Join us on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, where host John Furrier meets with David Namdar – CEO of CEA Industries and BNB Network Co. – to unpack a new digital-asset treasury play in an exclusive theCUBE + NYSE Wired “Crypto Trailblazers: Wall St On-Chain interview”. Namdar details a $500M PIPE at CEA Industries and the launch of BNB Network Co. as a bid to become the first NASDAQ-listed BNB treasury strategy. He contrasts the approach with the MicroStrategy model and explains why he believes BNB is undervalued: Binance’s scale (~290M users and volumes 5–8x Coinbase), BNB’s deflationary mechanics and BNB’s role as “digital infrastructure equity.” The conversation grounds big-picture market caps (Bitcoin >$2T, Ethereum ~$500B, BNB ~$120B) in a practical thesis around disciplined accumulation.
Furrier and Namdar dig into the collision of DeFi and TradFi; comparing treasury strategies with passive ETFs, flagging $100–$200B in expected capital inflows via public markets and reading policy shifts that could open U.S. investor access to global exchanges.
Namdar unpacks BNB’s token economics, with dual burn mechanisms removing 4–5% of supply – over $1B each quarter – and momentum around tokenized stocks and RWAs. He stresses optimism as the engine of financial entrepreneurship, noting BNB’s near all-time highs and consistent outperformance of Bitcoin since his strategy began.
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
Sign in to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Register For theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers
Please fill out the information below. You will recieve an email with a verification link confirming your registration. Click the link to automatically sign into the site.
You’re almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please click the verification button in the email. Once your email address is verified, you will have full access to all event content for theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers.
I want my badge and interests to be visible to all attendees.
Checking this box will display your presense on the attendees list, view your profile and allow other attendees to contact you via 1-1 chat. Read the Privacy Policy. At any time, you can choose to disable this preference.
Select your Interests!
add
Upload your photo
Uploading..
OR
Connect via Twitter
Connect via Linkedin
EDIT PASSWORD
Share
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
Sign in to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Sign in to gain access to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers
Please sign in with LinkedIn to continue to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers. Signing in with LinkedIn ensures a professional environment.
Are you sure you want to remove access rights for this user?
Details
Manage Access
email address
Community Invitation
Bryan Pellegrino, LayerZero Labs
Join us on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, where host John Furrier meets with David Namdar – CEO of CEA Industries and BNB Network Co. – to unpack a new digital-asset treasury play in an exclusive theCUBE + NYSE Wired “Crypto Trailblazers: Wall St On-Chain interview”. Namdar details a $500M PIPE at CEA Industries and the launch of BNB Network Co. as a bid to become the first NASDAQ-listed BNB treasury strategy. He contrasts the approach with the MicroStrategy model and explains why he believes BNB is undervalued: Binance’s scale (~290M users and volumes 5–8x Coinbase), BNB’s deflationary mechanics and BNB’s role as “digital infrastructure equity.” The conversation grounds big-picture market caps (Bitcoin >$2T, Ethereum ~$500B, BNB ~$120B) in a practical thesis around disciplined accumulation.
Furrier and Namdar dig into the collision of DeFi and TradFi; comparing treasury strategies with passive ETFs, flagging $100–$200B in expected capital inflows via public markets and reading policy shifts that could open U.S. investor access to global exchanges.
Namdar unpacks BNB’s token economics, with dual burn mechanisms removing 4–5% of supply – over $1B each quarter – and momentum around tokenized stocks and RWAs. He stresses optimism as the engine of financial entrepreneurship, noting BNB’s near all-time highs and consistent outperformance of Bitcoin since his strategy began.
play_circle_outlineLayerZero connects different blockchain chains, facilitating communication between them.
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineBridging Finance: Bryan Pellegrino on Middleware's Role in Decentralized and Traditional Financial Interactions and Blockchain Interoperability
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineLayerZero abstracts gas fees across chains for seamless user transactions and developer experience.
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineBuilding Trust in Blockchain: Lessons from Early Internet Standards and the Role of Decentralization in Financial Technology
>> Welcome back, everyone, to the Crypto Trailblazer series. This is theCUBE Studio in the New York Stock Exchange, of course. We have our studio in Palo Alto, connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street and the rest of the world around one of the most hottest trends, AI infrastructure, crypto infrastructure, all coming together. But the decentralized nature of crypto infrastructure is enabling a new form of patterns, money making, but more importantly, a disruptive enablement that's going to change the world, and we're featuring all the leaders here. We've got Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO of LayerZero. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Thank you so much for having me.>> It's interesting, the observation I've had since doing the series here at the NYSC Wired community is that the market is accepting it, it's mainstreaming. You go back a couple of years ago, it's like, "Keep them," but they were secretly working on it too, all the banks, all the institutions. Now you have money meets tech, tech money is happening. You guys are in the middle of it, you got significant backers. Explain what the company does. I want to get into this, because you're at a critical part of this connective tissue that is interoperating the protocol level. Explain what you guys do and we'll jump in.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> In a very simple way, we connect every chain. The insight we had was, years ago, when we started to have all these chains spin up, I looked at it as... This is pre-internet world. You got Stanford, you got DARPA, you got all these networks of computers that exist. None of them can talk to each other. Right now, we have a bunch of distributed execution environments that are chains, that's all they are, and there's no way for them to talk to each other. We were trying to build something for ourselves, and what we're trying to build needed you to execute contracts on both chains. There's no way to do that. That is the core of what we've done, is built a communication layer to do that and basically to allow these chains to talk to each other. Fast-forward today, we have $200 million-ish of applications built on top of us, we've had $36 billion move across the rails this month alone, so now it's grown to now it's real meaningful transactional volume. You have single transactions of $800 million being moved, and we can go into what that looks like, because the cost structure of a lot of this stuff is changing drastically, but that's what we do. We allow arbitrary contract invocation across any chain, so you can build any applications. They have to be financial, it doesn't have to be money. Be anything, any information, just like a packet on the internet.>> Yeah, DeFi and TradFi, I was talking to someone from TechSci, that's back-end, front-end. What are we talking about here? Come on. Where's the middleware? I have to ask you on the protocol, where is it sitting and how do you guys abstract that away from the app?
