Bill Barhydt of Abra and Eddie Chung of Abra join hosts Gemma Allen of theCUBE, John Furrier of theCUBE and Dave Vellante of NYSE Wired at the New York Stock Exchange for NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers presented by theCUBE and NYSE Wired. They discuss Abra’s evolution from retail cryptocurrency services into institutional-grade wealth management and tokenized finance, and the broader market shift toward tokenization, Decentralized Finance, DeFi and on-chain banking. The conversation addresses product differentiation, institutional custody, yield-bearing stablecoins, and the operational and compliance challenges of building secure digital-asset services.
Chung describes tokenization as the “second coming of crypto” and outlines the opportunities that arise from expanding tradable fungible collateral sets. Barhydt highlights Abra’s status as a Registered Investment Adviser, RIA, registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, and explains how a planned public listing aims to increase transparency and trust. They describe practical capabilities including delta-neutral yield strategies, lending against digital assets and stablecoin-based liquidity designed for institutional adoption.
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Eddie Chung & Bill Barhydt, Abra
Bill Barhydt of Abra and Eddie Chung of Abra join hosts Gemma Allen of theCUBE, John Furrier of theCUBE and Dave Vellante of NYSE Wired at the New York Stock Exchange for NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers presented by theCUBE and NYSE Wired. They discuss Abra’s evolution from retail cryptocurrency services into institutional-grade wealth management and tokenized finance, and the broader market shift toward tokenization, Decentralized Finance, DeFi and on-chain banking. The conversation addresses product differentiation, institutional custody, yield-bearing stablecoins, and the operational and compliance challenges of building secure digital-asset services.
Chung describes tokenization as the “second coming of crypto” and outlines the opportunities that arise from expanding tradable fungible collateral sets. Barhydt highlights Abra’s status as a Registered Investment Adviser, RIA, registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, and explains how a planned public listing aims to increase transparency and trust. They describe practical capabilities including delta-neutral yield strategies, lending against digital assets and stablecoin-based liquidity designed for institutional adoption.
>> you. next phase of digital finance. He's joined today by Eddie Chung, who leads Abra's business and corporate development. So the company pushes deeper into tokenization, DeFi and institutional finance. Folks, welcome to NYSE Wired.
Bill Barhydt
>> Great to be here. Thanks for having us.
Gemma Allen
>> So I mentioned that we've had a lot, we've had a real range of individuals on our Crypto Trailblazers show in this last year alone. It's definitely, I find it a fascinating space. Bill, you've been in the industry quite a while. You're an OG, as they say.Talk me through Abra this company and i guess this market moment right? It could be a very big year for both of you.
Bill Barhydt
>> Yeah. It's incredible how things have changed in the last uh 10 years. Originally it was kind of this libertarian playground where we had kind of our own money right. And that was uh what Bitcoin was for a very very small group of people who all kind of knew each other which is ironic, even though it was supposed to be decentralized. But now it's just like you said, the fact that you can have a diverse group of industries and people on your program speaks volumes to the fact that that didn't exist before. You couldn't have had them on because they didn't exist. And so an entire financial ecosystem has been created around what originally was kind of libertarian money, but now it's basically, what was just money is now becoming banking, right? And so the noun is basically being usurped by the verb, which basically says I can do trading. I can do perpetual futures. I can tokenize my house. I can tokenize shares. And it's this whole set of multiple industries and aspects of finance that are being integrated into our world in real time. So it's remarkable to watch.
Gemma Allen
>> And Eddie, at Abra, so you make a good point, Bill. There has definitely been some sort of convergence happening in the space too of late, right? Especially as we see more and more DeFi meets TradFi. We've had a lot of folks on that maybe meet the, and I'm not, no one here mentioned, but maybe meet the profile of more finance bro versus tech bro, right? It's a real mix of two worlds there. Talk about what's happening from a customer business development perspective from Abra. Yeah.
