theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers | Tony Edward, Thinking Crypto Podcast

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More from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers

Tony Edward

Founder & Host

Thinking Crypto Podcast

play_circle_outline Institutional adoption of crypto, including ETFs and stablecoins

play_circle_outline Importance of crypto legislation to prevent scams and fraud

play_circle_outline Tokenization of assets and decentralized finance

play_circle_outline Ethereum vs Solana debate for different use cases

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Tony Edward, Thinking Crypto Podcast

Tony Edward

Founder & Host Thinking Crypto Podcast

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>> Welcome back, everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here at our NYSC CUBE Studios on the East Coast. Of course, we've got our Palo Alto, West Coast, Silicon Valley studio. Of course, we cover all the events in tech. This is where all the action happens in Wall Street, bringing tech and Wall Street together as part of our NYSC, Wired and theCUBE partnership with Crypto Trailblazers the series, where we're highlighting all the leaders, fly on the fields, blazing the trail in crypto, crypto infrastructure, decentralized infrastructure, and then bringing in the new era of the economy, complete transparency, efficiency, all the same things that's going on with AI. I'm excited to have a host and founder of The Thinking Crypto podcast, Tony Edwards here, who's also been podding a lot of the experts as well. Welcome to the community, great to meet you. Thanks for coming on our pod. You're podding. We're podding together.

Tony Edward

>> Absolutely great to be here and excited to talk about what's happening in the crypto industry.

>> What I love about the studio here is one, it's got the vibe of New York, got the traders back there going crazy. You might hear them. It's about that time of year, and with 20 more minutes, market closes, they go crazy.

Tony Edward

>> It adds to the vibe, right?

>> Next 10 minutes it's going to be crazy. That's the old way of doing it. The crypto way is completely silent. It's happening on chain. First of all, thanks for coming in. First talk about your podcast, do a quick plug for the pod, your pod and who you cover and some of the conversations.

Tony Edward

>> Yeah, absolutely. So the podcast covers crypto news. It's a daily episode that's put out and it includes interviews with industry experts, founders, CEOs, institutional investors, regulators, and politicians as well.

>> Yeah, and that's been the theme here. Of all the interviews we've done, I think we've done over 50 interviews on crypto trailblazers, from the building parallel on chain, low latency action to institutions. But the mainstreaming has been the big story. The climate in the US is not hostile.

Tony Edward

>> Right.

>> It's somewhat of a tailwind, not full tailwind, but it's better than a hurricane headwind. But now the institutional adoption, what are you seeing? What are you hearing from your community? What are the experts telling you? Are they leaning in hard? Are they kind of putting their toe in the water? What's the sentiment? What are you seeing on your end?

Tony Edward

>> They are all in. I think about Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO. Just yesterday, he put out a letter to investors and in that letter he talked about tokenization. He wants to put stocks, bonds, and other assets on the blockchain and democratize investing. And in order to do that, you have to have the blockchain in place. So we are seeing the biggest of the biggest on Wall Street, whether it be BlackRock, Fidelity, they're going all in, launching ETFs, tokenizing, and now they're looking into stablecoins to improve payments where you have instant settlements. So we are seeing the next big macro trade, I believe, and these institutions recognize that.

>> It's interesting. I think the ETFs were a big game changer. They kind of tipped the scales a little bit towards the momentum. Stablecoins? Phenomenal for assets on chain, really big game changer there. So I want to ask you, what are you finding out in your discussions around where the confidence level is? Obviously the smart money is going there. I call it the tech alphas and the financial alphas. They'll like follow the money and the action. So you've got the tech theater exploding innovation there. What's the progress bar look like from your seat when you interview folks? Is there enough confidence in the underlying infrastructure that now these next layers will come on?

Tony Edward

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think a few years back there was the idea that this was all a fad, that it was not really a technology that was viable. But I think with institutions coming in and presenting real use cases, here's how we apply this technology to the real world. Here's how it's going to change people's lives. Whether it's improving payments, improving the process of doing transactions by having contracts on the blockchain, eliminating middlemen, cutting out fees, making things faster and efficient. And I think the instant settlement is the key. I can send money across border, instant settlement. I don't have to wake days or weeks for the backend to figure out the settlement. And I think with Congress working on crypto legislation, the confidence level is at an all time high because we have a favorable environment but Congress is pushing through stable coin legislation and market structure legislation.

