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Grant Hummer

Co-Founder

Etherealize

play_circle_outline Market oversold, Ethereum fundamentals strong, stablecoin adoption, real-world adoption increasing.

play_circle_outline Bitcoin's impact on the industry, IQ improvement, positive regulation influence.

play_circle_outline Innovative Composability: Ethereum's Impact on Democratizing Financial Asset Creation for Developers

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Grant Hummer, Etherealize

Grant Hummer

Co-Founder Etherealize

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>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE here in our Palo Alto Studios. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This is theCUBE series on Crypto Trailblazers, obviously partnering with the NYSE Wired community, founded by Brian Baumann, who put together an open network where we revolve around content and community. Grant Hummer here, co-founder of Etherealize. Grant, great to have you on pioneering and trailblazing, plowing the fields in crypto.

Grant Hummer

>> Great to be here.

>> .

Grant Hummer

>> Thank you.

>> So it's been a great two days so far. A lot of folks coming in, weighing in on one, the reality of where we are in the market. I call it Ethereum two, act two, act one. It's still a movement, right? So clearly the momentum, A little dark time there. Nuclear winter, some say, but we're back in crypto spring.

Grant Hummer

>> Yes.

>> It feels good. US is rocking. They're on board. Okay. Things are happening. The tech is evolving. That's awesome. We're starting to see a lot of activities. Some of the sidebar conversations have been, Hey, the needle's moving. What's your take on the market right now? Give us the state of the Ethereum piece of the market. What's the vibe? What's the progress bar look like?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah. So in terms of the market, and if we're talking about price, I think it's been very oversold. So one metric I really like to look at is something called the ETH/BTC ratio. That's how many ETH per dollar, or in every BTC per dollar. That peaked in like 2016-ish or 2017 at 1.5. ETH almost flipped Bitcoin in market cap. Right now we're down to about 0.023. In late 2021, we got up to about 0.8. So at the peak. For a long time, it held steady around 0.6. So we're down pretty low, down to the lowest level since May 2020. I think that's massively oversold. When you look at the fundamentals driving ETH right now, we have huge levels of stablecoin adoption by far. I think it's something like 140, $150 billion of stablecoins on Ethereum used all over the world, and that's just rocketing up week by week. The amount of real-world adoption that's happening on ETH, that's also up into the right. So there are all these fundamental drivers.

>> What does that mean for the folks watching that they see Bitcoin rising in price, they see value there. Is that good for them? What should they jump in? What's the prescription for that? What do you see the value to them? What does it mean for them?

Grant Hummer

>> Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, crypto markets, I would say their IQ has increased from 70 to 100 over the last few years. So they're definitely not ... I wouldn't say they're smart, but they're smarter. Bitcoin is beta, right? That's the flagship asset of all of crypto. When you say crypto, people think Bitcoin, and then there's this long tail of other assets that are doing a lot of different things. I think broadly speaking, Bitcoin going up is good for the industry. It's been a big leader in helping the industry get more favorable regulation. Yeah, I think Bitcoin has been a very good tailwind for everyone.

>> Awesome. And talk about what you guys do. Set the table before we get into it. What's the main business? What's the value proposition?

Grant Hummer

>> Sure. Yeah. So, Etherealize. Etherealize is very new. We started a few months ago. Our value proposition is to bring the real world to Ethereum and Ethereum to the real world, and that's really focusing on Wall Streets and fintech companies. So we've already done things like we've worked with Apollo to tokenize a $50 million private credit fund on Ethereum. We have a lot of other things I can't talk about right now, unfortunately in the pipeline, but the ...

