecoin yields and how that's kind of uh become a popular thing recently that people are talking about. It's a like really interesting topic, hot topic, um, both in crypto and outside of crypto, um, how stable coins and yield is working. Um but I wanted to get your perspective on vaults and and also on yield strategies and how those two things are playing out and um in DeFi specifically, and then um your take on like how that's changing how we understand finance and um and maybe even how competitive DeFi can be with sort of traditional finance.

SPEAKER_01 12:11

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a great question. No, the proliferation of stable coins um both as kind of a a unit uh of economic value within crypto and DeFi more broadly has been stock standard for a few years. But of course, in the last probably 24 to 36 months, we've seen a real blossom of different types of stable coins, slightly different kind of underpinnings, yield-bearing activities, backing structures. Um some of that has worked out really well for Suns Groups. You've seen the fantastic success of what the guys built over at Athena. And I think that's been a kind of a real bellwether of what elegant underpinning and stablecoin design can do at scale. Um, what it has done is created kind of a bit of a Cambrian explosion of those different token standards and types around different stable coins, and I think very, very varied rates of potential return across them. And now we've of course got this big institutional adoption of how do we issue our own stable coin? What kind of functionality does that afford us and our customers? Why does that improve potential settlement and distribution, clearing mechanisms across different financial rails? And I think we're still yet to see how that plays out at scale. Now, where I think vaults really elegantly fit into that is there are, of course, kind of receptacles or vehicles that can take in huge amounts of volume and can collapse that single or multiple asset directly into one environment, which consolidates and simplifies a huge amount of the accounting potential, and then can be this kind of cinch that then pushes that volume and flow back out to the market for the best yield-bearing activity. Now, what you do with those two, you're kind of dovetail question there, which is how do these things generate money? How do these things create yield? You know, my hypothesis is that there are small amounts of delta and between really, really great investment strategies at the moment, you know, kind of similar to traditional finance. You know, you have wonderful long, short investment firms across the world. And when you look at the annualized returns, yes, there is always a winner. There is always one large blue chip investment firm on Wall Street which wins the top of the leaderboard every year. But for the majority, there's quite a tight cluster between how people perform. Typically, you know, there can be variants at the bottom end and variants at the top. Right now, I think what people are trying to truly underwrite when it comes to generating yield on stable coins is what is the smart contract risk that you're taking? How much leverage is in the system, uh, and how durable over a long period of time is that rate of return. The reason those things matter is when you're starting to see some of the qualified custodians think about getting funds to work on-chain, um, bulge bracket banks thinking about how to offer products to their clients, and when you're thinking about you know, regulated investment groups thinking about how do we adopt and get more utility out of this, those things matter dramatically. But also thinking about the variance in return. You know, I personally think that fixed cost, fixed rate products are going to proliferate massively. We actually already offer one and it's been growing very quietly with a couple of large partners recently, and you know, we're very excited about the continuing to scale. But when you're a large financial institution, you really need to be able to underwrite that variance in risk because you're thinking about capital structuring and capital layering, and you start to look more and more about how does core DeFi mechanics get drawn into the traditional financial capital stack. Um, and vaults become this very, very consolidated unit economic that can take in other assets and other activities and push that back into the stack. And I think that's why they're catching so much attraction and so much chatter right now.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

Interesting. So it's kind of like what I was mentioning with the on-off ramp for individual kind of retail or or uh individual investors. You know, the centralized exchange is kind of like our default on off ramp for that kind of retail activity. It almost sounds like the way you're describing it is like a vault in this context of, you know, a larger financial strategy could could be like kind of the on onboard, offboard mechanism for, you know, bringing traditional finance on-chain or or not even bringing it on chain, but just having you know on-chain strategies collaborate with with sort of off-chain capital. I guess um, you know, uh maybe that's the connection point there. Um at least that's that's how I was kind of understanding it while you were walking through it. Um yeah, that's that's really fascinating. I also think it's like an interesting time. Um and and I kind of want to get your insight into this of like, you know, we keep hearing about real-world assets moving on-chain or or like um, you know, institutional capital. We're we're seeing that in other parts of the market or other uh parts of these networks where um certainly through like things like ETFs, um, you know, institutional capital is coming that way, or even um, you know, some of the treasuries that are being built to allocate that way. And I'm kind of curious from your perspective, like how you are looking at that or understanding the kind of movement of um, you know, traditional capital onto um blockchain or on-chain experiences, like where where do you see that happening, or where is it kind of like uh, you know, any any sort of uh interesting things from your perspective that that you're seeing um to either support or or uh maybe refute that that trend of of assets moving on chain?