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yeah, so I think the approach that had been taken prior to us was everyone had this vision of, "We're going to make our own thing and put it in the middle, and everything will flow through us," which is a great vision, because naturally, you're going to consume all of the transactions of all over the world. We took the vision that we are that middle thing, or anybody's that middle thing. It's very hard for the rest of the world to just delegate trust to that thing, so we're actually entirely stateless. LayerZero and endpoint lives on every chain. It's just a library of smart contracts that lives on chain, it's completely stateless itself. What's happening is some transaction's happening on a source chain, you are taking attestation of that and presenting on another chain and establishing effectively a channel across that, and that's how communication is happening. The protocol itself is stateless, endpoints that live on all these 140 chains, and the applications themselves come in and build on top of it. Now, the main layer of abstraction you have to build to give a good experience is, if I'm going from Ethereum to Solana, I have ETH on Ethereum, I don't necessarily have Sol on Solana, so I have to pay a transaction here and a transaction there, and I don't have one of those currencies. One of the things we do that's very convenient for the developer is just completely abstract that side of things. If you're a user, even if you're doing five hops across five chains and touching all these different states and execution, you only ever sign your transaction one time, you pay your gas on the local chain, everything else is fully abstracted away. When you're talking front end, when you're talking developer, the experience for that is just completely seamless. The user is just performing an action->> You sit on all the chains so that you create that peer-to-peer, if you will, connection to make that one piece. You manage the Sol on Solana for them on their behalf and do that for them.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Only on the gas side, so not... Again, if you're transferring $100 million worth of ETH, it's not like we have $100 million of ETH inventory sitting on both sides, but we're paying the gas on each side and abstracting the gas, so we're dealing with gas inventory across all of these chains, pricing in real time, so on these end->> You're like an option exchange, too. Awesome. When did it really kick in for you, when you said, "Okay, this is working"? When was the moment it started clicking, "Wow, this is actually working"?
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yeah, we started with zero. We're a bunch of nerds just building, we didn't intend to start a company, to be quite honest with you. We were building something that we needed ourselves, because it's a piece of technology that we thought was very interesting. Really, when we started going to people and we built it for ourselves, we built our own first product on top of this thing, we go to people and it was very clear that people needed this. Then we started working with some of our biggest partners, so this is when you see things like Tether's USDT, PayPal is PYUSD. All of the stable coins, all of that flow now is happening on top of us. Really, you started to see people say, "Okay." Not just, "Okay, this is cool. Let me try it," but, "Okay, I did this and now I have $10 billion more of AUM, right?" They really started to move the needle for people, so it was really just that you saw how quickly it connected with the developers itself. Then as we continue to just really focus on building the best experience, you started to see really big unlocks happening at the level of the application. Not just, "This is cool," or, "We have a great partnership to announce," but hey, this very meaningfully moved the needle for the business itself.>> It's a piece of the puzzle. I love the word "Plumbing," because the old infrastructure days, plumbing was moving packets from point A to point B. You curated the plumbing at a level that was not disruptive, so it's easy to execute, just get that at that point. Managing the gas, which is a key problem, people were having problems with. Maybe the old days gateways were always never 100% good, so that was a problem. Interoperability has been one of those thorny issues that requires standards. Back in pre-internet, TCPIP made that happen. In a way, that's happening here. What made this happen? Was it just the standard of being simple or what was the key enabler there?