>> The general use case, the enthusiasm, where does that come from? What's the main driver for that? Is it the viability? Is it just opportunity? For the finance folks, is it just another asset to get in there? What's the key?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah. I would say the broad question is why should you put financial assets on crypto rails? And there are lots of reasons. A huge reason is you can settle instantly. So a fixed income asset might take for some verticals, weeks to settle, or even months you could settle in seconds. Just the savings from that alone is massive. Composability with all of other sorts of asset classes. It's also huge, the ability to tap into a global pool of liquidity, the ability to plug into all these really interesting financial DeFi protocols as they're called, decentralized finance. There's just this split-

>> The composability piece I think is huge. Talk about that because I think that brings services in ... brings it into the market because now that's programming mindset. I'm a developer. I'm like, okay, I can compose. What's the restrictions? Walk me through that scenario. What's going on there? What's the message to developers? I mean, to me, that would be a huge headroom.

Grant Hummer

>> Oh, for sure. Yeah. Okay. Let's say you have a stock, right? Let's say you have Apple stock. You could put this on chain, you could plug it into a DeFi protocol, you could take a loan out against it. You could split it up into its principle and its dividend components. There's just all these sorts of interesting ways you could program it and then slice and dice it.

>> It'd be nice to have that dividend piece too because that's real value right there.

Grant Hummer

>> Oh, for sure.

>> And then programming that in. Okay. So tell about the economy here. The Ethereum economy, it's one of the key talking points. What does that mean to you, and what does that mean to the real world?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, yeah. The Ethereum economy comprises all the services on Ethereum. You can think of it like the US economy, but based in the Ethereum ecosystem. So that comprises what we call the layer one, which is Ethereum itself, and then the roll-ups on top of Ethereum called the layer twos. And all the usage of those platforms, all the transaction volume, and throughput, all of that is what I would kind of encompass the Ethereum economy. And you could actually measure that as like GDP terms almost.

>> Yeah. So you couldn't find the numbers too. You're at quant meets theorem.

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah.

>> You're looking at saying, Hey, I'm looking at metrics. I'm looking at growth. What metrics jump out at you? You mentioned the Bitcoin ratio. That's one. That's clear. I see that one. Obviously, the Bitcoin price will affect that, but you have all these other factors in Ethereum that you don't have on Bitcoin. Bitcoin's kind of lagging that, in my opinion, on Ethereum. What are those? Some other metrics that might shed some light into the data?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah. Well, people use Ethereum.

>> Good point right there.

Grant Hummer

>> You can hold Bitcoin. That's great. It's digital gold, right? That's how it's been presented in memes. And yeah, Ethereum has utility. So yeah, it's a different animal. It's apple and orange.

>> I mean, it's two different things.

Grant Hummer

>> What you're getting at here. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think for a lot of people, the long-term vision for Ethereum is it becomes the civilizational infrastructure chain. We put all our important civilizational functions on these neutral, transparent rails that anyone can audit, that disintermediates a lot of rent-seeking and inefficiencies, and just really up the fairness and efficiency of our economy.

>> What got us interested around 2018th time from here in theCUBE, the CUBE team, we have it developed and we did an Ethereum token, Solidity. We had a wallet, and it was all cool, but it was programmable. And that was awesome. You couldn't do that anywhere else. And if you think about cloud, for example, go back 15, 20 years ago, AWS, okay, why should I build a data center? Their value proposition was clear. I just go, I got a prototype, don't yet know what it is. That democratized no names like Airbnb, Dropbox came out of the woodwork, boom, massive wealth creation. The numbers are off the charts, that history there, a similar concept attracts developers. Ethereum attracts that persona.

Grant Hummer

>> Totally.

>> They go, I like this. This works for me. Okay, check, smoke the peace pipe a little bit. We love Ethereum. Great. Now reality, how do I get it to scale, workability, value extraction, value creation. So you start to get into that developer chain of thinking, sort of ability, all these little weird technical features kick in.

Grant Hummer

>> Sure.

>> All right. So take me through that. Where are we there? How do you view that? Because that's going to flip the metrics too.

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah.

>> Right into the key performance metrics.