SPEAKER_01 17:44

I think the ETFs were kind of this first like foray into call it a more you know air-gapped way to get proxy exposure to a very specific directional asset. We saw them grow very quickly, we saw them kind of rescind very poorly when there's been a lot of volatility or downturn in the market. That's to be expected, these are predominantly high-risk assets as far as a traditional portfolio manager would be concerned. If you're you know natively on-chain and you are a digital asset manager or you are a yield farming desk at an institution set up to do so, you weren't really buying ETFs. This was for people who were looking to have it be a very thin slice of their pie chart, as you know historically most people have and should do, unless you are kind of digital asset native. Um, don't take on too much exposure to anything that you don't really understand. Use a trusted professional or use a trusted service to do so on your behalf. I think what we're starting to see now is kind of a bit of a clicking into how do we get away from ETF dependency because they have struggled to be productive in terms of just doing something more other than providing general price exposure to the underlying principle. And I think that was the birth of that. Was like, okay, how do we make a ownership in these assets become potentially productive and supporting real business activities, real productive um kind of yield creation and or supporting of digital asset ecosystems? That's yet to kind of unglue itself in a meaningful way. We're spending a lot of time with those groups and figuring out paths to get those assets to work depending on the strategies that they want to implement. And then the final piece, I actually think, is we may skip a lot of it. Um the institutions we're spending most of our days with now thinking about long-term strategies are how do we actually get them exposure under the right privacy, security, kind of offset constraints and accounting expectations within the confines of their regulated bodies without breaking anything. Um, and those things come to, you know, account controls, reporting expectations, exposures, you know, regional constraints, whitelisting, you know, commingling of funds, et cetera. Um, that's really where we're spending the body of our work. And I I do wonder if that's going to be the next great wave of pushing liquidity on chain, which for us is fantastic. That's kind of what we do. Um and so I'd be very happy if that is the case.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

Yeah, it's interesting too. Um, I haven't heard um that that concept of, you know, is is there a leapfrog moment for um, you know, traditional capital or or real-world assets moving on chain? Um because we we've seen that with other kinds of technology adoption, right? Uh, where um, you know, the the technology grows in one market or one area, and then the secondary markets or other places that adopt that technology, they don't have to go through the same windy path to get to that result. They can just kind of say, like, okay, here's our starting point, there's our end point. Can we just, you know, get there faster? Um and so that's kind of a new idea to me. I haven't thought about that or really seen much about that, where um, you know, we we think, at least I think so far, like the way that we kind of understand moving capital on chain is like it'll happen kind of the way it's happened with like retail investment or or like the way that, you know, the past decade of moving from just having singular chains and assets to then all of a sudden we have DeFi and DeFi strategies. Um, it's not necessarily true that that same kind of path or um sort of evolution will happen with maybe institutional or or real world assets. So that's kind of interesting and something to kind of keep an eye on and think about like what would that leapfrog thing look like? And it sounds like that's kind of where you you are working and operating is like how how do you enable like kind of a leapfrog adoption sort of situation?

SPEAKER_01 21:48

Yeah, it's a it's a fascinating design space. And I think the exciting piece is on the one side of the table, you have institutions with a depth of history, track record. And of course, capital that we haven't historically seen available to digital assets. And then kind of we sit on the other side of the table trying to be the best support and design partner for, hey, you know, we've been beaten, bruised, and scarred by all the activities on chain by the last few years. Let us kind of hopefully help you navigate that without having to suffer the pain that we did as we got to where we are. But of course, they are a massive accelerant to flows and activity on-chain that retail benefits from, builders like ourselves benefit from. Everybody sort of wins in that world. So as responsible kind of custodians of that opportunity, um, it really matters to us about being good design partners and thought partners with these groups. And that's why we spend so much time on a lot of the unattractive elements of this, which is, you know, reporting, accounting, and security. And it's not the fun stuff, but it is the stuff that matters with this next leg of the of the journey within the market.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

Yeah. The kind of uh yeah, the the the growth moment for uh for DeFi and for crypto more broadly is uh yeah, getting getting uh some of those details right um and in place. Um, which is a great kind of segue into our my next question, um, something I was really curious about when I was kind of reading up on Blueprint and what you're building, um, is that you are building on multiple chains, uh, not just, you know, uh, I think a lot of times we're accustomed to seeing um companies or projects kind of uh making a decision, like, oh, we build on Ethereum, we build on Solana, we build on XYZ, uh, whatever it might be. Um and I'm kind of curious if you could just talk about that decision and like how does that enable some of the work that you are currently doing? And, you know, what's what's it like to be building on a in a multi-chain world, I guess?

