In this insightful episode of the Crypto Trailblazers series hosted by theCUBE, Mike Cagney of Figure Markets sits down with analysts from theCUBE Research to discuss groundbreaking advancements in blockchain technology and their implications for the finance sector. This video is part of the NYSE Wired digital event, aimed at bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and Wall Street by integrating technology and finance.
Cagney, an eminent figure in fintech, shares expertise on the transformative role of blockchain in financial markets during this interview. Conducted by seasoned analysts at theCUBE, the discussion delves into Figure’s innovative contributions, including their blockchain-native loan origination and securitization process. He outlines how Figure leverages blockchain to achieve cost reductions, enhanced security and improved liquidity in financial transactions.
Key takeaways from the interview highlight insights on the evolution of the Web3 ecosystem, such as the emergence of stablecoins as pivotal to transaction processes and the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi). Oltsik states these developments signify a shift towards democratizing finance, wherein truth and transparency are foundational. The conversation concludes with a look at Figure’s pioneering efforts in creating a new financial marketplace utilizing blockchain technology.
#CryptoTrailblazers #FigureMarkets #BlockchainInnovation #Web3 #NYEWired #BlockchainFinance #DecentralizedFinance #Fintech #Stablecoins
Find more SiliconANGLE news and analysis https://siliconangle.com/.
Follow theCUBE's wall-to-wall event coverage https://siliconangle.com/events/
Learn about the latest theCUBE events https://www.thecube.net/
00:00 - Intro
00:05 - Emerging Innovations in Financial Technology and Market Dynamics
02:45 - Key Elements in Financial Ecosystem Dynamics
06:20 - Blockchain: Truth and Transformation
09:39 - Shaping the Future: Innovations in Financial Markets and Stablecoin Integration
13:15 - Enabling the Future: Navigating Disruptions in Banking and Lending
16:51 - Exploring Opportunities and Building Confidence in the Blockchain Ecosystem
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Christopher Perkins, Coinfund
In this insightful episode of the Crypto Trailblazers series hosted by theCUBE, Mike Cagney of Figure Markets sits down with analysts from theCUBE Research to discuss groundbreaking advancements in blockchain technology and their implications for the finance sector. This video is part of the NYSE Wired digital event, aimed at bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and Wall Street by integrating technology and finance.
Cagney, an eminent figure in fintech, shares expertise on the transformative role of blockchain in financial markets during this interview. Conducted by seasoned analysts at theCUBE, the discussion delves into Figure’s innovative contributions, including their blockchain-native loan origination and securitization process. He outlines how Figure leverages blockchain to achieve cost reductions, enhanced security and improved liquidity in financial transactions.
Key takeaways from the interview highlight insights on the evolution of the Web3 ecosystem, such as the emergence of stablecoins as pivotal to transaction processes and the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi). Oltsik states these developments signify a shift towards democratizing finance, wherein truth and transparency are foundational. The conversation concludes with a look at Figure’s pioneering efforts in creating a new financial marketplace utilizing blockchain technology.
#CryptoTrailblazers #FigureMarkets #BlockchainInnovation #Web3 #NYEWired #BlockchainFinance #DecentralizedFinance #Fintech #Stablecoins
Find more SiliconANGLE news and analysis https://siliconangle.com/.
Follow theCUBE's wall-to-wall event coverage https://siliconangle.com/events/
Learn about the latest theCUBE events https://www.thecube.net/
00:00 - Intro
00:05 - Emerging Innovations in Financial Technology and Market Dynamics
02:45 - Key Elements in Financial Ecosystem Dynamics
06:20 - Blockchain: Truth and Transformation
09:39 - Shaping the Future: Innovations in Financial Markets and Stablecoin Integration
13:15 - Enabling the Future: Navigating Disruptions in Banking and Lending
16:51 - Exploring Opportunities and Building Confidence in the Blockchain Ecosystem
>> Hello. Welcome back to theCube here in New York City at our NYSC studio for theCube, of course, with Silicon Valley connecting Wall Street and Silicon Valley. This is our Crypto Trailblazer series, an ongoing series really featuring the leaders making it happen and also mainstreaming the convergence of our physical and digital world. It's happening. We're starting to see a lot more activity around everything from digital twins to financial systems being disrupted. Christopher is here, he's the President of CoinFund. He's a finance guy. He's been on Wall Street, he's in crypto. Christopher, thanks for coming on the program.
Christopher Perkins
>> Hey, thank you so much, John, great to be on.>> Before we get started, I want to also just plug that you're a big proponent of veterans of Wall Street and you've done a lot of pioneering work in crypto. It's funny, all the crypto leaders have scar tissue. It's like breaking through the glass and making it happen. But the beautiful thing is Circle went public. We're seeing a lot more activity with I call the mainstreaming of the financial programmable money coming in, and you've got the AI coming in behind it. So yeah, we see a world where software and hardware like we've seen in the supercomputing NVIDIAs of the world coming in to decentralized infrastructure together, and it's just going to be a disruptive enabler.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah.>> And so, this is the big story that, yeah, this disruption to how things work, like money.
Christopher Perkins
>> Oh, yeah.>> Follow the money, as they say. But also, it's an enabler you're going to start to see new business models, new use cases, new brands emerge, startups, obviously geopolitical. You've got chips, software, and geography issues. Those used to be really kind of normalized. You've got the US Stock Exchange. You've got venture capital. Now you've got people outside the United States now. Trump's friendly to this back in the US, so we're back in business. So all that's kind of been the macro. What are you working on right now with CoinFund? Talk about what you guys have done specifically, and how that's vectoring into the reality that's setting into like, "Hey, the money system and all the things that we do are up in the air. And when it comes down, it's going to land."
Christopher Perkins
>> Oh, yeah. Thanks for having me. And yeah, I was in the Marine Corps, so I guess I'm used to getting shot at. And yeah, it's a very ambiguous environment, and that's where veterans thrive. So let me tell you a little bit about what we focus on. We're CoinFund. We're one of the oldest crypto native investment firms in the world. We're actually in our 10th year. Our goal is to champion the leaders of the new internet. Why? Because we have a new internet that's being born before our eyes. And people don't realize how big a deal this is, because when you step back, we can now put private property into the internet for the very first time. Think about that. Before this stuff called crypto, you couldn't->> Physical private property.