Eddie Chung
>> So I just joined Abra about four months ago, and the focus for Abra is to distribute our wealth solutions for the masses with a focus on the institutional clients with our SEC RIA. But as we go on chain to serve our yield strategies, our lending and borrowing services, more broadly to all of the DeFi ecosystem. And so the partnerships that I'm most focused on today is to build the rails, the plumbing across both the DeFi ecosystem, but also in traditional finance as the blurring of the lines that you alluded to is happening to ensure that we, Abra, are in a position to serve the clients where they want to be served. So that's where my focus has been to date, and we're excited to continue on that journey.
Gemma Allen
>> So Bill, you have seen that customer journey evolve. Your own customer profile has evolved pretty significantly too, I'm sure, from 2014 to now. You mentioned you were based in the Bay Area back then, which was probably a different world to the one you're operating in Monday to Friday these days. Talk about what it is you're positioning to. How did you continue to evolve the strategy and remain competitive? What are institutions looking for that retail investors aren't?
Bill Barhydt
>> Yeah, sure. The earliest days of Abra, it was like, how do I buy Bitcoin? Excuse me. And then how do I buy Ethereum? Now we're issuing yield bearing stable coins so people can literally hold digital dollars and earn more digital dollars. Right. And so the complexity of what we're building and what we're able to offer and the user's understanding, it's just night and day versus where it was 10 years ago. So the idea that we can issue a yield bearing stable coin or have a token that allows you to basically take your Bitcoin and earn more Bitcoin from that token. The idea that you can borrow against your Bitcoin and not sell your Bitcoin. Like these are extreme evolutions versus where we were just a few years ago. And our client base has evolved along with that. In other words, we have family office clients who, you know, Bitcoin was a toy, a test to them. I'll put a million dollars in Bitcoin as a family office. Well, that went from a rounding error to being double digit percentages of their net worth because it's been the most appreciating asset over the last 10 years. And so now for them, it's like, well, how do I manage this? How do I make this tax efficient? How do I access the gains and not have a big tax bill? Can I borrow against this and hold it? Can I earn yield on it? So what was kind of a play thing has now become a real part of their financial planning slash net worth slash financial needs.
Gemma Allen
>> So when we think about what you have built, right, we think about the perspective of what institutions need. They need a level of agility, which is what you just described. Trust, security is huge in this space. Talk about the differentiators from a platform perspective, right? Because a lot of folks talk about building the rails, building the one stop shop, if you like. But you need to compete on something. Right. From a crypto perspective, how do you differentiate in this market?
Bill Barhydt
>> It's a great question for us. It's very straightforward. So there are 100 exchanges that facilitate trading crypto will hold your crypto. And that's a great business. but you're basically on the exchange's balance sheet, meaning your personal asset becomes the exchange's liability, right? Just like when you deposit at a bank. Now, if you're trading all day, that makes sense. Okay? If your goal is to have secure custody, to facilitate loans against your assets, to be able to margin them, then putting your assets on somebody else's balance sheet doesn't really make sense. So what we did is we built a traditional wealth advisor, SEC registered as an RIA, and through that wealth advisor, we offer traditional custody. We offer loans. We offer yield products. We offer bespoke versions of all of those that are tailored from both a regulatory and product perspective to meet the very nuanced needs from a wealth management perspective, not a trading perspective. And that space is actually relatively small because the number of people who are, let's call it digital asset wealthy is small, but growing very fast, right? Cause it went from zero to a $4 trillion space in less than 10 years. Right? So the needs are evolving quickly. And the idea of wealth management is actually relatively new in our space.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow! Eddie, help me profile them, the people that occupy that small space, right? What are their priorities like? You're out i'm sure hobnobbing with these folks quite regularly like. What are you hearing? What are they looking for right? Because it's an evolving concept and industry.