SPEAKER_01 23:47

Yeah. No, it's it's a great question. I think the first thing I'll say is only necessarily possible because we've been so fortunate to have such a great team uh across, you know, design, products, and of course, like both kind of core engineering, but critically on the smart contract side from an executioner risk framework perspective, thinking about security and the things that can go wrong and the things that keep us up at night. You know, we haven't you know touch wood, we've never had any issues so far with the amount of scale that we've handled, which is fantastic. And again, testament to the team uh in just being able to deliver on that kind of promise and that dream. As far as why we're built that way, yeah, we operate both within the kind of EVM framework more broadly. Um, we also operate within Solana. And then, of course, we you know next week we'll announce a new partnership, which gets us into the kind of final leg of that kind of core yield availability network uh as far as blockchains are concerned, to make sure that we offer our clients and our partners kind of one-click exposure to yield from anywhere sort of thing. Um, I think depending on the nascency, the nature, and the general activity uh at any one point in time within a network, a blockchain specifically, we as sort of purveyors of returns, let's say, for our customers should be able to reach in and execute there to both support that activity, increase its longevity, but also make sure that our customers who have entrusted us through our platform with their deposits get the best that the market can offer us, offer from us, rather than say, well, blueprint's not getting us what we expected, and I can kind of go and hunt this on my own. You know, I've always really cared about us owning the complexity for our customers, meaning that they shouldn't have to worry or be left wondering why haven't I achieved something that seems relatively simple to do so? I'm very upfront with why we don't take some things that seem obvious, because we may have done the due diligence where we say there's more risk than may appear at face value, so we don't pursue it. Um that so far has seen us very well. We performed exceptionally well during the October correction last year, um, which is one of the reasons we've grown so dramatically in the last kind of six months, and because we did not take on too much risk because we felt as though it was obvious to us that um people were over their skis. But being multi-chain allows us a lot of flexibility uh and a lot of ways to make sure we get consistent rates of return, plus meet the expectations of our customers.

SPEAKER_00 26:10

Yeah, that makes sense. I really like how you said it, you framed it uh one click exposure to yield anywhere. That's like that's a great uh, you know. I hope you have that on a poster somewhere.

SPEAKER_01 26:22

We'll look into it. Yeah. Yeah, that's it.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

That's a great uh great way to just kind of understand it is like, okay, this is why why we're building, this is the, you know, uh why the decision was made um, or or why we kind of continue to operate that way. Um just one kill click exposure to anywhere, so or yield exposure to anywhere. So um question I had as we're kind of wrapping up here is um I like to ask this of people that are caught on the front lines and building unique and novel products. Um is there anything that you're seeing, any insights or or trends that are maybe like kind of underreported or just not not made a lot of, but that you feel like are are interesting or fascinating um, you know, when you think about your customer base or when you're reaching out and and working on these big partnerships or just thinking about, you know, the the next wave of uh you know capital moving on chain. Like any any interesting wrinkles happening that um that you're seeing.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

I mean, I think something that is probably not necessarily regularly openly discussed is the rate at which large institutions who have either never touched digital assets or blockchain technology before or have never openly expressed any interest are becoming extraordinarily competitive and very sophisticated in not just first principles, but like second and third order effects of what it means to be a participant within networks. Um it's really, really enjoyable for groups like ourselves who've kind of been building, trying to think about where the putt's going to be in servicing those clients. Um but for us right now, I think that is something that is not necessarily easy to see unless you're in the room with those institutions, just how sophisticated they're becoming, but also how meaningfully they're investing time and resources into the space. You see headlines and you see kind of discussions and you see fantastic partnerships being announced right now, but the amount of work that's being done behind the scenes is is pretty, pretty prolific. And uh, we're pretty, pretty excited about what that means for us in the market more broadly.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