Bryan Pellegrino
>> It's funny. My first job was when I was in university and my two co-founders, we worked in an interoperability lab working on standards for all of the early internet technologies, so I was working on voiceover IP standards, they were data center bridging. Yeah, DSL. Yeah, we're very, very familiar with that world, with IEEE, the way to get to proper standards. I think there was two things that really moved the needle from our side. One, of course, is standardization. We created token standard. Again, we have hundreds of billions of dollars of assets built on top of this token standard that just makes it easy, makes it normalized, battle tested, audited, all of those things. Yes, that mattered. I think the big thing, though, the largest difference in our architecture was a shift in the layer of trust. A shift in the layer of trust was if I was designing this thing in the middle, where everything ran through me, then you, as an athlete... Say you're a Uniswap or Ave, you got 30, $50 billion there. Are you going to delegate the trust of those assets to me to control whatever structure I'm putting together? If you're JPMorgan and Goldman and settling a trade, are you going to delegate it to give me right access to your chain to me? Of course not. Our big insight was like every one of these channels is unique and you can have shared structures around that, but you have to give them the ability to own it directly, so if you think about Circle CCTP, that's how they move assets. You allow every issuer to own their own CCP. They have the ability to have full control over attestation, over security. If you are now JPMorgan and Goldman and you're settling a trade, you can handshake directly. We are the protocol layer that that happens, we are the technology that enables that, but it really was this move towards more immutable decentralization. Here is what this actually looks like, and then everything and build on top. Then we have spent the time to build this, to make it easy, to make it compelling, to do everything, but it was really the shift to get the people who really mattered and get the big applications that were going to move, you had to give them the lever to own the control if they want to own the control. That was just unintuitive, I think, at the time.>> Yeah, Bryan, I brought up the TCPIP because when I was in my twenties, the OSI seven-layer model came out. You're familiar with that, obviously, because you worked on it, but all seven layers actually never happened. But the ones that matter did, and then what happened next... By the way, it was like de facto standard. When the spec was just loose, it wasn't brittle, but it was just like, "Okay, here it is," and it was adopted. Once you had that orchestration and solidarity around, "Let's just get behind this," because magic happens. Once that happens, that killed the proprietary NOSs, network operating systems, or the IBMs and the Dex and the mini computers. That ushered in a massive wealth creation, because everyone else just took the top.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yep.>> Because the interoperability piece was the most important piece. That probably was the most disruptive enabler since decentralized that I could think of. I would put NVIDIA in that class and GPUs for sure, so GPU work and then this. I really can't think of any other disruptive enabler. Even the iPhone, I would say, doesn't match that, because it was one company. What is your view on what this will unlock for the future? What's your vision? Because if that is any prediction of future behavior, it's going to create more entrepreneurship, more creativity, more financial products, better everything. What's your vision on what this will disrupt and enable?
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yeah, my view is we're living through right now one of the most unique times in history where it's... If you think about the structural change in money and how money works around the financials, it's hard to think about living through something larger than that. You look at it now, Tether has created this unbelievable business. $16 billion of the profits this year, and it's largely bottoms-up through emerging market nations that want access to US dollars and want access to these, and they just haven't had a way to have access before. I saw a chart that somebody posted on the mobility of money throughout history and globalization, and you basically had this run up in the late 1800s to early 1900s where people said, "Wars are done, globalization has solved everything." 1914 happens and it drops straight down, and it takes almost 80 years until you start to re-ramp and recover. What happened is a lot of this was a global-instituted policy at the nation level and normal citizens and people had no ability, there was no capital mobility right now. Really, this technology has given away for bottoms-up mobility. Again, you can have somebody in Argentina, you can have somebody in Nigeria, in Egypt, in Turkey, and any of these places who have super high inflation, have all these issues happening, and now they have access to dollars. Not only have access to dollars, now you were talking about financial innovation, now they have access to lending and savings rates, now they have access to all of these structures that are being on top of this in a way that just didn't happen before. Before globalization and mobility, money was really defined. It was trade, it was physical trade, and now you have mobility of actual dollars, mobility of financial products, mobility of all of this happening from the bottoms up. Anybody with a phone, anybody with a computer has access to this stuff now, and that's just such a large change, it's almost hard to wrap your mind around.>> Well, one thing just to riff on that is, what decentralized does is creates a truth layer. Because if you look at The 1929 Panic, a book out by Andrew Ross Sorkin around 1929 crash, he's all on the TV, I've seen on all the pods, and he's trying to get people to say, "Are we going to have another 19..." Well, if you look at the market last week, another entrepreneur that was in here before you said it really didn't panic on the other side, it panicked here. Panic's an emotional thing. Running the bank sets a human reaction, has nothing to do with math. You could argue that the transparency of the market is there, you're talking about inflation. Why doesn't inflation happen in these areas? Bad government or bad things happen, bad human decisions, whatever. Macro non-related things to the reality of life. Now, the impact is significant to the people. This now is now interesting, because... What's your thoughts and reaction to that? Because you can almost say that the transparency and the efficiency is a almost true capitalism in the measurements that's just analytics.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yep. I think, again, which you have... Part of it was just access. If you were living in whatever country, in Indonesia and anywhere, it was extremely difficult to get US dollars, to buy US equities, to hold to all of these things that are becoming potentially possible as you move forward, and dollars are very possible. The economic freedom that an individual enjoys has massive->> If I'm living in a country that's got massive inflation for whatever reason, they all have their reasons, I just get my wallet. I purchase with USD-
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yeah, you walk around El Salvador->> this noise to me now at this point. The merchants can just go retail-
Bryan Pellegrino
>> They want, they want-... >> all the services and the banks, I'm just going to have different rails. One goes to the inflation, no one's going to go there, because everything just went down. This, to me, is the fundamental thing. All right, so I got to imagine that the appetite for what you're working on is high, given the success. Tell me the origination story and then the journey to financing and the froth in the market. Share the story.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Sure. My background is a little bit all over. I grew up in a rural town of 900 people, I'm a nerd with a computer, there's nothing around. I went to school for computer science and dropped out to play poker professionally, of all things. I did 80 countries, I traveled the world, I played the highest stakes. The game that I played, I was one of the best players in the world, and then online poker gets banned in the US, so I saw regulation like that. My job, all my money was locked up, everything was done and frozen, and that's actually when I found Bitcoin, because Bitcoin was the original way that you could move money between the remaining poker sites, so first product-market fit was okay. Outside of existing regulations->> "Things are blocked, let's unblock it with this."