Eddie Chung
>> Yeah so to Bill's point wealth isa newer part of the industry. And what we're hearing from clients that we already serve today and those that we're going after is they're looking to get more out of their crypto than just simply buying and holding. Right. So Abra has been in the business since 2014, as you mentioned, focused on yield strategies, lending and borrowing services that allow you to get more out of your crypto in a risk adjusted manner. And so on the yield strategy side, for example, we manage delta neutral trading strategies, a mix of basis trades, liquidity provisioning options and such that allow us to get more out of the clients crypto that they hold on the lending and borrowing side. Similarly, without having to sell your Bitcoin or your ETH or Solana, we can take that crypto and borrow against it where clients can, in a very low cost and capital efficient way, make use of those proceeds for trading or any other use case that they might see as a good use for those stable coins that we deploy. So those are the sort of client benefits that we are focused on most at Abra. And we're looking to expand with the vision that Bill is also sharing around the larger banking, on -chain banking vision that we're focused on.
Bill Barhydt
>> I would say real estate is probably the most interesting use case right now. So people borrowing against digital assets. And right now, when I say digital assets, it's mostly just crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum. But now what we're starting to see is, oh, I want to borrow against my tokenized QQQs, my tokenized SpaceX, and I'm going to use that to buy my house.
Gemma Allen
>> To stay on tokenization for a second, I think you refer to it as the second coming of crypto. Am I correct?
Bill Barhydt
>> 100%.
Gemma Allen
>> Okay, explain that to me, right? Tokenization, it's an evolving asset class. If we simplify it for a second, it means that what will be deemed eligible is expanding quite significantly, right? Right. But tell me why you think it's the second coming, especially give it to me if I'm a skeptic. Sure.
Bill Barhydt
>> So the first example of tokenization in crypto that worked was the stablecoin. What is a stablecoin? A stablecoin basically takes a dollar, leaves it in a bank account and gives you a token that represents that dollar. Why is that interesting? Well, I can now move that digital dollar peer to peer with nobody in the middle. As a kid, you ever talked with the two cups with a string. That's peer. We call that peer -to -peer right in tech world. That's how you move a stable coin around. Is that valuable? Well, there's 300 billion dollars locked in stable coins last time I checked right and so it's being used for everything from trading cross -border remittances cross -border commerce all kinds of peer -to -peer payments The international futures exchanges now are using stable coins as the pristine collateral because they know that they're generally backed with dollars or treasuries in a bank, which are audited, right? So that is the pristine example. Now, what happens if other types of securities become tokenized? Well, if you start tokenizing traditional equities, traditional indices on equities, what happens is that also becomes collateral the same way Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether are all collateral. It means I can borrow against those shares. I can use them as collateral on futures transactions, right? Which is the business of the parent company of NYSE here. So that's the future of investing, right? So wealth management, banking, trading all merge to be a new type of financial system. where all of the assets are fungible because they're all on these interoperable blockchain networks, because my Apple shares, my stable coins, my Bitcoin, my Solana, they're all tokens. They're all fungible. They're all pristine collateral. Right. And they're all basically liquidatable 24/7, which is what it takes to facilitate lending.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, you described there, though, right, that kind of convergence of industry. It also highly increases the TAM from what you originally described in the wealth management space. That's right. So Eddie, talk to me about that. What is the evolution of this kind of total addressable market? where do you see opportunities two or three years from now that you didn't three years ago?
Eddie Chung
>> I'm often reminded of the $800 trillion financial assets TAM as I have been on this crypto journey for a while. And that's the end goal, right, is how can we tokenize all financial assets so that they can be more fungible than it is today in the traditional system, so that they can be used in a more cost and capital efficient way than today. And so that is the TAM that I think about oftentimes as we are looking to modernize the overall financial system that we know today. Bill,
Gemma Allen
>> I want to talk to you about the operating cost of something like this, right? And what's happening from the perspective of tech. We talk to a lot of CEOs, a lot of founders about what's happening in the other world of tokens, okay? Around spend, predictability, building proprietary models, especially in a space like yours where there's a lot of security spend. and I'm sure you have to make sure things are absolutely airtight. Talk me through that. Bring me under the hood from the perspective of how you think about that and what you yourself and the team at Abra are building.