Christopher Perkins
>> You can put digital private property like in Web 2.0, do you own anything? No. You barely even own own URL. You don't own anything. You have data that's taken by a couple of guys, and it's guys who own the internet. They take the data and they give you a nice user experience. But now you can put private property into the internet. And what we do, this new internet that we're working on, is a decentralized internet where people can participate, they can own their data. But perhaps more importantly, this is an innovation on the ledger itself. Ledgers started in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago. And when they were born, amazing things happened. It was a period of an incredible innovation. You could track who owned what for the very first time, unlock credit for the first time. You had the second innovation of the ledger with the Renaissance, double entry bookkeeping, which underpinned the modern-day accounting system. And then, when Bitcoin was born, we have this third iteration on the ledger itself, trustless, permissionless exchange of value. It's a big deal. Now you touched on a number of different subjects. We invest across many, many different asset classes and verticals, as we call it. One of the most exciting is the intersection of crypto and AI. These are incredible technologies. Yes, there's been a lot of fanfare around AI, but when you bring it together with crypto, amazing things happen.>> And it's going to be mind-blowing, because now you've got the use cases that you mentioned, some of these evolutions, to the point about ledger. That enables a lot. So talk about what you guys do as CoinFund. Are you guys deploying capital? What is the structure of the business itself?
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah, so we have three main strategies. We have a pre-seed and a seed strategy where we're investing in early-stage founders. It's all about people, finding the people that are going to change the world, massive TAMs, big ideas. And what we do is we invest in those top folks. We have a second strategy called the venture strategy. That's where we're investing in series A and B companies. The difference there being is that there's a little bit of product-market fit, and what we really like to do is really get into trenches because we champion the leaders of the new internet and we build with them. And so, we'll give them differentiated support. Our last->> Classic venture capital.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah, the first two are classic venture capital. One is the seed strategy, the second is->> And that's US dollars or crypto?
Christopher Perkins
>> Well, we take US dollars and we invest it in crypto. That's where you get the asymmetric returns.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> Our final strategy is our liquid strategy. And this is where we're investing in liquid tokens and liquid equities to an extent. There, we're trying to really take advantage of some of the nuances. What we see in this space is companies kind of go public around series A with token launches. We're also seeing equity IPOs. We saw with Circle very recently. Congratulations to the NYSE on that. But we're able to effectively practically risk manage those series A token exposures, and that underpins our final strategy, which is that liquid strategy.>> So explain that series A token play. What's that look like? What's the motivation? Is it fundraising purpose? Is it more dependent upon utility? Is it a security or a utility?
Christopher Perkins
>> These are great questions, and I think it's very difficult when you try to put every single token into a single box, right? Because every single token that we see and that we underwrite and we learn about has different fundamentals, different purpose, because it can be programmed very bespokely. And that's what we do, is we try to evaluate->> Business-driven, situational.
Christopher Perkins
>> We apply very deep fundamental research to the properties that an underlying token displays. And what we tend to differentiate is really understanding the tech itself. You don't survive and hopefully thrive for 10 years without understanding the tech. And so, we get into the tech, we try to ascertain the real value, and that's how we underwrite.>> You guys probably due diligence techniques to the new world.
Christopher Perkins
>> A hundred percent.>> What's the market like with these start-ups? Because I always say in theCUBE, entrepreneurs will find opportunities. They have opportunity recognition as a superpower. What are some of those opportunities that you guys are seeing that are unique or just evolutionary?
Christopher Perkins
>> We have about 120 investments in this space.>> Give an example, because people sometimes can't even get their minds around how the formation of financial strategy and execution matches the business strategy. What would be an example? Can you highlight a few?
Christopher Perkins
>> Oh, I can highlight a ton. Well, this is a very easy one to explain. There's a company called GeoNet. Traditional GPS gives you location to about three meters. And what they can do is they can give you centimeter-level accuracy using something called RTK technology, right? And is it important to have centimeter-level accuracy? Well, if you're self-driving a car, it probably matters, three meters versus one centimeter.>> It's like near real time versus real time. Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> Right? It was actually invented in the 1990s. It was used by farmers for precision agriculture. Okay? And they needed it to plant their crops. And it was very centralized. You put in a big tower. It cost thousands and thousands of dollars. Well, this entrepreneur came along and Mike Courtney's like, "Wait a second. I can incentivize people by giving them a token if they set up RTK nodes in their house." Overnight, the largest RTK network is formed because of the incentivization power of tokens. And so, now anyone within a few kilometers of those nodes has that centimeter level of precision if they subscribe. That's going to underpin an entire next generation of robotics, self-driving cars, agriculture, etc. That's a pretty simple->> His alternative was go out and raise money, get a CapEx deployment, roll out a bunch of stuff.
Christopher Perkins
>> But how do you compete with the incumbents like that?>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> You can't.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> But by decentralizing->> A lot of risk too....
Christopher Perkins
>> and incentivizing people, but to set up the nodes themselves for the benefit of acquiring those tokens to perpetuate the network, it's a big deal. I think I'd be remiss not to talk a little bit about AI.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> Now today, AI is very centralized. And a lot of people are like, "Wait a second, we have these humongous companies. They have compute, they have the data that they've taken from us. They can leverage inference and they can train it in their little bespoke models for the best outputs for their company. They're going to dominate the space. Why wouldn't they?"
Well, there's an alternative to that, and the alternative is a decentralized approach. How do you do that? Well, people have sovereignty of their own data. What if I elect into a data set? Computation, right? You can actually garner a lot more compute by leveraging decentralized compute that's available throughout the world, very powerful. What about training? Right? Should you be training people in a black box, or should you be open and transparent with how you're training your models? We have an amazing company called Pluralis that's leveraging decentralized training. People didn't think it was going to happen. Next thing you know, these incredible entrepreneurs put out a whitepaper and say, "No, this is how we do it, and we're probably going to do it better." And I think they're going to give decentralized pipeline.>> I think the AI way of hitting the decentralized infrastructure wave, whether it's Bitcoin for money or Ethereum and these new chains that have all this value store will unlock kind of new potential, because it's like software meets stablecoin. You've got money and innovation. That's a big dynamic.