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yes, exactly. I found Bitcoin then, started a company, sold it, built some machine learning models, sold into some pro baseball teams, another company, and then did some academic research, published with Noam Brown and AI, did all of that stuff. Really smart contracts is what changed everything for me. Ethereum comes out, you have smart contracts, and I was like, "Okay, before we had money, we had Bitcoin, we had this form of thing that's interesting." I was passionate about, I was mining, I was doing all of these things. Then you have programmable money, and that was a night and day difference. Again, it was very interesting there, but it wasn't until Binance Smart Chain, BNB Chain, now came out. You really started to hear, "More volume than Ethereum, more users than Ethereum," and that was very idiosyncratic. Other things existed, but people didn't actually use them. Now we're like, "Okay, what can you actually do here? What would you do if you had this environment? Ethereum's very expensive at the time, it's hard to do real computation there. Maybe something that's fast and cheap." You just treat it as entirely ephemeral. What do you do? It's almost like a roll-up before a roll-up, so we just started building toy things for ourselves of, "Here is this environment, let's build something here, and those roll the result back to Ethereum." As we were trying to do that, we realized, "Wait, there is no way to do the execution across the two environments," so then we were like, "Okay, but surely somebody solved this." Then we started looking to bridges. We looked in the state of bridging at the time, we're horrified. It was like, "Oh, my God, how's anybody using any of this stuff?" Really, and since then, we're $5 billion of bridge hacks later, and everything that existed then has been hacked. It was really bad.>> Yeah, exactly.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Then we started looking into, "What would a better design for this be?" As we started to go through building->> You went to the drawing board, basically.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Went to the drawing board of, "How would we rebuild this thing better?" There's a real building than that, we realized there's still no way to execute. Even if you wanted a bridge, that gets rid of wrapped assets, native assets only. You're adding here, subtracting them, just simple inventory exchange. You still have to execute the contracts on both sides, you still need a layer for doing that. We just realized, "This is very clearly the generalizable problem," so really, we were building it again with zero intention to start a company. We were building it for ourselves, we were building it to->> You had the problem....
Bryan Pellegrino
>> build this thing, and we built the thing that we knew we needed as the developer and we really tried to harden ourselves, and that it was it. It was just after we launched, we launched March of 2022, and it was a messy environment early, there's a bunch of people trying to solve the same problem, and it has been this sort of slow march to where... I remember the first time we moved $1 million across the rails. It was exciting, it was like, "Somebody, we don't know who it is, somebody in the world is using this, it's real capital. This is happening." Just last week, we had an $800 million transfer and a $550 million transfer, and you move $800 million for... I think it was like $1.80 or something. You know what I mean? You're talking like something that's just completely disconnected from the world that exists today, and in trying to actually move->> Just for the people that don't know how hard it is, what's the alternative to move $800 million? What would you have to do? People don't understand that, but scope the magnitude difference between the old way.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> The magnitude difference is you have to have a bank that's open, you have a bank that is going to allow you to move that size, you have to go through swift , so much stuff to move. Even try to send $100,000 wire in your bank, you're going to get a phone call, you're going to have to answer all of these screening questions. You're going to have to do everything. It is just a mess, so the ability to do on demand, there is an economic opportunity. You want free flowing capital, so you fast-forward->> All right, so you hit product market fit. Obviously, you saw it, you were engineering for yourselves. Obviously, your friends needed it, which is your fellow builders. It starts working. When does the money come in? Do they come after you? Was it like, "We should raise money"?
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yeah.>> Who was the first person that hit you up?
Bryan Pellegrino
>> We had a very idiosyncratic raising environment, in that, in all four of our rounds, we were never actively raising. We were preempted all three times, even through a round at $3 billion, we never had a pitch deck. We had a very non-standard experience. We had lightning in a bottle, really. Our first round was two at 25. This was just friends, friends knew we were building, we're excited about we're talking. They said, "Let us give you... Turn this into , let us give you something," so we did that. Our second round was 6.450, our second round was really, "We want to have the largest or second-largest stakeholder of every major D5 protocol in the world. We want to have people who work deeply with these people, who know them, who can work with us to help get these integrations and do that."
Our second round was co-led by Multicoin and Binance, big set of people. Then our rounds after that was 135 at a billion and 120 at 3 billion, and both of those were co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. I think we were the first round ever in the time that they had shared that they had co-led, which was like amazing testament.>> Dogs and cats living together?