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, this is a great point. Ethereum has disrupted itself in the past few years. If you look at its revenues, they've gone down a lot, but the usage has gone up quite substantially when you include the roll-ups. This is kind of akin to what Amazon does, where they prioritize usage instead of profits in order to grow and kind of take over the market. That's how I think of it. Yeah, Ethereum-

>> And by the way too, if you think about what they did, technically it was simple building blocks, S3, EC2, queuing, no problem, and then fill it in based upon, as they say, working backwards from the customer, which is their ethos. But similar things are happening in Ethereum, and you point to some things for folks to connect that dot, because I think that's the story.

Grant Hummer

>> So the past few years in Ethereum has been defined by something called the roll-up roadmap. So when you launched your token, Ethereum was just one platform. It did about 12 transactions a second. For comparison, Visa does, I think 20,000 transactions a second, something like that. That's a pretty big gap. If you want to serve the real world at scale, Ethereum needs to do thousands, tens of thousands or more transactions per second. Really hit that level of scale, and that's what roll-ups allow it to do. It's in something of what I would call an awkward adolescence right now because these roll-ups, they don't interoperate very well yet, but there's a lot of engineering to stitch them together, and then pretty soon they'll all be able to interoperate seamlessly to where grandma will be able to press a button. She doesn't have to know what the word roll-up means. She just clicks a button and it's like super simple UX, super seamless.

>> And the thing too, that's a great point because a lot of historians like myself by default because where I'm at at my age, I've been through those revolutions, is interesting because it's not a Big Bang Theory of it has to be perfect out of the gate. There's a lot of goodness with what you got. Yeah, it's got to get better, but the alternative is not there. So that's why the cloud work because it's still better and getting better. So the evolutionary nature of Ethereum right now is a positive to your point about the growth piece.

Grant Hummer

>> For sure.

>> So now, how's that translate into the community and entrepreneurs? What white spaces, where do you see the action? Where is the action right now in Ethereum, and why does that matter?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, I think for a long time, crypto has been defined by purely digital, purely on-chain entrepreneurship. I think the next cycle we're heading into will be defined by the real world because you ask a traditional crypto skeptic today, Charlie Munger, God rest his soul. I was a big fan of his, despite his hatred of crypto.

>> A little bit of a blind spot there.

Grant Hummer

>> A little bit of a blind spot. But I also think ... I'd give them credit. A lot of this wasn't used in the real world, and I think even they won't be able to say, in five years, crypto is useless. The most ardent skeptics will be able to point to all these different touch points where crypto integrates with civilization and yeah, they won't have any-

>> I mean, it's so right on. I mean, the skeptics have it ... They're right but they're wrong. So I would have long conversations with Andy Jassy when he was the CEO of AWS early days.

Grant Hummer

>> Sure.

>> Had a quote I loved, which was, "If you have the answer, you have to be willing to be misunderstood for a long time." And Amazon Web Services was misunderstood. I mean, people were throwing haymakers at the, "Oh, it's just trivial." "Anyone can do that." And the data center guys, were so much more advanced. They're the Charlie, we have all these features, but it was an environmental shift. It was a complete different shift. What they were missing was they didn't have the view that self-provisioning, real-time and cloud had that. And so you weren't comparing the right thing. So if you were a Charlie Munger of the world, you're like, no, no. This is how finance works. It's that steady state in this environment, this other elementary meanderthal state, if they called it that, it's just growing, but it's moving over.

Grant Hummer

>> Oh, for sure.

>> I mean, I think that's the point.

Grant Hummer

>> It's a huge innovator's dilemma.

>> Yeah.