Christopher Perkins
>> Well, let's talk about stablecoins. Stablecoins are coming, and people don't realize how big a deal this is going to be. The Treasury Secretary himself, and the Treasury is usually a conservative organization, is talking about two to $3 trillion coming on chain. Right? That's going to result in a massive amount of capital coming into our market. It's a $3.5 trillion market to begin with. And guess what? There's no yield. Right? So what's going to happen? People are going to try to seek that yield. Where are they going to seek it? Through places like DeFi. And guess what? Let's go back to AI. Agents can pay themselves in crypto. It's very hard for them to get physical dollars. They can't go to Citibank down the street. Now agents are going to actually, you can call them up and say, "Hey, agent. I want you to go optimize my yield." And that's exactly what they can do.>> And the market is opening up right now, kicking off the day. I think this system, the financial system, Christopher, is going to be impacted. So stablecoins is a big deal. So again, infusion of cash, but also the mechanism is there. So that is a new mechanism combined with software. That's going to affect the NYSE, the exchanges, how people do business. I heard conversations about neo banking.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yep.>> So you've got kind of like this Circle meets Palantir kind of vibe. Okay? And I don't mean Palantir in the defense surveillance area. But their innovation and software combined with money, you've got institutional infrastructure, like the companies-
Christopher Perkins
>> That's right.... >> who adopt software and the money system. They're two different worlds. Right? So talk about that, because an expert in this. Those things are major variables. They're going to be disrupted and flipped upside down. How do people take advantage of it? What's the impact? Riff on that notion.
Christopher Perkins
>> You and I couldn't sit in a room and on a whiteboard design a better innovation for the greenback. This is just an incredible technology. And why are you seeing it? It's already $250 billion, and we haven't even gotten to the starting line yet. I think stablecoins were the third-largest purchaser of Treasuries in '24. That's going to skyrocket. Why is there so much demand? It's because of utility.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> Right? You can take a stablecoin. It's represented from a dollar. And I don't recommend anyone investing in a stablecoin because it's not going anywhere. It's a dollar.>> That's right.
Christopher Perkins
>> There are other ways to get exposure.>> Something that's not so stable, but still stable enough.
Christopher Perkins
>> There are ways that you can get exposure and we can talk about that. But essentially, what utility does it give? You can pay that stablecoin to anywhere in the world with someone who has an internet connection. That's a big deal.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> From a national security perspective, it's actually very awesome because if stablecoins were the normal way that we did business, think about this; where you're tracking transactions on a blockchain and I'm like, "Hey, John. I came up with this awesome technology. It's called dollars. We're going to make them on paper. You and I can give them to each other. No one's going to know." National security experts would freak out. This is actually very good for our national security. But it eliminates all different types of risk. It eliminates Herstatt risk, which in '74 we had a bank go bankrupt because of settlement latency. Putting on my own hat, I wish I had these assets.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> It's super early. Right now, 99% of->> Settlement is a huge issue.
Christopher Perkins
>> Settlement's a huge issue.>> Huge.
Christopher Perkins
>> 99% of internet money today, stablecoins, are dollars. In the real world, if you want to say that, the traditional world, about 57% are dollars. It's going to be incredibly exciting as new currencies come online. And now you're going to see FX trading. You're going to see better settlement and payments. And the last thing I'll tell you is that if you're in the developing world, and you're sitting there in Zimbabwe or Venezuela and you have the opportunity to have your local currency or greenbacks, you're probably going to want to have dollars.>> Yeah. And I think the geo-political situation, the fact that Tether for instance is not even in the US is interesting. You mentioned settlements. This is going to be huge because now you have a global economy. Remember high-frequency trading, how that disrupted the market and then certain data centers had to be specked because of the speed of light on the packets moving from point to point Because? Now stablecoins and decentralized kind of eliminate that. So the question I have for you is will we see zero-latency settlement soon? Or is it already here? Because that would be like a home run, because then if I'm making a trade in say Taiwan and California, and I can timestamp that and manage that with zero latency.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah. Well, there's a reason why people like Jump have been very involved in the architecture of many of these blockchains. Right? That's the end goal. Solana itself says it wants to be the decentralized, I'm not going to say it here because we're nicey, but they call it something else, a competitor exchange. Right? And so, the opportunity for that real-time settlement is profound. I think you're going to see it compressed to, obviously focus on low latency is very important as these chains innovate constantly. And how do they innovate? Fees, security, and TPS, transactions per second. You're going to see that number go higher and higher and higher. That's going to underpin a lot more exciting trading opportunities.>> So what are the key metrics that you said again for money-making? Transactions per second?
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah. So when you look at what we call layer one on blockchain, you look at security. How secure is that network? Very important. You look at fees. Right? How much are you paying for each transaction? TPS is another thing, transactions per second. How fast can it be? The next one I'd say is modularity. Are you a monolithic blockchain that's competing with other things? Or do you have a dedicated block space and bandwidth that's very modular and controlled? So the beautiful thing about this ecosystem where I work is that things are composable, they're modular. You can do all different things and optimize for any of those things. It's not even->> If you said five years ago there'd be innovation at layer one of Bitcoin in the blockchain, you'd be like, "What?"
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah.>> Now you see a lot more entrepreneurs because they're really engineering some really cool solutions. So I'm expecting a lot more action on that. And then, the impact will be, you mentioned nicey. I also knew some of the big funds like Franklin Templeton, they're getting into assets on chain. A lot of assets are coming on chain. You've got the stablecoin. So the question is, who hugs onto that old school, the tree huggers of finance? Will they resist? And if they do, will they get crippled? Will they get toppled? Is it an extinction event for traditional, because I've got the power and the money now, but there's structural change. You pointed it out. What are people doing and what's the reality? Are there two camps inside these big institution companies, or is there actual reality hitting them?