>> I mean, market assets and digital? You got to have something. When you look at your bank statement, that's not real money, it's digital. I mean, I'm looking at an online dashboard on my bank and money somewhere. It's t-bills. It's like this concept. So I think people are now realizing that, okay, I can buy into this. What is the critical path in your mind to success? Is it adoption, full integration? What are some of the threshold issues that you're seeing that people are talking about?

Tony Edward

>> Sure. So I think the first barrier was getting institutions to come in and start innovating and we're past that. But the next is crypto legislation, because the guardrails need to be put into place. There are bad actors trying to use this technology to scam people. And we see people are rug pulling investors with meme coins. We can't have that. If this asset class is to mature to the next level and more capital is to come in, I think there is a lot of capital sitting on the sidelines. Once we get the legislation, you're going to see the floodgates open up. Even though we're seeing some of that with the ETFs. But notice the ETFs are an institutional wrapper. This is not something that the early crypto adopters were bullish on or said, we want ETFs. They believe in the kind of the sypher punk movement. But now with-

>> It's real money, serious people.

Tony Edward

>> Exactly.

>> Serious people do it. I was talking to Franklin Templeton, they have an awesome solution. Their innovation, they're fully integrated, all the software they're building. Token economics, the tokens themselves. So you're going to start to see these economies. It's really fascinating that you're going to start to see stable coins give people... We at theCUBE, we have a Cube dollar. You could have a thinking Crypto podcast coin.

Tony Edward

>> Exactly.

>> This is coming.

Tony Edward

>> So this is something I've been talking about for years and I call it the token economy because whether it's a stock part of a real estate, a building in Manhattan, whatever it may be, it's going to be in token form. Even communities. So part of social networks or if you're a part of a Nike community, they can give you a token as a reward for your activity and you're going to have ownership. And that's the difference at Web3. And it's verifiable on the blockchain.

>> Yeah. What's the coolest thing you've been seeing that you like right now, and what is the most disturbing thing? Is it the chain wars or something else? What's the coolest thing you've seen in some of the, I won't say disastrous thing, but get better, we need to get better faster?

Tony Edward

>> I'm very fascinated by the United States government looking to build a Bitcoin reserve because I think we're at another Bretton Woods moment where after World War II, there was the movement of putting gold in place and the US dollar is the reserve currency. Now you're introducing Bitcoin, a digital gold, and I'm fascinated to see what the central banks and the world governments do. Will they all accumulate now that the United States has put up the signal? Second, I think stable coins, in addition to improving payments, the fact that stable coin issuers are now going to buy treasuries from the United States, help solve a problem of helping the United States maintain that rural reserve currency status because BRICS nations are trying to bypass the US dollar. So there's a geopolitical layer here. And then I would say tokenization. The fact that eventually I can tokenize my house and do some things on decentralized finance, and we're way off from that. But the possibility.

>> Well, it's possible. It's there.

Tony Edward

>> Yes.

>> It's in a line of sight.

Tony Edward

>> Yes.

>> It's a couple of lily pads away to hop to basically.

Tony Edward

>> Exactly. And it just opens up secondary and tertiary markets. I, as an individual can go to someone in Belgium, let's say, "Hey, I would like to take out a loan. Here's my collateral. Here's some tokens to my property. Give me a loan."

>> And the settlement speed is the key.

Tony Edward

>> Exactly.

>> This is where we're seeing this. I mean, I had one guest on theCUBE saying, "This is pure capitalism and it's all good." It's good capitalism because it's where everythings transparent.

Tony Edward

>> Yes.

>> And you got the efficiencies. So AI and crypto infrastructure are rhyming right now. Productivity, transparency, democratization, efficiency, new use cases. What's your take on that? What would you say some things you might see that address that here?