Bill Barhydt
>> So I have two perspectives on that. So there's the customer's perspective and then there's the perspective of the service provider that we are to our clients. From a customer's perspective, this is the best of all possible worlds because what that does is when, remember, we talked about Bitcoin kind of being the future of money and showing how it could work. And now, tokenization is kind of like the verb, meaning what kind of banking can I do with it? When you start tokenizing things and you start moving things on chain, you're eliminating multiple parties from transactions, right? If I can talk to you with the two cups with the string, I don't have a phone company in the middle. And so if I can move a stable coin peer to peer, I've eliminated a bunch of companies from that transaction, which means that there's fewer hands in the pie asking to get paid in that transaction. If I can use online decentralized futures exchanges and eliminate a whole bunch of counterparty risk in that system, a lot of people don't need to get paid in that transaction. So the consumer, the institution, the end users benefit enormously, not to mention the fact that the liquidity basically grows that you have access to. because in the U.S., we have relatively efficient markets compared to the rest of the world, but it's a big planet, right? And so 75 % of the global population is shut out of the kind of efficient markets that we're used to dealing with. Crypto technology and digital asset technology is the great leveler in that regard. Okay, so that's kind of part one. So part two is the Abra perspective is, okay, what does the bank of the future look like, right? Right. And so, OK, I have kind of a quasi optimistic perspective and a dystopian perspective, which says, OK, I know what's coming and I got to fix it. Right. So the optimistic perspective says, OK, decentralization technology is the future. The Internet is the ultimate decentralized system. Right. Because it's a network of networks that you can't shut down. It was built to literally, survive a nuclear war. That was the whole idea of the Internet. So now we have this decentralized network. We use it to watch movies, cat videos, all this crap. What are we going to use it for in the future? Well, banking hasn't changed in 50 years. It still runs on the same mainframes. As a matter of fact, they can't touch a lot of those systems because the people that designed them are dead. So what crypto does is it decentralizes all of that. Now, that actually solves a whole bunch of problems for the bank of the future. But it does, I would say to a degree act as an insurance policy on poor policy planning, poor government policy. the fact that trust in financial institutions is at an all time low. A lot of retail banks in this country have negative net promoter scores. Now, that kind of defies the laws of physics because you shouldn't have a negative Net Promoter Score. What that means in English is for every customer they sign up, they lose more customers because their reputation is so bad. Wow. OK, so that's obviously unsustainable. because you're literally spending money to shrink your business. Okay. So what I'm saying is that at some point, this is going to break. And I think we're at that point now, right? When the government is buying its debt and interest rates are going up still, that's not supposed to happen. So we're at this kind of apex where I think something is breaking. And I think that these systems we're describing are going to pick up the pieces. and it's not going to be like, oh, it just broke on Tuesday and we're here on Wednesday. It's like a gradual thing, like when you're boiling the proverbial frog starting with cold water, people are not going to realize that all of a sudden it's an entirely new financial system, but it is happening. And as the old system breaks, I think we're very fortunate that we have this next -gen decentralization technology to pick up the pieces.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, I'm certainly glad you said, what am I going to do to fix it? and you're not saying you're building a bunker, but that gives me hope for sure.
Bill Barhydt
>> I don't think the two have to be mutually exclusive. So I can still have a bunker and still try to fix the world at the same time. But I don't have a bunker, so it's all good.
Gemma Allen
>> So exciting road ahead for you guys. You're here at the NYSE today. No coincidence. You guys are planning to go public, I believe, later this year.
Bill Barhydt
>> That's right.
Gemma Allen
>> Talk me through that journey. How are you approaching that? Exciting times.