Christopher Perkins
>> So let me just talk about how big an opportunity this is. So we were under a lot of regulatory stress for four years.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> Now that's gone. And that regulatory headwind is now turning into a regulatory tailwind. What does that mean? It means new asset allocators are coming in because they don't have that reputational risk. They'll take market risks, they'll invest, but they don't want to get hit with a regulatory issue that makes them look bad. So we have capital coming in, great. What's even more exciting is the fact that there's about 30 million developers in Web 2.0. Do you know how many there are on Web 3.0 in crypto? About 10,000. 10,000 versus 30 million. Why? Why haven't they come into our space? Well, maybe some are chasing AI, whatever, but those worlds are converging. But frankly, it's because they didn't want to get in trouble with the regulators.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> Right? They didn't want to get in trouble with Gary Gensler and the SEC.>> They don't want to get sued.
Christopher Perkins
>> They didn't want to get sued.>> Nor debanked.
Christopher Perkins
>> Right.>> Sued.
Christopher Perkins
>> Thrown in jail.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> So now they're like, "Wait a second. I can develop this without getting in trouble." So you're going to have some of those 30 million support those 10,000 brave souls that are developing today, coupled with that capital is going to be huge. And so, to answer your question, what do the legacy guys do? They either got to get on board really quickly, either by buying, probably buying, it's harder to build because they're behind. The folks who adjust survive. Or you could have issues with legacy. How many companies have we seen die because they didn't adjust? So I think they're all having these discussions at the highest level.>> First of all, I love your name of your company, CoinFunds. I love that it's got coin in it. Fund means money. I think that's a great point. In fact, the software developers are going to migrate super fast, probably don't even know they're migrating because low code, no code and coding assistance is the hottest area in AI right now. And you've got super computing being democratized by these AI factories. You've got NVIDIA, you've got Dell, you've got the cloud guys, Hyperscaler, you've got Neocloud is now enabling neo banks. So what I'm looking at is I believe that it's going to be disrupted. But where I'm looking, and I want to get your reaction to this, is that where's the enablement? Because the enablement is going to enable those developers who are going to probably shift over and build on top of something. So obviously, generically we hand wave and say, "It's blockchain." But it's more than that because you have little piece parts coming together. I interviewed founders doing lending and borrowing on chains, super interesting. What you're doing with CoinFund, you're enabling entrepreneurs.
Christopher Perkins
>> A hundred percent.>> And you have a spectrum of liquidity options and investment vehicles. Everyone's coming in.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah.>> Where's the enablement? What's that big disruptive enablement feature, focus? What does the market need to optimize for, Christopher?
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah, so for the last four years, we've been doing a lot of investing in infrastructure, right? We've talked about layer one blockchains, which are major blockchains, layer twos, working on all those things, TPS, et cetera. But there's a ton of other infrastructure we've been building on. And why do we do that? Things like ZK technology, zero-knowledge technology. So these proofs allow you to prove something cryptographically without showing what you've got. So it's a privacy enhancement mechanism. One of the problems with blockchain and mainstream adoption is the fact that there's very little privacy because you can see this stuff on chain. But new technologies will allow you to have the right mix of privacy, public versus private. So the long story short is that crypto in the last 10 years has been very clunky. Right? Ever tried to go into DeFi? It's a pretty awful experience, but every day it gets slightly better. And what many of my entrepreneurs are focusing on are the user experience.>> The mainstreaming of it too.
Christopher Perkins
>> The user experience, because you can't have somebody have 12 or 24-page passcode logging on this, logging on that. It's very, very clunky. And so, we're doing a lot of that. I'd say that the final thing that needs to be unlocked is security. Right? We have state actors maneuvering against us. We're about to put $3 trillion on chain and stablecoins. The The North Koreans are very excited about that. And so, one of the things I've been putting forth and working at the highest levels of our government is putting forth new policies to help unlock security. And our thesis is the way that you really enhance security in our space is to go back to our past and to unlock our private sector, effectively going back to what's an Article I of our Constitution, which is privateering. And by empowering the private sector to go on offense instead of staying on defense, I'm a Marine, I can't help it. That's one of the solutions. And by the way, we've had a problem over the last four years. We lost a lot of entrepreneurs overseas. Right? How do we get them back? Well, what if we could extend a security umbrella where if you're in the United States, no one's going to mess with you because the consequences are bad.>> Yeah. If someone lands on our shores with guns, the military would respond.
Christopher Perkins
>> Right.>> Why wouldn't we respond in the digital world?
Christopher Perkins
>> They've been ravaging on entrepreneurs. And the last few years, it's been blaming the victims. It's really hard to raise money. It's really hard.>> I'm with you on this, Christopher. I love your veteran perspective. No, this is true. I've always said we have to build our own militias.
Christopher Perkins
>> Right.>> Why? Because the government's not protecting us.
Christopher Perkins
>> A hundred percent.>> Why wouldn't they take the same, the red line is crossed. Hey, if you're in my bank, that's a sovereignty issue.
Christopher Perkins
>> A hundred percent.>> Why wouldn't we-
Christopher Perkins
>> We can't roll over. And it's been worse than being on defense because our young founders, to the extent they get hacked, we blame them.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> That's what the government did. No, we don't blame them, we should be protecting them. And I think the private sector has the know-how, the flexibility, and the capabilities to go on offense and to protect our honor.>> I will amplify that message because I think it also takes the energy out of the private companies. Their efforts could be creative. And as productivity kicks in with AI, and now you've got the stability of value creation store and unlocking, why wouldn't we want our citizens and our country to prosper?
Christopher Perkins
>> AI makes the security threat much worse.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> It also makes the ability to combat it much better, so we've got to get on the offense.>> Great conversation. I know you brought up veteran, you're a Marine. I always use the beachhead analogy when I talk about that. Get good beachheads. Secure the beachhead. And then mission, I love how you've got a dual mission, double bottom line what you think about. Talk about veterans on Wall Street. I know you're a big proponent of that.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah.>> What is it, and why you're doing it? And how do people get involved, veterans and just citizens?