Tony Edward

>> I'm very big into technology, so I'm super passionate and excited about these things, even though there's a bit of a dystopian aspect to some of it. But I believe we're living in the fourth industrial revolution. And we saw in the early 1900s how the combustion engine electricity light bulb changed our lives. And I mean, look at what we're doing right now as a result. With the internet, AI, blockchain crypto robotics, the world is going to look very different in 20 to 30 years. I think about my seven-year-old and the world she's going to live in, maybe she's going to have a Tesla bot in their house. And how do you police the Tesla bot and AI agents unique blockchain? And it's so funny how these technologies are converging and they're going to change the way we do business.

>> It's interesting. I want to get back to some of the innovations because I think Ethereum might've been a little bit too slow to address the latency issues. Solana came out of nowhere. Look what's happening there. We had the Ethereum folks on our Silicon Valley Crypto Trailblazer series. Hope Foundation was in town, Metallic was in town for the first time in the US in four years. He lives outside the United States. But they're talking about working on faster stuff, but they just got crushed by a Bloomberg story this week around how dysfunctional that is. And then the performance numbers of course Solana's piling on. So talk about the difference between those two because there's different use cases. I mean, Solana hits the use cases for access. You and I want to start our own token, we can do that tomorrow. They got throughput. Ethereum more higher value, prices cost more on transactions, but they're getting crucified right now. So is that warranted or am I asking you to choose here or give some perspective? How should the market look at those two chains?

Tony Edward

>> Sure. I'm an eth holder, so I'm feeling the pain right now. But I like to think of them as Ethereum is more for enterprises. And I'll give an example. Fidelity last week said, "Hey, we're going to launch a stablecoin. Guess which chain it's going to be on? Ethereum. We're going to start tokenizing a money market fund to follow in BlackRock steps. Guess where we're starting? Ethereum." So we're seeing institutional level adoption for Ethereum and Solana is more of the retail. To your point, the fast, easy, cheap way of launching coins or doing certain transactions. However, I think Solana's transactions, the majority of it has been mean coins, which is not a great utility per se because it's not BlackRock moving some sort of token or whatever it may be. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the entire change mean points, but a large amount of the volume was. So I think Ethereum will catch up this cycle. I believe when the SEC approves staking to go into the Ethereum spot ETFs, that will be the game changer. Inflows will increase

>> And what's going to drive that? Volume?

Tony Edward

>> Yeah. Because the possibility of holding the asset and getting the yield in the ETF, that's a great incentive. Right now, I'm not incentivized to buy the Ethereum ETF. Why? I can buy directly and stake and earn the rewards. I can't do that in the ETF right now.

>> Yeah. And then also the gas too, issues there.

Tony Edward

>> Yeah.

>> It's interesting. I think they're not mutually exclusive. There's use cases for both chains. It's interesting going to see how that goes. Now, I'll say one thing. I was talking to Dave Vellante about this, my co-founder and co-CEO of SiliconANGLE, competition's good.

Tony Edward

>> Yes.

>> I think Ethereum got a little fire lit under their ass. Like, "Hey, come on guys."

Tony Edward

>> Absolutely.

>> "Get your together. We want performance." And I talked to a lot of folks, it's happening. So it's not like they're sitting on their hands. The community's kind of like chill. I guess that's my word. I shouldn't say it. I mean that in a very complimentary way.

Tony Edward

>> Well, they were in the driver's seat for many years as the top smart contract blockchain. And a competitors came on and they were like, "Okay, we see where you're not crossing your T's and dotting your I's and we're going to take advantage." And now I think to your point, a fire's been lit and they're trying to catch up.

>> Yeah. Got the big trades going down. It's my favorite part of the day. It's eight minutes before the bell closes. Going crazy.

Tony Edward

>> Love it.

>> And Nvidia and Tesla's been going on fire all week. Tesla's been like a yo-yo with all the burning of the Teslas, obviously Nvidia with CoreWeave. Let's see what's on the board today. Palantir, Tesla. Yeah, it's all a lot of Tesla, Nvidia, Apple. Apple's up there. Wow. Apple options are going. So activity. It's all in the green though.

Tony Edward

>> Yeah, I've seen the movies in the old days where it's very loud and I've been here a few times for interviews and it's been quiet, but it's great to hear some noise.

>> Well, on the NYSE, which is right on the next hall, it's like there's no trading. Just market makers, all the electronics trading, dark pools are off property.

Tony Edward

>> Oh, sure.