Bryan Pellegrino
>> They've been amazing, so I'm really glad. We actually turned down, at $1 billion, we turned down $1.5 billion to get the groups that we wanted, because our focus then we->> Yeah, it's all about teamwork there.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> We said, "Listen, we know what we're building from the technology side. We don't want input on the technology, it's not that we won't welcome it. What we don't know is how to build a world-class company." That's what we want, that's what we're trying to pull out.>> Have support, too.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> 100%.>> A bunch of people around you that's not going to get in your way. They're not going to speed you up or slow you down.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yep. Yeah, so we went through the round, went through the round at a billion, went through the round at 3 billion. It was really just, "Who can we pull in? Who are the most strategic best partners?" Groups like Coinbase, groups like Circle, groups like PayPal. All investors across the board, unbelievable.>> Give the quick stats on the company. Obviously, you started 2022. People, what you're looking to do, some key metrics you're tracking that you follow, and what you're focused on, what you're optimizing for.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> We are about 150 people right now spread out between New York, Vancouver, and Hong Kong, so three offices across the board. Global clients everywhere. In terms of people building on top of us, we have 65,000 contracts built on top of us. Pushing 600 to 1,000 real meaningful applications driving volume. We've done about $36 billion of volume on top of us this month. All of the names, almost every major stable coin outside of one or two, all built on top of us, all the big names there. More and more now has been with the intersection of traditional finance and this, so all of your big wonderful groups here in New York and what everybody's doing. Same thing with the fintechs. Metrics we care about, we care about, "How much money's moving?" Real economic value that's unlocking. Where is that trending? What does it look like? Where is it? Clear, stable coins has been just massive product market fit for us, so that has been phenomenal. Other than that, it's the speed of developers. What does developer adoption look like? Overall messaging across the network, those are the real things we're focused on.>> Yeah, you've got a great mission and the timing is important, that you stay focused on that, because like we talked about earlier, interoperability protocols, it's an enabler, right? Ecosystem will develop, builders will build on top of it, money will move. It's plumbing, so you got to connect to other things and keep that solid, and then once that's done, release the innovation.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yep.>> Congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Thank you so much.>> Definitely trailblazing. Trailblazing happens at many levels. Again, the plumbing on the infrastructure side of crypto is super important. As this new era comes in with stable coins and as money infrastructure and the applications and the process are going to be built... We didn't even get to that, we'll come back in another segment and talk about that and the entrepreneurial opportunities that will be formed from the great innovation. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.
>> Welcome back, everyone, to the Crypto Trailblazer series. This is theCUBE Studio in the New York Stock Exchange, of course. We have our studio in Palo Alto, connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street and the rest of the world around one of the most hottest trends, AI infrastructure, crypto infrastructure, all coming together. But the decentralized nature of crypto infrastructure is enabling a new form of patterns, money making, but more importantly, a disruptive enablement that's going to change the world, and we're featuring all the leaders here. We've got Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO of LayerZero. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Thank you so much for having me.>> It's interesting, the observation I've had since doing the series here at the NYSC Wired community is that the market is accepting it, it's mainstreaming. You go back a couple of years ago, it's like, "Keep them," but they were secretly working on it too, all the banks, all the institutions. Now you have money meets tech, tech money is happening. You guys are in the middle of it, you got significant backers. Explain what the company does. I want to get into this, because you're at a critical part of this connective tissue that is interoperating the protocol level. Explain what you guys do and we'll jump in.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> In a very simple way, we connect every chain. The insight we had was, years ago, when we started to have all these chains spin up, I looked at it as... This is pre-internet world. You got Stanford, you got DARPA, you got all these networks of computers that exist. None of them can talk to each other. Right now, we have a bunch of distributed execution environments that are chains, that's all they are, and there's no way for them to talk to each other. We were trying to build something for ourselves, and what we're trying to build needed you to execute contracts on both chains. There's no way to do that. That is the core of what we've done, is built a communication layer to do that and basically to allow these chains to talk to each other. Fast-forward today, we have $200 million-ish of applications built on top of us, we've had $36 billion move across the rails this month alone, so now it's grown to now it's real meaningful transactional volume. You have single transactions of $800 million being moved, and we can go into what that looks like, because the cost structure of a lot of this stuff is changing drastically, but that's what we do. We allow arbitrary contract invocation across any chain, so you can build any applications. They have to be financial, it doesn't have to be money. Be anything, any information, just like a packet on the internet.>> Yeah, DeFi and TradFi, I was talking to someone from TechSci, that's back-end, front-end. What are we talking about here? Come on. Where's the middleware? I have to ask you on the protocol, where is it sitting and how do you guys abstract that away from the app?
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yeah, so I think the approach that had been taken prior to us was everyone had this vision of, "We're going to make our own thing and put it in the middle, and everything will flow through us," which is a great vision, because naturally, you're going to consume all of the transactions of all over the world. We took the vision that we are that middle thing, or anybody's that middle thing. It's very hard for the rest of the world to just delegate trust to that thing, so we're actually entirely stateless. LayerZero and endpoint lives on every chain. It's just a library of smart contracts that lives on chain, it's completely stateless itself. What's happening is some transaction's happening on a source chain, you are taking attestation of that and presenting on another chain and establishing effectively a channel across that, and that's how communication is happening. The protocol itself is stateless, endpoints that live on all these 140 chains, and the applications themselves come in and build on top of it. Now, the main layer of abstraction you have to build to give a good experience is, if I'm going from Ethereum to Solana, I have ETH on Ethereum, I don't necessarily have Sol on Solana, so I have to pay a transaction here and a transaction there, and I don't have one of those currencies. One of the things we do that's very convenient for the developer is just completely abstract that side of things. If you're a user, even if you're doing five hops across five chains and touching all these different states and execution, you only ever sign your transaction one time, you pay your gas on the local chain, everything else is fully abstracted away. When you're talking front end, when you're talking developer, the experience for that is just completely seamless. The user is just performing an action->> You sit on all the chains so that you create that peer-to-peer, if you will, connection to make that one piece. You manage the Sol on Solana for them on their behalf and do that for them.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Only on the gas side, so not... Again, if you're transferring $100 million worth of ETH, it's not like we have $100 million of ETH inventory sitting on both sides, but we're paying the gas on each side and abstracting the gas, so we're dealing with gas inventory across all of these chains, pricing in real time, so on these end->> You're like an option exchange, too. Awesome. When did it really kick in for you, when you said, "Okay, this is working"? When was the moment it started clicking, "Wow, this is actually working"?