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah. I've always believed that veterans are some of our best national assets. We spend millions of dollars in training these men and women. And they're highly, highly skilled. Right? And they tend to do really well operating in environments that are stressful. They know how to build teams. They understand risk management. When I got my first job at Lehman, they're like, "Who the heck are you?" And I'm like, "I just got back from Ramadi." I'm like, "I make a lot of calculations, an artillery guy, and I calculate risk. But if my risk was wrong, people die. You guys lose money, right?" And they're like, "Oh, yeah. We should hire you." And so, they gave me a chance. And so, I think you'll find that the talent out there with veterans is incredible. These are people who have volunteered. They've got generally very strong ideals. So give them a chance, hire them. They can do amazing things. Veterans on Wall Street we founded in 2011. We worked very closely with the Bob Woodruff Foundation. We're also working now to bring veterans into the digital asset space, founded something called VIDA, Veterans in Digital Assets. Generally, when you have veterans enter into an industry, the ethics, things just tend to get better. So we'd love to have more folks come in. It's a great environment to build.>> If they can handle that, they can handle banking. It's a piece of cake. A stress environment. "Oh, this is nothing. It's a walk in the park." By the way, theCUBE is a great environment for veterans. We have a lot of military operations going on with events. It feels like we're in the militia going fighting for space, getting those stories.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah, yeah.>> Christopher, thank you for coming on. And again, you're a leader and congratulations. And what you do is great, great work. And again, it's just getting started. I think the clunkiness of the experience is one thing, but the structural mainstreaming of crypto as a digital first party citizen of our world is here.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah.>> And it's just beginning. So this generation, this wave, and give it some AI love too. That just makes the wave bigger.
Christopher Perkins
>> Oh, it's going to accelerate.>> I'm just super excited.
Christopher Perkins
>> It's going to accelerate for sure. Thank you so much, John.>> All right. Check out CoinFund. If you're an entrepreneur out there, again, think differently because opportunity recognition is a superpower. How do you finance it? There's a lot of creative and easy, predictable ways to do that. Check out CoinFund of course. Watch theCUBE. We've got all the action here. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.
>> Hello. Welcome back to theCube here in New York City at our NYSC studio for theCube, of course, with Silicon Valley connecting Wall Street and Silicon Valley. This is our Crypto Trailblazer series, an ongoing series really featuring the leaders making it happen and also mainstreaming the convergence of our physical and digital world. It's happening. We're starting to see a lot more activity around everything from digital twins to financial systems being disrupted. Christopher is here, he's the President of CoinFund. He's a finance guy. He's been on Wall Street, he's in crypto. Christopher, thanks for coming on the program.
Christopher Perkins
>> Hey, thank you so much, John, great to be on.>> Before we get started, I want to also just plug that you're a big proponent of veterans of Wall Street and you've done a lot of pioneering work in crypto. It's funny, all the crypto leaders have scar tissue. It's like breaking through the glass and making it happen. But the beautiful thing is Circle went public. We're seeing a lot more activity with I call the mainstreaming of the financial programmable money coming in, and you've got the AI coming in behind it. So yeah, we see a world where software and hardware like we've seen in the supercomputing NVIDIAs of the world coming in to decentralized infrastructure together, and it's just going to be a disruptive enabler.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah.>> And so, this is the big story that, yeah, this disruption to how things work, like money.
Christopher Perkins
>> Oh, yeah.>> Follow the money, as they say. But also, it's an enabler you're going to start to see new business models, new use cases, new brands emerge, startups, obviously geopolitical. You've got chips, software, and geography issues. Those used to be really kind of normalized. You've got the US Stock Exchange. You've got venture capital. Now you've got people outside the United States now. Trump's friendly to this back in the US, so we're back in business. So all that's kind of been the macro. What are you working on right now with CoinFund? Talk about what you guys have done specifically, and how that's vectoring into the reality that's setting into like, "Hey, the money system and all the things that we do are up in the air. And when it comes down, it's going to land."
Christopher Perkins
>> Oh, yeah. Thanks for having me. And yeah, I was in the Marine Corps, so I guess I'm used to getting shot at. And yeah, it's a very ambiguous environment, and that's where veterans thrive. So let me tell you a little bit about what we focus on. We're CoinFund. We're one of the oldest crypto native investment firms in the world. We're actually in our 10th year. Our goal is to champion the leaders of the new internet. Why? Because we have a new internet that's being born before our eyes. And people don't realize how big a deal this is, because when you step back, we can now put private property into the internet for the very first time. Think about that. Before this stuff called crypto, you couldn't->> Physical private property.
Christopher Perkins
>> You can put digital private property like in Web 2.0, do you own anything? No. You barely even own own URL. You don't own anything. You have data that's taken by a couple of guys, and it's guys who own the internet. They take the data and they give you a nice user experience. But now you can put private property into the internet. And what we do, this new internet that we're working on, is a decentralized internet where people can participate, they can own their data. But perhaps more importantly, this is an innovation on the ledger itself. Ledgers started in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago. And when they were born, amazing things happened. It was a period of an incredible innovation. You could track who owned what for the very first time, unlock credit for the first time. You had the second innovation of the ledger with the Renaissance, double entry bookkeeping, which underpinned the modern-day accounting system. And then, when Bitcoin was born, we have this third iteration on the ledger itself, trustless, permissionless exchange of value. It's a big deal. Now you touched on a number of different subjects. We invest across many, many different asset classes and verticals, as we call it. One of the most exciting is the intersection of crypto and AI. These are incredible technologies. Yes, there's been a lot of fanfare around AI, but when you bring it together with crypto, amazing things happen.>> And it's going to be mind-blowing, because now you've got the use cases that you mentioned, some of these evolutions, to the point about ledger. That enables a lot. So talk about what you guys do as CoinFund. Are you guys deploying capital? What is the structure of the business itself?
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah, so we have three main strategies. We have a pre-seed and a seed strategy where we're investing in early-stage founders. It's all about people, finding the people that are going to change the world, massive TAMs, big ideas. And what we do is we invest in those top folks. We have a second strategy called the venture strategy. That's where we're investing in series A and B companies. The difference there being is that there's a little bit of product-market fit, and what we really like to do is really get into trenches because we champion the leaders of the new internet and we build with them. And so, we'll give them differentiated support. Our last->> Classic venture capital.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah, the first two are classic venture capital. One is the seed strategy, the second is->> And that's US dollars or crypto?