Grant Hummer

>> It's that classic disruptive, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of MBAs understand this now. Clayton Christensen-

>> The Clay Christensen in the Army. You're stuck in the middle, all those things. So what does that mean for you guys as envision for your company? It's brand new. You're going after a market that's ripe right now. Obviously, you're starting to see integration. You're starting to see crypto institutions that are friendly. Some are still skeptics. They're going to be the laggards. What's the key connection point? Why does it matter for them? What are you guys doing? What's your vision?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, our vision is to basically bring all the world's financial assets onto Ethereum and other infrastructure too, going forward, but starting with the focus on Wall Street. So what does that mean? Like I said, we had Apollo tokenize really big private credit funds. Another big thing we're helping them do is launch their own layer twos or roll-ups. So what these roll-ups allow for is customizability and control. So if you're financial institution and you want to be able to have your own basically semi-walled garden while still being able to connect to the rest of the Ethereum economy, these are a perfect solution because you can tap into the liquidity, the network affects the user base of Ethereum while also having control over what goes on in your execution environment.

>> Yeah. What's interesting is that is almost consistent, directly overlays to the AI market. Cloud's great for data processing, but all the domain expertise and the workflows, their assets are on premises. So okay, what you're saying is, we know fintech, they love to develop. They love control. Governance is a huge issue. Privacy, governance and security. And now we haven't even talked about AI. Finally, got it in the conversation. You can't talk about anything without AI. But again, you start thinking about the mindset of I'm a bank, I'm an institution. I've been doing this for generations. Data center to cloud, hybrid, okay, no problem. Now I got decentralized. I still got to want to take advantage of the system that's open and decentralized, but I got my shingle here. I'm going to code that.

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, exactly.

>> That's the market.

Grant Hummer

>> It's a great analog. I have friends who are lawyers and they don't want to give Sam Altman their legal cases, right? They want to keep it in their own data center.

>> You're obviously excited. Congratulations on the new venture, and thanks for coming into the studio. What are you most excited about right now? If you had to zoom out, obviously, you get your venture, so that's going to be a piece, but outside of your venture, well, you can know what your venture do. We'll put a plug in a second, but what are you excited about right now? Is it the market? Is it the money-making? Is it the tech? Is it the community? What is the most exciting thing?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, I just think Ethereum's future. Ethereum, I think it's coming out of this U-shaped sort of-

>> Trough.

Grant Hummer

>> Trough, yeah.

>> From the disillusionment as-

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, exactly. And I think going forward, the tech is just going to take off. We've passed the bottom, I think, in terms of the user experience and the difficulties of integrating it while being scalable. So, Ethereum's like 20X at scale in the past year or so, and that's just going to keep going up. So I'm really excited about that. I integrated it-

>> I at dinner at the Stanford Halsted, the Ethereum Foundation last night at dinner. I was excited by the fact that you have the value and performance pillars. They're not mutually exclusive and they're being worked on aggressively. You have entrepreneurs coming in, you have pre-existing institutions coming in, tons of white space. And again, it's a lot like the AWS movement I saw. And again, the movement's still happening. Stories are a big part of it. If there's a story out there that you see that could really illustrate this wave, what would it be? What's some stories that you could share? It could be your personal stories, it could be anecdotal. Share a story you see that says, look at skeptics, whoever. Look at this because it's happening out and unfolding in front of our eyes. The growth.

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. For the skeptics, I would say look at stablecoins. Look at Argentina, look at Turkey. Look at Egypt. Billions and billions of dollars of stablecoin adoption is happening there. And this is also extending dollar hegemony across the world. Tether, for instance, I think they own a couple percent of our T-bills.

>> Quiet revolution, not so quiet anymore.

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> Super excited. I love the focus on the metrics. Love what you're doing. Put a plug-in for the company. Last minute we have left.

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, sure.

>> What are you working on? What are you trying to do? What are you are trying to recruit? What's your goals? What's your mission?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, Etherealize, we're trying to connect Wall Street to Ethereum. Check out our website at etherealize.io. We have a really cool dashboard of different metrics we think are important that highlight Ethereum's growth and advantages. So check it out.

>> All right. Congratulations on the new venture. Grant Hummer is here, co-founder of Etherealize. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto. Of course, we have our studio here and we've got our studio at the NYSE as part of the Wired Open community. And of course, we cover all the tech events. A lot more crypto action. If you know us from 2018, seen us out in all the different events, CoinAgenda, all the blockchain events. We've been there. We're back. Stay tuned for more coverage from the Trailblazer series. The Crypto Trailblazers here from theCUBE. Thanks for watching.