Bill Barhydt
>> Yeah, this was a really... Look, going public, as is not an easy... It's not a cakewalk process. It's a very complex process. It's a very expensive process. But as we're forming this bank of the future vis -a -vis the discussion we just had, it was really obvious to us that coming out of all of the trials and tribulations that our space has gone through, whether it's other failed companies, people, bad actors, it's very difficult for the family office clients, the institutions to know who to trust in our space. Which is ironic. And so what we consciously decided is, okay, we're going to build this wealth management slash bank platform of the future, but we have to instill as much trust in our clients as possible. And the way you do that ultimately is through ultimate transparency. And so a public company filed to become an RIA, which no one in our space had really done before, and just really commit to that we're going to do everything we can to give people the feeling that, okay, this company is legit. They're here to stay. They're committed to transparency. They have the right values. And if the future of banking is digital assets, that's a company I want to trust in the digital asset space.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, you certainly have convinced me. Bill, Eddie, thank you so much for joining us on NYSE Wired.
Bill Barhydt
>> Thanks for having us.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen here at theCUBE Studio at the New York Stock Exchange. This is Crypto Trailblazers, one of our segments with NYSE Wired. Thanks for watching.
>> you. next phase of digital finance. He's joined today by Eddie Chung, who leads Abra's business and corporate development. So the company pushes deeper into tokenization, DeFi and institutional finance. Folks, welcome to NYSE Wired.
Bill Barhydt
>> Great to be here. Thanks for having us.
Gemma Allen
>> So I mentioned that we've had a lot, we've had a real range of individuals on our Crypto Trailblazers show in this last year alone. It's definitely, I find it a fascinating space. Bill, you've been in the industry quite a while. You're an OG, as they say.Talk me through Abra this company and i guess this market moment right? It could be a very big year for both of you.
Bill Barhydt
>> Yeah. It's incredible how things have changed in the last uh 10 years. Originally it was kind of this libertarian playground where we had kind of our own money right. And that was uh what Bitcoin was for a very very small group of people who all kind of knew each other which is ironic, even though it was supposed to be decentralized. But now it's just like you said, the fact that you can have a diverse group of industries and people on your program speaks volumes to the fact that that didn't exist before. You couldn't have had them on because they didn't exist. And so an entire financial ecosystem has been created around what originally was kind of libertarian money, but now it's basically, what was just money is now becoming banking, right? And so the noun is basically being usurped by the verb, which basically says I can do trading. I can do perpetual futures. I can tokenize my house. I can tokenize shares. And it's this whole set of multiple industries and aspects of finance that are being integrated into our world in real time. So it's remarkable to watch.
Gemma Allen
>> And Eddie, at Abra, so you make a good point, Bill. There has definitely been some sort of convergence happening in the space too of late, right? Especially as we see more and more DeFi meets TradFi. We've had a lot of folks on that maybe meet the, and I'm not, no one here mentioned, but maybe meet the profile of more finance bro versus tech bro, right? It's a real mix of two worlds there. Talk about what's happening from a customer business development perspective from Abra. Yeah.
Eddie Chung
>> So I just joined Abra about four months ago, and the focus for Abra is to distribute our wealth solutions for the masses with a focus on the institutional clients with our SEC RIA. But as we go on chain to serve our yield strategies, our lending and borrowing services, more broadly to all of the DeFi ecosystem. And so the partnerships that I'm most focused on today is to build the rails, the plumbing across both the DeFi ecosystem, but also in traditional finance as the blurring of the lines that you alluded to is happening to ensure that we, Abra, are in a position to serve the clients where they want to be served. So that's where my focus has been to date, and we're excited to continue on that journey.
Gemma Allen
>> So Bill, you have seen that customer journey evolve. Your own customer profile has evolved pretty significantly too, I'm sure, from 2014 to now. You mentioned you were based in the Bay Area back then, which was probably a different world to the one you're operating in Monday to Friday these days. Talk about what it is you're positioning to. How did you continue to evolve the strategy and remain competitive? What are institutions looking for that retail investors aren't?