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yeah, we started with zero. We're a bunch of nerds just building, we didn't intend to start a company, to be quite honest with you. We were building something that we needed ourselves, because it's a piece of technology that we thought was very interesting. Really, when we started going to people and we built it for ourselves, we built our own first product on top of this thing, we go to people and it was very clear that people needed this. Then we started working with some of our biggest partners, so this is when you see things like Tether's USDT, PayPal is PYUSD. All of the stable coins, all of that flow now is happening on top of us. Really, you started to see people say, "Okay." Not just, "Okay, this is cool. Let me try it," but, "Okay, I did this and now I have $10 billion more of AUM, right?" They really started to move the needle for people, so it was really just that you saw how quickly it connected with the developers itself. Then as we continue to just really focus on building the best experience, you started to see really big unlocks happening at the level of the application. Not just, "This is cool," or, "We have a great partnership to announce," but hey, this very meaningfully moved the needle for the business itself.>> It's a piece of the puzzle. I love the word "Plumbing," because the old infrastructure days, plumbing was moving packets from point A to point B. You curated the plumbing at a level that was not disruptive, so it's easy to execute, just get that at that point. Managing the gas, which is a key problem, people were having problems with. Maybe the old days gateways were always never 100% good, so that was a problem. Interoperability has been one of those thorny issues that requires standards. Back in pre-internet, TCPIP made that happen. In a way, that's happening here. What made this happen? Was it just the standard of being simple or what was the key enabler there?
Bryan Pellegrino
>> It's funny. My first job was when I was in university and my two co-founders, we worked in an interoperability lab working on standards for all of the early internet technologies, so I was working on voiceover IP standards, they were data center bridging. Yeah, DSL. Yeah, we're very, very familiar with that world, with IEEE, the way to get to proper standards. I think there was two things that really moved the needle from our side. One, of course, is standardization. We created token standard. Again, we have hundreds of billions of dollars of assets built on top of this token standard that just makes it easy, makes it normalized, battle tested, audited, all of those things. Yes, that mattered. I think the big thing, though, the largest difference in our architecture was a shift in the layer of trust. A shift in the layer of trust was if I was designing this thing in the middle, where everything ran through me, then you, as an athlete... Say you're a Uniswap or Ave, you got 30, $50 billion there. Are you going to delegate the trust of those assets to me to control whatever structure I'm putting together? If you're JPMorgan and Goldman and settling a trade, are you going to delegate it to give me right access to your chain to me? Of course not. Our big insight was like every one of these channels is unique and you can have shared structures around that, but you have to give them the ability to own it directly, so if you think about Circle CCTP, that's how they move assets. You allow every issuer to own their own CCP. They have the ability to have full control over attestation, over security. If you are now JPMorgan and Goldman and you're settling a trade, you can handshake directly. We are the protocol layer that that happens, we are the technology that enables that, but it really was this move towards more immutable decentralization. Here is what this actually looks like, and then everything and build on top. Then we have spent the time to build this, to make it easy, to make it compelling, to do everything, but it was really the shift to get the people who really mattered and get the big applications that were going to move, you had to give them the lever to own the control if they want to own the control. That was just unintuitive, I think, at the time.>> Yeah, Bryan, I brought up the TCPIP because when I was in my twenties, the OSI seven-layer model came out. You're familiar with that, obviously, because you worked on it, but all seven layers actually never happened. But the ones that matter did, and then what happened next... By the way, it was like de facto standard. When the spec was just loose, it wasn't brittle, but it was just like, "Okay, here it is," and it was adopted. Once you had that orchestration and solidarity around, "Let's just get behind this," because magic happens. Once that happens, that killed the proprietary NOSs, network operating systems, or the IBMs and the Dex and the mini computers. That ushered in a massive wealth creation, because everyone else just took the top.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yep.>> Because the interoperability piece was the most important piece. That probably was the most disruptive enabler since decentralized that I could think of. I would put NVIDIA in that class and GPUs for sure, so GPU work and then this. I really can't think of any other disruptive enabler. Even the iPhone, I would say, doesn't match that, because it was one company. What is your view on what this will unlock for the future? What's your vision? Because if that is any prediction of future behavior, it's going to create more entrepreneurship, more creativity, more financial products, better everything. What's your vision on what this will disrupt and enable?