Grant Hummer, Etherealize

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>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE here in our Palo Alto Studios. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This is theCUBE series on Crypto Trailblazers, obviously partnering with the NYSE Wired community, founded by Brian Baumann, who put together an open network where we revolve around content and community. Grant Hummer here, co-founder of Etherealize. Grant, great to have you on pioneering and trailblazing, plowing the fields in crypto.

Grant Hummer

>> Great to be here.

>> .

Grant Hummer

>> Thank you.

>> So it's been a great two days so far. A lot of folks coming in, weighing in on one, the reality of where we are in the market. I call it Ethereum two, act two, act one. It's still a movement, right? So clearly the momentum, A little dark time there. Nuclear winter, some say, but we're back in crypto spring.

Grant Hummer

>> Yes.

>> It feels good. US is rocking. They're on board. Okay. Things are happening. The tech is evolving. That's awesome. We're starting to see a lot of activities. Some of the sidebar conversations have been, Hey, the needle's moving. What's your take on the market right now? Give us the state of the Ethereum piece of the market. What's the vibe? What's the progress bar look like?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah. So in terms of the market, and if we're talking about price, I think it's been very oversold. So one metric I really like to look at is something called the ETH/BTC ratio. That's how many ETH per dollar, or in every BTC per dollar. That peaked in like 2016-ish or 2017 at 1.5. ETH almost flipped Bitcoin in market cap. Right now we're down to about 0.023. In late 2021, we got up to about 0.8. So at the peak. For a long time, it held steady around 0.6. So we're down pretty low, down to the lowest level since May 2020. I think that's massively oversold. When you look at the fundamentals driving ETH right now, we have huge levels of stablecoin adoption by far. I think it's something like 140, $150 billion of stablecoins on Ethereum used all over the world, and that's just rocketing up week by week. The amount of real-world adoption that's happening on ETH, that's also up into the right. So there are all these fundamental drivers.

>> What does that mean for the folks watching that they see Bitcoin rising in price, they see value there. Is that good for them? What should they jump in? What's the prescription for that? What do you see the value to them? What does it mean for them?

Grant Hummer

>> Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, crypto markets, I would say their IQ has increased from 70 to 100 over the last few years. So they're definitely not ... I wouldn't say they're smart, but they're smarter. Bitcoin is beta, right? That's the flagship asset of all of crypto. When you say crypto, people think Bitcoin, and then there's this long tail of other assets that are doing a lot of different things. I think broadly speaking, Bitcoin going up is good for the industry. It's been a big leader in helping the industry get more favorable regulation. Yeah, I think Bitcoin has been a very good tailwind for everyone.

>> Awesome. And talk about what you guys do. Set the table before we get into it. What's the main business? What's the value proposition?

Grant Hummer

>> Sure. Yeah. So, Etherealize. Etherealize is very new. We started a few months ago. Our value proposition is to bring the real world to Ethereum and Ethereum to the real world, and that's really focusing on Wall Streets and fintech companies. So we've already done things like we've worked with Apollo to tokenize a $50 million private credit fund on Ethereum. We have a lot of other things I can't talk about right now, unfortunately in the pipeline, but the ...

>> The general use case, the enthusiasm, where does that come from? What's the main driver for that? Is it the viability? Is it just opportunity? For the finance folks, is it just another asset to get in there? What's the key?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah. I would say the broad question is why should you put financial assets on crypto rails? And there are lots of reasons. A huge reason is you can settle instantly. So a fixed income asset might take for some verticals, weeks to settle, or even months you could settle in seconds. Just the savings from that alone is massive. Composability with all of other sorts of asset classes. It's also huge, the ability to tap into a global pool of liquidity, the ability to plug into all these really interesting financial DeFi protocols as they're called, decentralized finance. There's just this split-

>> The composability piece I think is huge. Talk about that because I think that brings services in ... brings it into the market because now that's programming mindset. I'm a developer. I'm like, okay, I can compose. What's the restrictions? Walk me through that scenario. What's going on there? What's the message to developers? I mean, to me, that would be a huge headroom.