>> So it's all electronic now. All right, cool. Well, it's great to have you on, Tony. Talk about the pod. How long you've been podcasting, how many episodes you in, who are some of your guests, who listens to it? Give us the feel for the pod.

Tony Edward

>> Sure. So I got into crypto in 2016. I started the YouTube channel in 2017 as crypto was hitting I think one of its biggest bull markets ever. And then that expanded to the podcast where I started interviewing guests. And folks I've had on are Michael Saylor, Michael Arrington, Raoul Pal, Anthony Staramucci, a lot of regulators. Hester Peirce of the SEC. In addition to Chris Giancarlo, former CFTC chairman. I just interviewed earlier, Bo Heinz, who is the executive director for the Presidential Council Advisory Board for Digital Assets.

>> Nice.

Tony Edward

>> Long title.

>> And events you go to?

Tony Edward

>> So I tried to attend a Bitcoin conference consensus, all the major crypto events, and in addition the advocacy events in DC. So I was at the DC Blockchain Summit last week headed up by the Digital Chamber. We had the most members of Congress at that event. The vibes were at all time high.

>> Awesome. Well, great to have you on my pod and look forward to maybe someday coming on your pod.

Tony Edward

>> Absolutely. We'd love to have you.

>> With theCUBE coin. We were there for the ICO craze in 2018. We did Coin Agenda in Puerto Rico, Coin Agenda multiple times here in New York at the Hilton. We did The Bahamas, Polygon had a big event there.

Tony Edward

>> Sure.

>> And the other international events. For 2018, theCUBE on the road, we've been covering crypto since 2012. And so in fact, our first website in 2011, no, 2012, the developer wanted to be paid in Bitcoin, but you only get it through Silk Road. So we had to go dark web for the transaction.

Tony Edward

>> Wow. That's your OG.

>> The joke is that's a $300 million website. We use it for a year.

Tony Edward

>> Wow. Amazing stuff.

>> Great to have you on. Great to meet you. Congratulations. Love the pod. Thanks for coming on.

Tony Edward

>> Thank you so much, John.

>> All right. I'm John Furrier. The bell's about to ring here in New York City for the NYSC. Also, the NYSC Wired Community is an open community. The Trailblazers, we've been chronicling the leaders. One, making it happen. Newsmakers, decision makers. Also, the innovators, all making the new wave happen. The script will be flipping. We're here on the show floor. Thanks for watching.

Tony Edward, Thinking Crypto Podcast

search

>> Welcome back, everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here at our NYSC CUBE Studios on the East Coast. Of course, we've got our Palo Alto, West Coast, Silicon Valley studio. Of course, we cover all the events in tech. This is where all the action happens in Wall Street, bringing tech and Wall Street together as part of our NYSC, Wired and theCUBE partnership with Crypto Trailblazers the series, where we're highlighting all the leaders, fly on the fields, blazing the trail in crypto, crypto infrastructure, decentralized infrastructure, and then bringing in the new era of the economy, complete transparency, efficiency, all the same things that's going on with AI. I'm excited to have a host and founder of The Thinking Crypto podcast, Tony Edwards here, who's also been podding a lot of the experts as well. Welcome to the community, great to meet you. Thanks for coming on our pod. You're podding. We're podding together.

Tony Edward

>> Absolutely great to be here and excited to talk about what's happening in the crypto industry.

>> What I love about the studio here is one, it's got the vibe of New York, got the traders back there going crazy. You might hear them. It's about that time of year, and with 20 more minutes, market closes, they go crazy.

Tony Edward

>> It adds to the vibe, right?

>> Next 10 minutes it's going to be crazy. That's the old way of doing it. The crypto way is completely silent. It's happening on chain. First of all, thanks for coming in. First talk about your podcast, do a quick plug for the pod, your pod and who you cover and some of the conversations.

Tony Edward

>> Yeah, absolutely. So the podcast covers crypto news. It's a daily episode that's put out and it includes interviews with industry experts, founders, CEOs, institutional investors, regulators, and politicians as well.

>> Yeah, and that's been the theme here. Of all the interviews we've done, I think we've done over 50 interviews on crypto trailblazers, from the building parallel on chain, low latency action to institutions. But the mainstreaming has been the big story. The climate in the US is not hostile.