Christopher Perkins
>> Well, we take US dollars and we invest it in crypto. That's where you get the asymmetric returns.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> Our final strategy is our liquid strategy. And this is where we're investing in liquid tokens and liquid equities to an extent. There, we're trying to really take advantage of some of the nuances. What we see in this space is companies kind of go public around series A with token launches. We're also seeing equity IPOs. We saw with Circle very recently. Congratulations to the NYSE on that. But we're able to effectively practically risk manage those series A token exposures, and that underpins our final strategy, which is that liquid strategy.>> So explain that series A token play. What's that look like? What's the motivation? Is it fundraising purpose? Is it more dependent upon utility? Is it a security or a utility?
Christopher Perkins
>> These are great questions, and I think it's very difficult when you try to put every single token into a single box, right? Because every single token that we see and that we underwrite and we learn about has different fundamentals, different purpose, because it can be programmed very bespokely. And that's what we do, is we try to evaluate->> Business-driven, situational.
Christopher Perkins
>> We apply very deep fundamental research to the properties that an underlying token displays. And what we tend to differentiate is really understanding the tech itself. You don't survive and hopefully thrive for 10 years without understanding the tech. And so, we get into the tech, we try to ascertain the real value, and that's how we underwrite.>> You guys probably due diligence techniques to the new world.
Christopher Perkins
>> A hundred percent.>> What's the market like with these start-ups? Because I always say in theCUBE, entrepreneurs will find opportunities. They have opportunity recognition as a superpower. What are some of those opportunities that you guys are seeing that are unique or just evolutionary?
Christopher Perkins
>> We have about 120 investments in this space.>> Give an example, because people sometimes can't even get their minds around how the formation of financial strategy and execution matches the business strategy. What would be an example? Can you highlight a few?
Christopher Perkins
>> Oh, I can highlight a ton. Well, this is a very easy one to explain. There's a company called GeoNet. Traditional GPS gives you location to about three meters. And what they can do is they can give you centimeter-level accuracy using something called RTK technology, right? And is it important to have centimeter-level accuracy? Well, if you're self-driving a car, it probably matters, three meters versus one centimeter.>> It's like near real time versus real time. Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> Right? It was actually invented in the 1990s. It was used by farmers for precision agriculture. Okay? And they needed it to plant their crops. And it was very centralized. You put in a big tower. It cost thousands and thousands of dollars. Well, this entrepreneur came along and Mike Courtney's like, "Wait a second. I can incentivize people by giving them a token if they set up RTK nodes in their house." Overnight, the largest RTK network is formed because of the incentivization power of tokens. And so, now anyone within a few kilometers of those nodes has that centimeter level of precision if they subscribe. That's going to underpin an entire next generation of robotics, self-driving cars, agriculture, etc. That's a pretty simple->> His alternative was go out and raise money, get a CapEx deployment, roll out a bunch of stuff.
Christopher Perkins
>> But how do you compete with the incumbents like that?>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> You can't.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> But by decentralizing->> A lot of risk too....
Christopher Perkins
>> and incentivizing people, but to set up the nodes themselves for the benefit of acquiring those tokens to perpetuate the network, it's a big deal. I think I'd be remiss not to talk a little bit about AI.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> Now today, AI is very centralized. And a lot of people are like, "Wait a second, we have these humongous companies. They have compute, they have the data that they've taken from us. They can leverage inference and they can train it in their little bespoke models for the best outputs for their company. They're going to dominate the space. Why wouldn't they?"
Well, there's an alternative to that, and the alternative is a decentralized approach. How do you do that? Well, people have sovereignty of their own data. What if I elect into a data set? Computation, right? You can actually garner a lot more compute by leveraging decentralized compute that's available throughout the world, very powerful. What about training? Right? Should you be training people in a black box, or should you be open and transparent with how you're training your models? We have an amazing company called Pluralis that's leveraging decentralized training. People didn't think it was going to happen. Next thing you know, these incredible entrepreneurs put out a whitepaper and say, "No, this is how we do it, and we're probably going to do it better." And I think they're going to give decentralized pipeline.>> I think the AI way of hitting the decentralized infrastructure wave, whether it's Bitcoin for money or Ethereum and these new chains that have all this value store will unlock kind of new potential, because it's like software meets stablecoin. You've got money and innovation. That's a big dynamic.
Christopher Perkins
>> Well, let's talk about stablecoins. Stablecoins are coming, and people don't realize how big a deal this is going to be. The Treasury Secretary himself, and the Treasury is usually a conservative organization, is talking about two to $3 trillion coming on chain. Right? That's going to result in a massive amount of capital coming into our market. It's a $3.5 trillion market to begin with. And guess what? There's no yield. Right? So what's going to happen? People are going to try to seek that yield. Where are they going to seek it? Through places like DeFi. And guess what? Let's go back to AI. Agents can pay themselves in crypto. It's very hard for them to get physical dollars. They can't go to Citibank down the street. Now agents are going to actually, you can call them up and say, "Hey, agent. I want you to go optimize my yield." And that's exactly what they can do.>> And the market is opening up right now, kicking off the day. I think this system, the financial system, Christopher, is going to be impacted. So stablecoins is a big deal. So again, infusion of cash, but also the mechanism is there. So that is a new mechanism combined with software. That's going to affect the NYSE, the exchanges, how people do business. I heard conversations about neo banking.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yep.>> So you've got kind of like this Circle meets Palantir kind of vibe. Okay? And I don't mean Palantir in the defense surveillance area. But their innovation and software combined with money, you've got institutional infrastructure, like the companies-
Christopher Perkins
>> That's right.... >> who adopt software and the money system. They're two different worlds. Right? So talk about that, because an expert in this. Those things are major variables. They're going to be disrupted and flipped upside down. How do people take advantage of it? What's the impact? Riff on that notion.