Grant Hummer

>> Oh, for sure. Yeah. Okay. Let's say you have a stock, right? Let's say you have Apple stock. You could put this on chain, you could plug it into a DeFi protocol, you could take a loan out against it. You could split it up into its principle and its dividend components. There's just all these sorts of interesting ways you could program it and then slice and dice it.

>> It'd be nice to have that dividend piece too because that's real value right there.

Grant Hummer

>> Oh, for sure.

>> And then programming that in. Okay. So tell about the economy here. The Ethereum economy, it's one of the key talking points. What does that mean to you, and what does that mean to the real world?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, yeah. The Ethereum economy comprises all the services on Ethereum. You can think of it like the US economy, but based in the Ethereum ecosystem. So that comprises what we call the layer one, which is Ethereum itself, and then the roll-ups on top of Ethereum called the layer twos. And all the usage of those platforms, all the transaction volume, and throughput, all of that is what I would kind of encompass the Ethereum economy. And you could actually measure that as like GDP terms almost.

>> Yeah. So you couldn't find the numbers too. You're at quant meets theorem.

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah.

>> You're looking at saying, Hey, I'm looking at metrics. I'm looking at growth. What metrics jump out at you? You mentioned the Bitcoin ratio. That's one. That's clear. I see that one. Obviously, the Bitcoin price will affect that, but you have all these other factors in Ethereum that you don't have on Bitcoin. Bitcoin's kind of lagging that, in my opinion, on Ethereum. What are those? Some other metrics that might shed some light into the data?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah. Well, people use Ethereum.

>> Good point right there.

Grant Hummer

>> You can hold Bitcoin. That's great. It's digital gold, right? That's how it's been presented in memes. And yeah, Ethereum has utility. So yeah, it's a different animal. It's apple and orange.

>> I mean, it's two different things.

Grant Hummer

>> What you're getting at here. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think for a lot of people, the long-term vision for Ethereum is it becomes the civilizational infrastructure chain. We put all our important civilizational functions on these neutral, transparent rails that anyone can audit, that disintermediates a lot of rent-seeking and inefficiencies, and just really up the fairness and efficiency of our economy.

>> What got us interested around 2018th time from here in theCUBE, the CUBE team, we have it developed and we did an Ethereum token, Solidity. We had a wallet, and it was all cool, but it was programmable. And that was awesome. You couldn't do that anywhere else. And if you think about cloud, for example, go back 15, 20 years ago, AWS, okay, why should I build a data center? Their value proposition was clear. I just go, I got a prototype, don't yet know what it is. That democratized no names like Airbnb, Dropbox came out of the woodwork, boom, massive wealth creation. The numbers are off the charts, that history there, a similar concept attracts developers. Ethereum attracts that persona.

Grant Hummer

>> Totally.

>> They go, I like this. This works for me. Okay, check, smoke the peace pipe a little bit. We love Ethereum. Great. Now reality, how do I get it to scale, workability, value extraction, value creation. So you start to get into that developer chain of thinking, sort of ability, all these little weird technical features kick in.

Grant Hummer

>> Sure.

>> All right. So take me through that. Where are we there? How do you view that? Because that's going to flip the metrics too.

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah.

>> Right into the key performance metrics.

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, this is a great point. Ethereum has disrupted itself in the past few years. If you look at its revenues, they've gone down a lot, but the usage has gone up quite substantially when you include the roll-ups. This is kind of akin to what Amazon does, where they prioritize usage instead of profits in order to grow and kind of take over the market. That's how I think of it. Yeah, Ethereum-

>> And by the way too, if you think about what they did, technically it was simple building blocks, S3, EC2, queuing, no problem, and then fill it in based upon, as they say, working backwards from the customer, which is their ethos. But similar things are happening in Ethereum, and you point to some things for folks to connect that dot, because I think that's the story.