Tony Edward

>> Right.

>> It's somewhat of a tailwind, not full tailwind, but it's better than a hurricane headwind. But now the institutional adoption, what are you seeing? What are you hearing from your community? What are the experts telling you? Are they leaning in hard? Are they kind of putting their toe in the water? What's the sentiment? What are you seeing on your end?

Tony Edward

>> They are all in. I think about Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO. Just yesterday, he put out a letter to investors and in that letter he talked about tokenization. He wants to put stocks, bonds, and other assets on the blockchain and democratize investing. And in order to do that, you have to have the blockchain in place. So we are seeing the biggest of the biggest on Wall Street, whether it be BlackRock, Fidelity, they're going all in, launching ETFs, tokenizing, and now they're looking into stablecoins to improve payments where you have instant settlements. So we are seeing the next big macro trade, I believe, and these institutions recognize that.

>> It's interesting. I think the ETFs were a big game changer. They kind of tipped the scales a little bit towards the momentum. Stablecoins? Phenomenal for assets on chain, really big game changer there. So I want to ask you, what are you finding out in your discussions around where the confidence level is? Obviously the smart money is going there. I call it the tech alphas and the financial alphas. They'll like follow the money and the action. So you've got the tech theater exploding innovation there. What's the progress bar look like from your seat when you interview folks? Is there enough confidence in the underlying infrastructure that now these next layers will come on?

Tony Edward

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think a few years back there was the idea that this was all a fad, that it was not really a technology that was viable. But I think with institutions coming in and presenting real use cases, here's how we apply this technology to the real world. Here's how it's going to change people's lives. Whether it's improving payments, improving the process of doing transactions by having contracts on the blockchain, eliminating middlemen, cutting out fees, making things faster and efficient. And I think the instant settlement is the key. I can send money across border, instant settlement. I don't have to wake days or weeks for the backend to figure out the settlement. And I think with Congress working on crypto legislation, the confidence level is at an all time high because we have a favorable environment but Congress is pushing through stable coin legislation and market structure legislation.

>> I mean, market assets and digital? You got to have something. When you look at your bank statement, that's not real money, it's digital. I mean, I'm looking at an online dashboard on my bank and money somewhere. It's t-bills. It's like this concept. So I think people are now realizing that, okay, I can buy into this. What is the critical path in your mind to success? Is it adoption, full integration? What are some of the threshold issues that you're seeing that people are talking about?

Tony Edward

>> Sure. So I think the first barrier was getting institutions to come in and start innovating and we're past that. But the next is crypto legislation, because the guardrails need to be put into place. There are bad actors trying to use this technology to scam people. And we see people are rug pulling investors with meme coins. We can't have that. If this asset class is to mature to the next level and more capital is to come in, I think there is a lot of capital sitting on the sidelines. Once we get the legislation, you're going to see the floodgates open up. Even though we're seeing some of that with the ETFs. But notice the ETFs are an institutional wrapper. This is not something that the early crypto adopters were bullish on or said, we want ETFs. They believe in the kind of the sypher punk movement. But now with-

>> It's real money, serious people.

Tony Edward

>> Exactly.

>> Serious people do it. I was talking to Franklin Templeton, they have an awesome solution. Their innovation, they're fully integrated, all the software they're building. Token economics, the tokens themselves. So you're going to start to see these economies. It's really fascinating that you're going to start to see stable coins give people... We at theCUBE, we have a Cube dollar. You could have a thinking Crypto podcast coin.

Tony Edward

>> Exactly.

>> This is coming.

Tony Edward

>> So this is something I've been talking about for years and I call it the token economy because whether it's a stock part of a real estate, a building in Manhattan, whatever it may be, it's going to be in token form. Even communities. So part of social networks or if you're a part of a Nike community, they can give you a token as a reward for your activity and you're going to have ownership. And that's the difference at Web3. And it's verifiable on the blockchain.

>> Yeah. What's the coolest thing you've been seeing that you like right now, and what is the most disturbing thing? Is it the chain wars or something else? What's the coolest thing you've seen in some of the, I won't say disastrous thing, but get better, we need to get better faster?