Bill Barhydt
>> Yeah, sure. The earliest days of Abra, it was like, how do I buy Bitcoin? Excuse me. And then how do I buy Ethereum? Now we're issuing yield bearing stable coins so people can literally hold digital dollars and earn more digital dollars. Right. And so the complexity of what we're building and what we're able to offer and the user's understanding, it's just night and day versus where it was 10 years ago. So the idea that we can issue a yield bearing stable coin or have a token that allows you to basically take your Bitcoin and earn more Bitcoin from that token. The idea that you can borrow against your Bitcoin and not sell your Bitcoin. Like these are extreme evolutions versus where we were just a few years ago. And our client base has evolved along with that. In other words, we have family office clients who, you know, Bitcoin was a toy, a test to them. I'll put a million dollars in Bitcoin as a family office. Well, that went from a rounding error to being double digit percentages of their net worth because it's been the most appreciating asset over the last 10 years. And so now for them, it's like, well, how do I manage this? How do I make this tax efficient? How do I access the gains and not have a big tax bill? Can I borrow against this and hold it? Can I earn yield on it? So what was kind of a play thing has now become a real part of their financial planning slash net worth slash financial needs.
Gemma Allen
>> So when we think about what you have built, right, we think about the perspective of what institutions need. They need a level of agility, which is what you just described. Trust, security is huge in this space. Talk about the differentiators from a platform perspective, right? Because a lot of folks talk about building the rails, building the one stop shop, if you like. But you need to compete on something. Right. From a crypto perspective, how do you differentiate in this market?
Bill Barhydt
>> It's a great question for us. It's very straightforward. So there are 100 exchanges that facilitate trading crypto will hold your crypto. And that's a great business. but you're basically on the exchange's balance sheet, meaning your personal asset becomes the exchange's liability, right? Just like when you deposit at a bank. Now, if you're trading all day, that makes sense. Okay? If your goal is to have secure custody, to facilitate loans against your assets, to be able to margin them, then putting your assets on somebody else's balance sheet doesn't really make sense. So what we did is we built a traditional wealth advisor, SEC registered as an RIA, and through that wealth advisor, we offer traditional custody. We offer loans. We offer yield products. We offer bespoke versions of all of those that are tailored from both a regulatory and product perspective to meet the very nuanced needs from a wealth management perspective, not a trading perspective. And that space is actually relatively small because the number of people who are, let's call it digital asset wealthy is small, but growing very fast, right? Cause it went from zero to a $4 trillion space in less than 10 years. Right? So the needs are evolving quickly. And the idea of wealth management is actually relatively new in our space.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow! Eddie, help me profile them, the people that occupy that small space, right? What are their priorities like? You're out i'm sure hobnobbing with these folks quite regularly like. What are you hearing? What are they looking for right? Because it's an evolving concept and industry.
Eddie Chung
>> Yeah so to Bill's point wealth isa newer part of the industry. And what we're hearing from clients that we already serve today and those that we're going after is they're looking to get more out of their crypto than just simply buying and holding. Right. So Abra has been in the business since 2014, as you mentioned, focused on yield strategies, lending and borrowing services that allow you to get more out of your crypto in a risk adjusted manner. And so on the yield strategy side, for example, we manage delta neutral trading strategies, a mix of basis trades, liquidity provisioning options and such that allow us to get more out of the clients crypto that they hold on the lending and borrowing side. Similarly, without having to sell your Bitcoin or your ETH or Solana, we can take that crypto and borrow against it where clients can, in a very low cost and capital efficient way, make use of those proceeds for trading or any other use case that they might see as a good use for those stable coins that we deploy. So those are the sort of client benefits that we are focused on most at Abra. And we're looking to expand with the vision that Bill is also sharing around the larger banking, on -chain banking vision that we're focused on.
Bill Barhydt
>> I would say real estate is probably the most interesting use case right now. So people borrowing against digital assets. And right now, when I say digital assets, it's mostly just crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum. But now what we're starting to see is, oh, I want to borrow against my tokenized QQQs, my tokenized SpaceX, and I'm going to use that to buy my house.