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yeah, my view is we're living through right now one of the most unique times in history where it's... If you think about the structural change in money and how money works around the financials, it's hard to think about living through something larger than that. You look at it now, Tether has created this unbelievable business. $16 billion of the profits this year, and it's largely bottoms-up through emerging market nations that want access to US dollars and want access to these, and they just haven't had a way to have access before. I saw a chart that somebody posted on the mobility of money throughout history and globalization, and you basically had this run up in the late 1800s to early 1900s where people said, "Wars are done, globalization has solved everything." 1914 happens and it drops straight down, and it takes almost 80 years until you start to re-ramp and recover. What happened is a lot of this was a global-instituted policy at the nation level and normal citizens and people had no ability, there was no capital mobility right now. Really, this technology has given away for bottoms-up mobility. Again, you can have somebody in Argentina, you can have somebody in Nigeria, in Egypt, in Turkey, and any of these places who have super high inflation, have all these issues happening, and now they have access to dollars. Not only have access to dollars, now you were talking about financial innovation, now they have access to lending and savings rates, now they have access to all of these structures that are being on top of this in a way that just didn't happen before. Before globalization and mobility, money was really defined. It was trade, it was physical trade, and now you have mobility of actual dollars, mobility of financial products, mobility of all of this happening from the bottoms up. Anybody with a phone, anybody with a computer has access to this stuff now, and that's just such a large change, it's almost hard to wrap your mind around.>> Well, one thing just to riff on that is, what decentralized does is creates a truth layer. Because if you look at The 1929 Panic, a book out by Andrew Ross Sorkin around 1929 crash, he's all on the TV, I've seen on all the pods, and he's trying to get people to say, "Are we going to have another 19..." Well, if you look at the market last week, another entrepreneur that was in here before you said it really didn't panic on the other side, it panicked here. Panic's an emotional thing. Running the bank sets a human reaction, has nothing to do with math. You could argue that the transparency of the market is there, you're talking about inflation. Why doesn't inflation happen in these areas? Bad government or bad things happen, bad human decisions, whatever. Macro non-related things to the reality of life. Now, the impact is significant to the people. This now is now interesting, because... What's your thoughts and reaction to that? Because you can almost say that the transparency and the efficiency is a almost true capitalism in the measurements that's just analytics.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yep. I think, again, which you have... Part of it was just access. If you were living in whatever country, in Indonesia and anywhere, it was extremely difficult to get US dollars, to buy US equities, to hold to all of these things that are becoming potentially possible as you move forward, and dollars are very possible. The economic freedom that an individual enjoys has massive->> If I'm living in a country that's got massive inflation for whatever reason, they all have their reasons, I just get my wallet. I purchase with USD-
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yeah, you walk around El Salvador->> this noise to me now at this point. The merchants can just go retail-
Bryan Pellegrino
>> They want, they want-... >> all the services and the banks, I'm just going to have different rails. One goes to the inflation, no one's going to go there, because everything just went down. This, to me, is the fundamental thing. All right, so I got to imagine that the appetite for what you're working on is high, given the success. Tell me the origination story and then the journey to financing and the froth in the market. Share the story.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Sure. My background is a little bit all over. I grew up in a rural town of 900 people, I'm a nerd with a computer, there's nothing around. I went to school for computer science and dropped out to play poker professionally, of all things. I did 80 countries, I traveled the world, I played the highest stakes. The game that I played, I was one of the best players in the world, and then online poker gets banned in the US, so I saw regulation like that. My job, all my money was locked up, everything was done and frozen, and that's actually when I found Bitcoin, because Bitcoin was the original way that you could move money between the remaining poker sites, so first product-market fit was okay. Outside of existing regulations->> "Things are blocked, let's unblock it with this."
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yes, exactly. I found Bitcoin then, started a company, sold it, built some machine learning models, sold into some pro baseball teams, another company, and then did some academic research, published with Noam Brown and AI, did all of that stuff. Really smart contracts is what changed everything for me. Ethereum comes out, you have smart contracts, and I was like, "Okay, before we had money, we had Bitcoin, we had this form of thing that's interesting." I was passionate about, I was mining, I was doing all of these things. Then you have programmable money, and that was a night and day difference. Again, it was very interesting there, but it wasn't until Binance Smart Chain, BNB Chain, now came out. You really started to hear, "More volume than Ethereum, more users than Ethereum," and that was very idiosyncratic. Other things existed, but people didn't actually use them. Now we're like, "Okay, what can you actually do here? What would you do if you had this environment? Ethereum's very expensive at the time, it's hard to do real computation there. Maybe something that's fast and cheap." You just treat it as entirely ephemeral. What do you do? It's almost like a roll-up before a roll-up, so we just started building toy things for ourselves of, "Here is this environment, let's build something here, and those roll the result back to Ethereum." As we were trying to do that, we realized, "Wait, there is no way to do the execution across the two environments," so then we were like, "Okay, but surely somebody solved this." Then we started looking to bridges. We looked in the state of bridging at the time, we're horrified. It was like, "Oh, my God, how's anybody using any of this stuff?" Really, and since then, we're $5 billion of bridge hacks later, and everything that existed then has been hacked. It was really bad.>> Yeah, exactly.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Then we started looking into, "What would a better design for this be?" As we started to go through building->> You went to the drawing board, basically.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Went to the drawing board of, "How would we rebuild this thing better?" There's a real building than that, we realized there's still no way to execute. Even if you wanted a bridge, that gets rid of wrapped assets, native assets only. You're adding here, subtracting them, just simple inventory exchange. You still have to execute the contracts on both sides, you still need a layer for doing that. We just realized, "This is very clearly the generalizable problem," so really, we were building it again with zero intention to start a company. We were building it for ourselves, we were building it to->> You had the problem....