Tony Edward

>> I'm very fascinated by the United States government looking to build a Bitcoin reserve because I think we're at another Bretton Woods moment where after World War II, there was the movement of putting gold in place and the US dollar is the reserve currency. Now you're introducing Bitcoin, a digital gold, and I'm fascinated to see what the central banks and the world governments do. Will they all accumulate now that the United States has put up the signal? Second, I think stable coins, in addition to improving payments, the fact that stable coin issuers are now going to buy treasuries from the United States, help solve a problem of helping the United States maintain that rural reserve currency status because BRICS nations are trying to bypass the US dollar. So there's a geopolitical layer here. And then I would say tokenization. The fact that eventually I can tokenize my house and do some things on decentralized finance, and we're way off from that. But the possibility.

>> Well, it's possible. It's there.

Tony Edward

>> Yes.

>> It's in a line of sight.

Tony Edward

>> Yes.

>> It's a couple of lily pads away to hop to basically.

Tony Edward

>> Exactly. And it just opens up secondary and tertiary markets. I, as an individual can go to someone in Belgium, let's say, "Hey, I would like to take out a loan. Here's my collateral. Here's some tokens to my property. Give me a loan."

>> And the settlement speed is the key.

Tony Edward

>> Exactly.

>> This is where we're seeing this. I mean, I had one guest on theCUBE saying, "This is pure capitalism and it's all good." It's good capitalism because it's where everythings transparent.

Tony Edward

>> Yes.

>> And you got the efficiencies. So AI and crypto infrastructure are rhyming right now. Productivity, transparency, democratization, efficiency, new use cases. What's your take on that? What would you say some things you might see that address that here?

Tony Edward

>> I'm very big into technology, so I'm super passionate and excited about these things, even though there's a bit of a dystopian aspect to some of it. But I believe we're living in the fourth industrial revolution. And we saw in the early 1900s how the combustion engine electricity light bulb changed our lives. And I mean, look at what we're doing right now as a result. With the internet, AI, blockchain crypto robotics, the world is going to look very different in 20 to 30 years. I think about my seven-year-old and the world she's going to live in, maybe she's going to have a Tesla bot in their house. And how do you police the Tesla bot and AI agents unique blockchain? And it's so funny how these technologies are converging and they're going to change the way we do business.

>> It's interesting. I want to get back to some of the innovations because I think Ethereum might've been a little bit too slow to address the latency issues. Solana came out of nowhere. Look what's happening there. We had the Ethereum folks on our Silicon Valley Crypto Trailblazer series. Hope Foundation was in town, Metallic was in town for the first time in the US in four years. He lives outside the United States. But they're talking about working on faster stuff, but they just got crushed by a Bloomberg story this week around how dysfunctional that is. And then the performance numbers of course Solana's piling on. So talk about the difference between those two because there's different use cases. I mean, Solana hits the use cases for access. You and I want to start our own token, we can do that tomorrow. They got throughput. Ethereum more higher value, prices cost more on transactions, but they're getting crucified right now. So is that warranted or am I asking you to choose here or give some perspective? How should the market look at those two chains?

Tony Edward

>> Sure. I'm an eth holder, so I'm feeling the pain right now. But I like to think of them as Ethereum is more for enterprises. And I'll give an example. Fidelity last week said, "Hey, we're going to launch a stablecoin. Guess which chain it's going to be on? Ethereum. We're going to start tokenizing a money market fund to follow in BlackRock steps. Guess where we're starting? Ethereum." So we're seeing institutional level adoption for Ethereum and Solana is more of the retail. To your point, the fast, easy, cheap way of launching coins or doing certain transactions. However, I think Solana's transactions, the majority of it has been mean coins, which is not a great utility per se because it's not BlackRock moving some sort of token or whatever it may be. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the entire change mean points, but a large amount of the volume was. So I think Ethereum will catch up this cycle. I believe when the SEC approves staking to go into the Ethereum spot ETFs, that will be the game changer. Inflows will increase

>> And what's going to drive that? Volume?

Tony Edward

>> Yeah. Because the possibility of holding the asset and getting the yield in the ETF, that's a great incentive. Right now, I'm not incentivized to buy the Ethereum ETF. Why? I can buy directly and stake and earn the rewards. I can't do that in the ETF right now.

>> Yeah. And then also the gas too, issues there.