Grant Hummer

>> So the past few years in Ethereum has been defined by something called the roll-up roadmap. So when you launched your token, Ethereum was just one platform. It did about 12 transactions a second. For comparison, Visa does, I think 20,000 transactions a second, something like that. That's a pretty big gap. If you want to serve the real world at scale, Ethereum needs to do thousands, tens of thousands or more transactions per second. Really hit that level of scale, and that's what roll-ups allow it to do. It's in something of what I would call an awkward adolescence right now because these roll-ups, they don't interoperate very well yet, but there's a lot of engineering to stitch them together, and then pretty soon they'll all be able to interoperate seamlessly to where grandma will be able to press a button. She doesn't have to know what the word roll-up means. She just clicks a button and it's like super simple UX, super seamless.

>> And the thing too, that's a great point because a lot of historians like myself by default because where I'm at at my age, I've been through those revolutions, is interesting because it's not a Big Bang Theory of it has to be perfect out of the gate. There's a lot of goodness with what you got. Yeah, it's got to get better, but the alternative is not there. So that's why the cloud work because it's still better and getting better. So the evolutionary nature of Ethereum right now is a positive to your point about the growth piece.

Grant Hummer

>> For sure.

>> So now, how's that translate into the community and entrepreneurs? What white spaces, where do you see the action? Where is the action right now in Ethereum, and why does that matter?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, I think for a long time, crypto has been defined by purely digital, purely on-chain entrepreneurship. I think the next cycle we're heading into will be defined by the real world because you ask a traditional crypto skeptic today, Charlie Munger, God rest his soul. I was a big fan of his, despite his hatred of crypto.

>> A little bit of a blind spot there.

Grant Hummer

>> A little bit of a blind spot. But I also think ... I'd give them credit. A lot of this wasn't used in the real world, and I think even they won't be able to say, in five years, crypto is useless. The most ardent skeptics will be able to point to all these different touch points where crypto integrates with civilization and yeah, they won't have any-

>> I mean, it's so right on. I mean, the skeptics have it ... They're right but they're wrong. So I would have long conversations with Andy Jassy when he was the CEO of AWS early days.

Grant Hummer

>> Sure.

>> Had a quote I loved, which was, "If you have the answer, you have to be willing to be misunderstood for a long time." And Amazon Web Services was misunderstood. I mean, people were throwing haymakers at the, "Oh, it's just trivial." "Anyone can do that." And the data center guys, were so much more advanced. They're the Charlie, we have all these features, but it was an environmental shift. It was a complete different shift. What they were missing was they didn't have the view that self-provisioning, real-time and cloud had that. And so you weren't comparing the right thing. So if you were a Charlie Munger of the world, you're like, no, no. This is how finance works. It's that steady state in this environment, this other elementary meanderthal state, if they called it that, it's just growing, but it's moving over.

Grant Hummer

>> Oh, for sure.

>> I mean, I think that's the point.

Grant Hummer

>> It's a huge innovator's dilemma.

>> Yeah.

Grant Hummer

>> It's that classic disruptive, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of MBAs understand this now. Clayton Christensen-

>> The Clay Christensen in the Army. You're stuck in the middle, all those things. So what does that mean for you guys as envision for your company? It's brand new. You're going after a market that's ripe right now. Obviously, you're starting to see integration. You're starting to see crypto institutions that are friendly. Some are still skeptics. They're going to be the laggards. What's the key connection point? Why does it matter for them? What are you guys doing? What's your vision?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, our vision is to basically bring all the world's financial assets onto Ethereum and other infrastructure too, going forward, but starting with the focus on Wall Street. So what does that mean? Like I said, we had Apollo tokenize really big private credit funds. Another big thing we're helping them do is launch their own layer twos or roll-ups. So what these roll-ups allow for is customizability and control. So if you're financial institution and you want to be able to have your own basically semi-walled garden while still being able to connect to the rest of the Ethereum economy, these are a perfect solution because you can tap into the liquidity, the network affects the user base of Ethereum while also having control over what goes on in your execution environment.