Christopher Perkins
>> You and I couldn't sit in a room and on a whiteboard design a better innovation for the greenback. This is just an incredible technology. And why are you seeing it? It's already $250 billion, and we haven't even gotten to the starting line yet. I think stablecoins were the third-largest purchaser of Treasuries in '24. That's going to skyrocket. Why is there so much demand? It's because of utility.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> Right? You can take a stablecoin. It's represented from a dollar. And I don't recommend anyone investing in a stablecoin because it's not going anywhere. It's a dollar.>> That's right.
Christopher Perkins
>> There are other ways to get exposure.>> Something that's not so stable, but still stable enough.
Christopher Perkins
>> There are ways that you can get exposure and we can talk about that. But essentially, what utility does it give? You can pay that stablecoin to anywhere in the world with someone who has an internet connection. That's a big deal.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> From a national security perspective, it's actually very awesome because if stablecoins were the normal way that we did business, think about this; where you're tracking transactions on a blockchain and I'm like, "Hey, John. I came up with this awesome technology. It's called dollars. We're going to make them on paper. You and I can give them to each other. No one's going to know." National security experts would freak out. This is actually very good for our national security. But it eliminates all different types of risk. It eliminates Herstatt risk, which in '74 we had a bank go bankrupt because of settlement latency. Putting on my own hat, I wish I had these assets.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> It's super early. Right now, 99% of->> Settlement is a huge issue.
Christopher Perkins
>> Settlement's a huge issue.>> Huge.
Christopher Perkins
>> 99% of internet money today, stablecoins, are dollars. In the real world, if you want to say that, the traditional world, about 57% are dollars. It's going to be incredibly exciting as new currencies come online. And now you're going to see FX trading. You're going to see better settlement and payments. And the last thing I'll tell you is that if you're in the developing world, and you're sitting there in Zimbabwe or Venezuela and you have the opportunity to have your local currency or greenbacks, you're probably going to want to have dollars.>> Yeah. And I think the geo-political situation, the fact that Tether for instance is not even in the US is interesting. You mentioned settlements. This is going to be huge because now you have a global economy. Remember high-frequency trading, how that disrupted the market and then certain data centers had to be specked because of the speed of light on the packets moving from point to point Because? Now stablecoins and decentralized kind of eliminate that. So the question I have for you is will we see zero-latency settlement soon? Or is it already here? Because that would be like a home run, because then if I'm making a trade in say Taiwan and California, and I can timestamp that and manage that with zero latency.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah. Well, there's a reason why people like Jump have been very involved in the architecture of many of these blockchains. Right? That's the end goal. Solana itself says it wants to be the decentralized, I'm not going to say it here because we're nicey, but they call it something else, a competitor exchange. Right? And so, the opportunity for that real-time settlement is profound. I think you're going to see it compressed to, obviously focus on low latency is very important as these chains innovate constantly. And how do they innovate? Fees, security, and TPS, transactions per second. You're going to see that number go higher and higher and higher. That's going to underpin a lot more exciting trading opportunities.>> So what are the key metrics that you said again for money-making? Transactions per second?
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah. So when you look at what we call layer one on blockchain, you look at security. How secure is that network? Very important. You look at fees. Right? How much are you paying for each transaction? TPS is another thing, transactions per second. How fast can it be? The next one I'd say is modularity. Are you a monolithic blockchain that's competing with other things? Or do you have a dedicated block space and bandwidth that's very modular and controlled? So the beautiful thing about this ecosystem where I work is that things are composable, they're modular. You can do all different things and optimize for any of those things. It's not even->> If you said five years ago there'd be innovation at layer one of Bitcoin in the blockchain, you'd be like, "What?"
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah.>> Now you see a lot more entrepreneurs because they're really engineering some really cool solutions. So I'm expecting a lot more action on that. And then, the impact will be, you mentioned nicey. I also knew some of the big funds like Franklin Templeton, they're getting into assets on chain. A lot of assets are coming on chain. You've got the stablecoin. So the question is, who hugs onto that old school, the tree huggers of finance? Will they resist? And if they do, will they get crippled? Will they get toppled? Is it an extinction event for traditional, because I've got the power and the money now, but there's structural change. You pointed it out. What are people doing and what's the reality? Are there two camps inside these big institution companies, or is there actual reality hitting them?
Christopher Perkins
>> So let me just talk about how big an opportunity this is. So we were under a lot of regulatory stress for four years.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> Now that's gone. And that regulatory headwind is now turning into a regulatory tailwind. What does that mean? It means new asset allocators are coming in because they don't have that reputational risk. They'll take market risks, they'll invest, but they don't want to get hit with a regulatory issue that makes them look bad. So we have capital coming in, great. What's even more exciting is the fact that there's about 30 million developers in Web 2.0. Do you know how many there are on Web 3.0 in crypto? About 10,000. 10,000 versus 30 million. Why? Why haven't they come into our space? Well, maybe some are chasing AI, whatever, but those worlds are converging. But frankly, it's because they didn't want to get in trouble with the regulators.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> Right? They didn't want to get in trouble with Gary Gensler and the SEC.>> They don't want to get sued.
Christopher Perkins
>> They didn't want to get sued.>> Nor debanked.
Christopher Perkins
>> Right.>> Sued.
Christopher Perkins
>> Thrown in jail.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> So now they're like, "Wait a second. I can develop this without getting in trouble." So you're going to have some of those 30 million support those 10,000 brave souls that are developing today, coupled with that capital is going to be huge. And so, to answer your question, what do the legacy guys do? They either got to get on board really quickly, either by buying, probably buying, it's harder to build because they're behind. The folks who adjust survive. Or you could have issues with legacy. How many companies have we seen die because they didn't adjust? So I think they're all having these discussions at the highest level.>> First of all, I love your name of your company, CoinFunds. I love that it's got coin in it. Fund means money. I think that's a great point. In fact, the software developers are going to migrate super fast, probably don't even know they're migrating because low code, no code and coding assistance is the hottest area in AI right now. And you've got super computing being democratized by these AI factories. You've got NVIDIA, you've got Dell, you've got the cloud guys, Hyperscaler, you've got Neocloud is now enabling neo banks. So what I'm looking at is I believe that it's going to be disrupted. But where I'm looking, and I want to get your reaction to this, is that where's the enablement? Because the enablement is going to enable those developers who are going to probably shift over and build on top of something. So obviously, generically we hand wave and say, "It's blockchain." But it's more than that because you have little piece parts coming together. I interviewed founders doing lending and borrowing on chains, super interesting. What you're doing with CoinFund, you're enabling entrepreneurs.