Tony Edward

>> Yeah.

>> It's interesting. I think they're not mutually exclusive. There's use cases for both chains. It's interesting going to see how that goes. Now, I'll say one thing. I was talking to Dave Vellante about this, my co-founder and co-CEO of SiliconANGLE, competition's good.

Tony Edward

>> Yes.

>> I think Ethereum got a little fire lit under their ass. Like, "Hey, come on guys."

Tony Edward

>> Absolutely.

>> "Get your together. We want performance." And I talked to a lot of folks, it's happening. So it's not like they're sitting on their hands. The community's kind of like chill. I guess that's my word. I shouldn't say it. I mean that in a very complimentary way.

Tony Edward

>> Well, they were in the driver's seat for many years as the top smart contract blockchain. And a competitors came on and they were like, "Okay, we see where you're not crossing your T's and dotting your I's and we're going to take advantage." And now I think to your point, a fire's been lit and they're trying to catch up.

>> Yeah. Got the big trades going down. It's my favorite part of the day. It's eight minutes before the bell closes. Going crazy.

Tony Edward

>> Love it.

>> And Nvidia and Tesla's been going on fire all week. Tesla's been like a yo-yo with all the burning of the Teslas, obviously Nvidia with CoreWeave. Let's see what's on the board today. Palantir, Tesla. Yeah, it's all a lot of Tesla, Nvidia, Apple. Apple's up there. Wow. Apple options are going. So activity. It's all in the green though.

Tony Edward

>> Yeah, I've seen the movies in the old days where it's very loud and I've been here a few times for interviews and it's been quiet, but it's great to hear some noise.

>> Well, on the NYSE, which is right on the next hall, it's like there's no trading. Just market makers, all the electronics trading, dark pools are off property.

Tony Edward

>> Oh, sure.

>> So it's all electronic now. All right, cool. Well, it's great to have you on, Tony. Talk about the pod. How long you've been podcasting, how many episodes you in, who are some of your guests, who listens to it? Give us the feel for the pod.

Tony Edward

>> Sure. So I got into crypto in 2016. I started the YouTube channel in 2017 as crypto was hitting I think one of its biggest bull markets ever. And then that expanded to the podcast where I started interviewing guests. And folks I've had on are Michael Saylor, Michael Arrington, Raoul Pal, Anthony Staramucci, a lot of regulators. Hester Peirce of the SEC. In addition to Chris Giancarlo, former CFTC chairman. I just interviewed earlier, Bo Heinz, who is the executive director for the Presidential Council Advisory Board for Digital Assets.

>> Nice.

Tony Edward

>> Long title.

>> And events you go to?

Tony Edward

>> So I tried to attend a Bitcoin conference consensus, all the major crypto events, and in addition the advocacy events in DC. So I was at the DC Blockchain Summit last week headed up by the Digital Chamber. We had the most members of Congress at that event. The vibes were at all time high.

>> Awesome. Well, great to have you on my pod and look forward to maybe someday coming on your pod.

Tony Edward

>> Absolutely. We'd love to have you.

>> With theCUBE coin. We were there for the ICO craze in 2018. We did Coin Agenda in Puerto Rico, Coin Agenda multiple times here in New York at the Hilton. We did The Bahamas, Polygon had a big event there.

Tony Edward

>> Sure.

>> And the other international events. For 2018, theCUBE on the road, we've been covering crypto since 2012. And so in fact, our first website in 2011, no, 2012, the developer wanted to be paid in Bitcoin, but you only get it through Silk Road. So we had to go dark web for the transaction.

Tony Edward

>> Wow. That's your OG.

>> The joke is that's a $300 million website. We use it for a year.

Tony Edward

>> Wow. Amazing stuff.

>> Great to have you on. Great to meet you. Congratulations. Love the pod. Thanks for coming on.

Tony Edward

>> Thank you so much, John.

>> All right. I'm John Furrier. The bell's about to ring here in New York City for the NYSC. Also, the NYSC Wired Community is an open community. The Trailblazers, we've been chronicling the leaders. One, making it happen. Newsmakers, decision makers. Also, the innovators, all making the new wave happen. The script will be flipping. We're here on the show floor. Thanks for watching.