Gemma Allen
>> To stay on tokenization for a second, I think you refer to it as the second coming of crypto. Am I correct?
Bill Barhydt
>> 100%.
Gemma Allen
>> Okay, explain that to me, right? Tokenization, it's an evolving asset class. If we simplify it for a second, it means that what will be deemed eligible is expanding quite significantly, right? Right. But tell me why you think it's the second coming, especially give it to me if I'm a skeptic. Sure.
Bill Barhydt
>> So the first example of tokenization in crypto that worked was the stablecoin. What is a stablecoin? A stablecoin basically takes a dollar, leaves it in a bank account and gives you a token that represents that dollar. Why is that interesting? Well, I can now move that digital dollar peer to peer with nobody in the middle. As a kid, you ever talked with the two cups with a string. That's peer. We call that peer -to -peer right in tech world. That's how you move a stable coin around. Is that valuable? Well, there's 300 billion dollars locked in stable coins last time I checked right and so it's being used for everything from trading cross -border remittances cross -border commerce all kinds of peer -to -peer payments The international futures exchanges now are using stable coins as the pristine collateral because they know that they're generally backed with dollars or treasuries in a bank, which are audited, right? So that is the pristine example. Now, what happens if other types of securities become tokenized? Well, if you start tokenizing traditional equities, traditional indices on equities, what happens is that also becomes collateral the same way Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether are all collateral. It means I can borrow against those shares. I can use them as collateral on futures transactions, right? Which is the business of the parent company of NYSE here. So that's the future of investing, right? So wealth management, banking, trading all merge to be a new type of financial system. where all of the assets are fungible because they're all on these interoperable blockchain networks, because my Apple shares, my stable coins, my Bitcoin, my Solana, they're all tokens. They're all fungible. They're all pristine collateral. Right. And they're all basically liquidatable 24/7, which is what it takes to facilitate lending.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, you described there, though, right, that kind of convergence of industry. It also highly increases the TAM from what you originally described in the wealth management space. That's right. So Eddie, talk to me about that. What is the evolution of this kind of total addressable market? where do you see opportunities two or three years from now that you didn't three years ago?
Eddie Chung
>> I'm often reminded of the $800 trillion financial assets TAM as I have been on this crypto journey for a while. And that's the end goal, right, is how can we tokenize all financial assets so that they can be more fungible than it is today in the traditional system, so that they can be used in a more cost and capital efficient way than today. And so that is the TAM that I think about oftentimes as we are looking to modernize the overall financial system that we know today. Bill,
Gemma Allen
>> I want to talk to you about the operating cost of something like this, right? And what's happening from the perspective of tech. We talk to a lot of CEOs, a lot of founders about what's happening in the other world of tokens, okay? Around spend, predictability, building proprietary models, especially in a space like yours where there's a lot of security spend. and I'm sure you have to make sure things are absolutely airtight. Talk me through that. Bring me under the hood from the perspective of how you think about that and what you yourself and the team at Abra are building.