Christopher Perkins
>> A hundred percent.>> And you have a spectrum of liquidity options and investment vehicles. Everyone's coming in.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah.>> Where's the enablement? What's that big disruptive enablement feature, focus? What does the market need to optimize for, Christopher?
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah, so for the last four years, we've been doing a lot of investing in infrastructure, right? We've talked about layer one blockchains, which are major blockchains, layer twos, working on all those things, TPS, et cetera. But there's a ton of other infrastructure we've been building on. And why do we do that? Things like ZK technology, zero-knowledge technology. So these proofs allow you to prove something cryptographically without showing what you've got. So it's a privacy enhancement mechanism. One of the problems with blockchain and mainstream adoption is the fact that there's very little privacy because you can see this stuff on chain. But new technologies will allow you to have the right mix of privacy, public versus private. So the long story short is that crypto in the last 10 years has been very clunky. Right? Ever tried to go into DeFi? It's a pretty awful experience, but every day it gets slightly better. And what many of my entrepreneurs are focusing on are the user experience.>> The mainstreaming of it too.
Christopher Perkins
>> The user experience, because you can't have somebody have 12 or 24-page passcode logging on this, logging on that. It's very, very clunky. And so, we're doing a lot of that. I'd say that the final thing that needs to be unlocked is security. Right? We have state actors maneuvering against us. We're about to put $3 trillion on chain and stablecoins. The The North Koreans are very excited about that. And so, one of the things I've been putting forth and working at the highest levels of our government is putting forth new policies to help unlock security. And our thesis is the way that you really enhance security in our space is to go back to our past and to unlock our private sector, effectively going back to what's an Article I of our Constitution, which is privateering. And by empowering the private sector to go on offense instead of staying on defense, I'm a Marine, I can't help it. That's one of the solutions. And by the way, we've had a problem over the last four years. We lost a lot of entrepreneurs overseas. Right? How do we get them back? Well, what if we could extend a security umbrella where if you're in the United States, no one's going to mess with you because the consequences are bad.>> Yeah. If someone lands on our shores with guns, the military would respond.
Christopher Perkins
>> Right.>> Why wouldn't we respond in the digital world?
Christopher Perkins
>> They've been ravaging on entrepreneurs. And the last few years, it's been blaming the victims. It's really hard to raise money. It's really hard.>> I'm with you on this, Christopher. I love your veteran perspective. No, this is true. I've always said we have to build our own militias.
Christopher Perkins
>> Right.>> Why? Because the government's not protecting us.
Christopher Perkins
>> A hundred percent.>> Why wouldn't they take the same, the red line is crossed. Hey, if you're in my bank, that's a sovereignty issue.
Christopher Perkins
>> A hundred percent.>> Why wouldn't we-
Christopher Perkins
>> We can't roll over. And it's been worse than being on defense because our young founders, to the extent they get hacked, we blame them.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> That's what the government did. No, we don't blame them, we should be protecting them. And I think the private sector has the know-how, the flexibility, and the capabilities to go on offense and to protect our honor.>> I will amplify that message because I think it also takes the energy out of the private companies. Their efforts could be creative. And as productivity kicks in with AI, and now you've got the stability of value creation store and unlocking, why wouldn't we want our citizens and our country to prosper?
Christopher Perkins
>> AI makes the security threat much worse.>> Yeah.
Christopher Perkins
>> It also makes the ability to combat it much better, so we've got to get on the offense.>> Great conversation. I know you brought up veteran, you're a Marine. I always use the beachhead analogy when I talk about that. Get good beachheads. Secure the beachhead. And then mission, I love how you've got a dual mission, double bottom line what you think about. Talk about veterans on Wall Street. I know you're a big proponent of that.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah.>> What is it, and why you're doing it? And how do people get involved, veterans and just citizens?
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah. I've always believed that veterans are some of our best national assets. We spend millions of dollars in training these men and women. And they're highly, highly skilled. Right? And they tend to do really well operating in environments that are stressful. They know how to build teams. They understand risk management. When I got my first job at Lehman, they're like, "Who the heck are you?" And I'm like, "I just got back from Ramadi." I'm like, "I make a lot of calculations, an artillery guy, and I calculate risk. But if my risk was wrong, people die. You guys lose money, right?" And they're like, "Oh, yeah. We should hire you." And so, they gave me a chance. And so, I think you'll find that the talent out there with veterans is incredible. These are people who have volunteered. They've got generally very strong ideals. So give them a chance, hire them. They can do amazing things. Veterans on Wall Street we founded in 2011. We worked very closely with the Bob Woodruff Foundation. We're also working now to bring veterans into the digital asset space, founded something called VIDA, Veterans in Digital Assets. Generally, when you have veterans enter into an industry, the ethics, things just tend to get better. So we'd love to have more folks come in. It's a great environment to build.>> If they can handle that, they can handle banking. It's a piece of cake. A stress environment. "Oh, this is nothing. It's a walk in the park." By the way, theCUBE is a great environment for veterans. We have a lot of military operations going on with events. It feels like we're in the militia going fighting for space, getting those stories.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah, yeah.>> Christopher, thank you for coming on. And again, you're a leader and congratulations. And what you do is great, great work. And again, it's just getting started. I think the clunkiness of the experience is one thing, but the structural mainstreaming of crypto as a digital first party citizen of our world is here.
Christopher Perkins
>> Yeah.>> And it's just beginning. So this generation, this wave, and give it some AI love too. That just makes the wave bigger.
Christopher Perkins
>> Oh, it's going to accelerate.>> I'm just super excited.
Christopher Perkins
>> It's going to accelerate for sure. Thank you so much, John.>> All right. Check out CoinFund. If you're an entrepreneur out there, again, think differently because opportunity recognition is a superpower. How do you finance it? There's a lot of creative and easy, predictable ways to do that. Check out CoinFund of course. Watch theCUBE. We've got all the action here. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.