Bryan Pellegrino
>> build this thing, and we built the thing that we knew we needed as the developer and we really tried to harden ourselves, and that it was it. It was just after we launched, we launched March of 2022, and it was a messy environment early, there's a bunch of people trying to solve the same problem, and it has been this sort of slow march to where... I remember the first time we moved $1 million across the rails. It was exciting, it was like, "Somebody, we don't know who it is, somebody in the world is using this, it's real capital. This is happening." Just last week, we had an $800 million transfer and a $550 million transfer, and you move $800 million for... I think it was like $1.80 or something. You know what I mean? You're talking like something that's just completely disconnected from the world that exists today, and in trying to actually move->> Just for the people that don't know how hard it is, what's the alternative to move $800 million? What would you have to do? People don't understand that, but scope the magnitude difference between the old way.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> The magnitude difference is you have to have a bank that's open, you have a bank that is going to allow you to move that size, you have to go through swift , so much stuff to move. Even try to send $100,000 wire in your bank, you're going to get a phone call, you're going to have to answer all of these screening questions. You're going to have to do everything. It is just a mess, so the ability to do on demand, there is an economic opportunity. You want free flowing capital, so you fast-forward->> All right, so you hit product market fit. Obviously, you saw it, you were engineering for yourselves. Obviously, your friends needed it, which is your fellow builders. It starts working. When does the money come in? Do they come after you? Was it like, "We should raise money"?
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yeah.>> Who was the first person that hit you up?
Bryan Pellegrino
>> We had a very idiosyncratic raising environment, in that, in all four of our rounds, we were never actively raising. We were preempted all three times, even through a round at $3 billion, we never had a pitch deck. We had a very non-standard experience. We had lightning in a bottle, really. Our first round was two at 25. This was just friends, friends knew we were building, we're excited about we're talking. They said, "Let us give you... Turn this into , let us give you something," so we did that. Our second round was 6.450, our second round was really, "We want to have the largest or second-largest stakeholder of every major D5 protocol in the world. We want to have people who work deeply with these people, who know them, who can work with us to help get these integrations and do that."
Our second round was co-led by Multicoin and Binance, big set of people. Then our rounds after that was 135 at a billion and 120 at 3 billion, and both of those were co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. I think we were the first round ever in the time that they had shared that they had co-led, which was like amazing testament.>> Dogs and cats living together?
Bryan Pellegrino
>> They've been amazing, so I'm really glad. We actually turned down, at $1 billion, we turned down $1.5 billion to get the groups that we wanted, because our focus then we->> Yeah, it's all about teamwork there.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> We said, "Listen, we know what we're building from the technology side. We don't want input on the technology, it's not that we won't welcome it. What we don't know is how to build a world-class company." That's what we want, that's what we're trying to pull out.>> Have support, too.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> 100%.>> A bunch of people around you that's not going to get in your way. They're not going to speed you up or slow you down.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yep. Yeah, so we went through the round, went through the round at a billion, went through the round at 3 billion. It was really just, "Who can we pull in? Who are the most strategic best partners?" Groups like Coinbase, groups like Circle, groups like PayPal. All investors across the board, unbelievable.>> Give the quick stats on the company. Obviously, you started 2022. People, what you're looking to do, some key metrics you're tracking that you follow, and what you're focused on, what you're optimizing for.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> We are about 150 people right now spread out between New York, Vancouver, and Hong Kong, so three offices across the board. Global clients everywhere. In terms of people building on top of us, we have 65,000 contracts built on top of us. Pushing 600 to 1,000 real meaningful applications driving volume. We've done about $36 billion of volume on top of us this month. All of the names, almost every major stable coin outside of one or two, all built on top of us, all the big names there. More and more now has been with the intersection of traditional finance and this, so all of your big wonderful groups here in New York and what everybody's doing. Same thing with the fintechs. Metrics we care about, we care about, "How much money's moving?" Real economic value that's unlocking. Where is that trending? What does it look like? Where is it? Clear, stable coins has been just massive product market fit for us, so that has been phenomenal. Other than that, it's the speed of developers. What does developer adoption look like? Overall messaging across the network, those are the real things we're focused on.>> Yeah, you've got a great mission and the timing is important, that you stay focused on that, because like we talked about earlier, interoperability protocols, it's an enabler, right? Ecosystem will develop, builders will build on top of it, money will move. It's plumbing, so you got to connect to other things and keep that solid, and then once that's done, release the innovation.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Yep.>> Congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it.
Bryan Pellegrino
>> Thank you so much.>> Definitely trailblazing. Trailblazing happens at many levels. Again, the plumbing on the infrastructure side of crypto is super important. As this new era comes in with stable coins and as money infrastructure and the applications and the process are going to be built... We didn't even get to that, we'll come back in another segment and talk about that and the entrepreneurial opportunities that will be formed from the great innovation. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.