>> Yeah. What's interesting is that is almost consistent, directly overlays to the AI market. Cloud's great for data processing, but all the domain expertise and the workflows, their assets are on premises. So okay, what you're saying is, we know fintech, they love to develop. They love control. Governance is a huge issue. Privacy, governance and security. And now we haven't even talked about AI. Finally, got it in the conversation. You can't talk about anything without AI. But again, you start thinking about the mindset of I'm a bank, I'm an institution. I've been doing this for generations. Data center to cloud, hybrid, okay, no problem. Now I got decentralized. I still got to want to take advantage of the system that's open and decentralized, but I got my shingle here. I'm going to code that.

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, exactly.

>> That's the market.

Grant Hummer

>> It's a great analog. I have friends who are lawyers and they don't want to give Sam Altman their legal cases, right? They want to keep it in their own data center.

>> You're obviously excited. Congratulations on the new venture, and thanks for coming into the studio. What are you most excited about right now? If you had to zoom out, obviously, you get your venture, so that's going to be a piece, but outside of your venture, well, you can know what your venture do. We'll put a plug in a second, but what are you excited about right now? Is it the market? Is it the money-making? Is it the tech? Is it the community? What is the most exciting thing?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, I just think Ethereum's future. Ethereum, I think it's coming out of this U-shaped sort of-

>> Trough.

Grant Hummer

>> Trough, yeah.

>> From the disillusionment as-

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, exactly. And I think going forward, the tech is just going to take off. We've passed the bottom, I think, in terms of the user experience and the difficulties of integrating it while being scalable. So, Ethereum's like 20X at scale in the past year or so, and that's just going to keep going up. So I'm really excited about that. I integrated it-

>> I at dinner at the Stanford Halsted, the Ethereum Foundation last night at dinner. I was excited by the fact that you have the value and performance pillars. They're not mutually exclusive and they're being worked on aggressively. You have entrepreneurs coming in, you have pre-existing institutions coming in, tons of white space. And again, it's a lot like the AWS movement I saw. And again, the movement's still happening. Stories are a big part of it. If there's a story out there that you see that could really illustrate this wave, what would it be? What's some stories that you could share? It could be your personal stories, it could be anecdotal. Share a story you see that says, look at skeptics, whoever. Look at this because it's happening out and unfolding in front of our eyes. The growth.

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. For the skeptics, I would say look at stablecoins. Look at Argentina, look at Turkey. Look at Egypt. Billions and billions of dollars of stablecoin adoption is happening there. And this is also extending dollar hegemony across the world. Tether, for instance, I think they own a couple percent of our T-bills.

>> Quiet revolution, not so quiet anymore.

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> Super excited. I love the focus on the metrics. Love what you're doing. Put a plug-in for the company. Last minute we have left.

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, sure.

>> What are you working on? What are you trying to do? What are you are trying to recruit? What's your goals? What's your mission?

Grant Hummer

>> Yeah, Etherealize, we're trying to connect Wall Street to Ethereum. Check out our website at etherealize.io. We have a really cool dashboard of different metrics we think are important that highlight Ethereum's growth and advantages. So check it out.

>> All right. Congratulations on the new venture. Grant Hummer is here, co-founder of Etherealize. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto. Of course, we have our studio here and we've got our studio at the NYSE as part of the Wired Open community. And of course, we cover all the tech events. A lot more crypto action. If you know us from 2018, seen us out in all the different events, CoinAgenda, all the blockchain events. We've been there. We're back. Stay tuned for more coverage from the Trailblazer series. The Crypto Trailblazers here from theCUBE. Thanks for watching.