Bill Barhydt
>> So I have two perspectives on that. So there's the customer's perspective and then there's the perspective of the service provider that we are to our clients. From a customer's perspective, this is the best of all possible worlds because what that does is when, remember, we talked about Bitcoin kind of being the future of money and showing how it could work. And now, tokenization is kind of like the verb, meaning what kind of banking can I do with it? When you start tokenizing things and you start moving things on chain, you're eliminating multiple parties from transactions, right? If I can talk to you with the two cups with the string, I don't have a phone company in the middle. And so if I can move a stable coin peer to peer, I've eliminated a bunch of companies from that transaction, which means that there's fewer hands in the pie asking to get paid in that transaction. If I can use online decentralized futures exchanges and eliminate a whole bunch of counterparty risk in that system, a lot of people don't need to get paid in that transaction. So the consumer, the institution, the end users benefit enormously, not to mention the fact that the liquidity basically grows that you have access to. because in the U.S., we have relatively efficient markets compared to the rest of the world, but it's a big planet, right? And so 75 % of the global population is shut out of the kind of efficient markets that we're used to dealing with. Crypto technology and digital asset technology is the great leveler in that regard. Okay, so that's kind of part one. So part two is the Abra perspective is, okay, what does the bank of the future look like, right? Right. And so, OK, I have kind of a quasi optimistic perspective and a dystopian perspective, which says, OK, I know what's coming and I got to fix it. Right. So the optimistic perspective says, OK, decentralization technology is the future. The Internet is the ultimate decentralized system. Right. Because it's a network of networks that you can't shut down. It was built to literally, survive a nuclear war. That was the whole idea of the Internet. So now we have this decentralized network. We use it to watch movies, cat videos, all this crap. What are we going to use it for in the future? Well, banking hasn't changed in 50 years. It still runs on the same mainframes. As a matter of fact, they can't touch a lot of those systems because the people that designed them are dead. So what crypto does is it decentralizes all of that. Now, that actually solves a whole bunch of problems for the bank of the future. But it does, I would say to a degree act as an insurance policy on poor policy planning, poor government policy. the fact that trust in financial institutions is at an all time low. A lot of retail banks in this country have negative net promoter scores. Now, that kind of defies the laws of physics because you shouldn't have a negative Net Promoter Score. What that means in English is for every customer they sign up, they lose more customers because their reputation is so bad. Wow. OK, so that's obviously unsustainable. because you're literally spending money to shrink your business. Okay. So what I'm saying is that at some point, this is going to break. And I think we're at that point now, right? When the government is buying its debt and interest rates are going up still, that's not supposed to happen. So we're at this kind of apex where I think something is breaking. And I think that these systems we're describing are going to pick up the pieces. and it's not going to be like, oh, it just broke on Tuesday and we're here on Wednesday. It's like a gradual thing, like when you're boiling the proverbial frog starting with cold water, people are not going to realize that all of a sudden it's an entirely new financial system, but it is happening. And as the old system breaks, I think we're very fortunate that we have this next -gen decentralization technology to pick up the pieces.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, I'm certainly glad you said, what am I going to do to fix it? and you're not saying you're building a bunker, but that gives me hope for sure.
Bill Barhydt
>> I don't think the two have to be mutually exclusive. So I can still have a bunker and still try to fix the world at the same time. But I don't have a bunker, so it's all good.
Gemma Allen
>> So exciting road ahead for you guys. You're here at the NYSE today. No coincidence. You guys are planning to go public, I believe, later this year.
Bill Barhydt
>> That's right.
Gemma Allen
>> Talk me through that journey. How are you approaching that? Exciting times.
Bill Barhydt
>> Yeah, this was a really... Look, going public, as is not an easy... It's not a cakewalk process. It's a very complex process. It's a very expensive process. But as we're forming this bank of the future vis -a -vis the discussion we just had, it was really obvious to us that coming out of all of the trials and tribulations that our space has gone through, whether it's other failed companies, people, bad actors, it's very difficult for the family office clients, the institutions to know who to trust in our space. Which is ironic. And so what we consciously decided is, okay, we're going to build this wealth management slash bank platform of the future, but we have to instill as much trust in our clients as possible. And the way you do that ultimately is through ultimate transparency. And so a public company filed to become an RIA, which no one in our space had really done before, and just really commit to that we're going to do everything we can to give people the feeling that, okay, this company is legit. They're here to stay. They're committed to transparency. They have the right values. And if the future of banking is digital assets, that's a company I want to trust in the digital asset space.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, you certainly have convinced me. Bill, Eddie, thank you so much for joining us on NYSE Wired.
Bill Barhydt
>> Thanks for having us.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen here at theCUBE Studio at the New York Stock Exchange. This is Crypto Trailblazers, one of our segments with NYSE Wired. Thanks for watching.
Gemma Allen
Bill Barhydt
Eddie Chung