Yeah. And it kind of sounds like that sort of underscores your previous point or that that thing we were talking about with leapfrogging, where um, you know, the adoption, rates of adoption and just rates of uh like the evolution of the technology and how long that's taken so far, like it's likely that that's not gonna be the same rate in the future, right? Like once, especially some of these sophisticated um institutions or or um uh groups, uh asset holders um that have not really moved on chain yet, but they're like trying to figure it out. And it's sounds like, you know, um yeah, they're sure there'll be some toe dipping in the water, but once once it kind of starts moving, it might might move quickly and um uh be interesting to see how that does kind of unfold in like where where the new financial products actually come from and um and how that all sort of fits together. Um and what what of what we kind of understand now as DeFi or crypto kind of gets abstracted away in that process, right? So that um, you know, maybe if we have this conversation in a year or two or three or five or whatever, um, you know, we're it's it's not so much about how vaults work or how uh you know where the yield comes from. It's just like, you know, people understand, hey, I can go use this product and you know, with one click I get I get exposure to yield from everywhere, which uh I think would be uh, you know, we're we're seeing that not only in in sort of the the parameters of our conversation, but I think it it's happening on other other facets of it, even just like you know, things like how to set up and use a wallet, and that's getting easier and more abstracted, and um, you know, how to how to actually engage with DeFi is getting easier and more abstracted. And it sounds like that same kind of um change is happening sort of at this institutional kind of maybe behind the scenes kind of level. So have to keep an eye out there for sure. Um so that leaves us, yeah, that leaves us with one one last question, Nick. And uh I'm kind of curious, uh, you know, based on everything you said and and kind of your your journey so far in in building uh Blueprint, what uh do you see uh, you know, if you had to make a a bold, better prediction or even just look out, you know, uh into the onto the horizon, like, you know, some at some point in the future, uh what do you see like something that maybe is exciting or interesting, or you're just kind of keeping an eye on and kind of, you know, like like you said, your your whole company is kind of designed to to uh try to figure out where the puck's going before everybody else. So so with that mentality or that kind of like view, what what are you kind of looking at right now?

SPEAKER_01 31:09

I mean, I think that for a long time within digital assets, blockchain, crypto, whichever way you you'd like to couch it, we've loved these predictions, like whether it's Bitcoin all-time high, ether all time high, or you know, corrections, market trends, you know, when do we get a billion users? Whatever it might be, we've loved forecasting. Um we've probably never got it perfectly right. And of course, if we're all really good at predicting, um, you know, there wouldn't be much fun in playing the game. But the I actually think what is most exciting to me as I look out over kind of a 24 to 72 month horizon in that kind of period where you expect a market to go from this instantiation of institutional adoption and more sophistication and more broadly available products to what I would say is steady-state mainstream scale. I would like to think that within 24 months, there are everyday people who almost unknowingly receive benefit from digital asset yield. And what I mean by that is whether that's embedded financial products within credit cards, saving products, perhaps even the integration within IRAs or 401k adoption within kind of employment opportunities. When these digital asset products become a durable, sustainable mechanism to generate rates of return that outstrip traditional financial instrumentation at an acceptable risk delta, my most exciting day will be knowing that there is somebody who has no idea that they just received value within their savings account, that credit card benefits, whatever it might be from a digital asset or a DeFi type mechanism, that tells me we've probably placed our bet on the right horse for the next kind of five to 10 years. I think that can happen pretty comfortably within three to five years. I'd love to see it happen kind of, you know, more so than just in small isolation within the next 24 months. Yeah. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 33:06

I like that. Uh yeah, and it's kind of like one of the themes that that keeps coming up when when we're talking to people on exponential is, you know, this this sort of concept of hiding the wiring of of all the crypto and and DeFi stuff that we talk about. And uh we like we like to talk about the technology aspects, but but like the real interesting part comes when we kind of stop talking about the technology and it just works well. Um people can use it safely, they can access it from anywhere in the world. And, you know, it um in this case, it it also generates some kind of reward or some kind of yield for them. So it's actually um useful in that regard. So uh will be interesting for sure. That's something I I keep coming back to, that kind of that moment of hiding the wiring. And maybe, maybe it's not just one moment, but like sometime, you know, I'm I'm sure we'll we'll face that where it's like we we do some kind of financial transaction or or some kind of activity on the internet and and you know, we we're using crypto rails or or uh a DeFi strategy without kind of even being aware of it. And that that will be really cool. Um uh and we'll just have to pay attention to those moments because um it'll be be a massive milestone, a massive unlock for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But with that, Nick, I uh appreciate your time today. I'll I'll let you go. Thank you so much for for joining Exponential and walking us through what you're building. And um uh congratulations on the launch of Concrete. That sounds really, really cool. We'll have to go check that out. And um, yeah, just thanks again for your time.

SPEAKER_01 34:38

Thanks so much, man.

SPEAKER_00 34:40

All right. Thank you for listening to this episode of Exponential. We'll be back next week with another show featuring people, code, and capital. Please like, review, and share Exponential wherever you listen to your podcast. And be sure to visit app.nexus.xyz to see what we are building.