Monad's Vision: Bitcoin's Crown at Risk — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] So, do you think there's a chance that Bitcoin  isn't number one by then? I think so. Bitcoin is   amazing; it's like digital gold, but  it's very simple in what it does.   that Monad is more performant than Solana. You  guys raised a quarter of a billion dollars.  

[00:18] There were a number of projects that raised  around that time. Many don't even exist anymore,   or they've really faded out. We're  now in a very strong position as   the most performant, most decentralized  blockchain to now go take the next step.

[00:42] be acted upon by persons in the United Kingdom.  Nothing said on Risk Takers is a recommendation   to buy or sell any token, asset, or security.  Views expressed by hosts and guests are solely   their opinions and not financial advice. Keon, you  mentioned recently it's never as good as it seems  

[01:00] and it's never as bad as it seems. How does  it seem today for you guys at Monad right now?   I think it seems, you know, it's like the  beginning of Star Wars, A New Hope. It feels like  

[01:16] there's so much potential, and there are great  builders in the ecosystem. We've got a great team.   We've got great technology, and it feels like more  and more people in the real world are also getting  

[01:30] really excited about crypto and starting to adopt  crypto in their businesses. So, I feel quite   optimistic. It feels quite good. That's cool.  So, I wonder when the last time you felt like it   seemed bad. Yeah, maybe about a year ago or so.  Just around TG sort of time? Well, yeah, maybe  

[01:51] a little bit after that because I think 10 10  happened. Yeah, right. That was a really big, just   negative event for the crypto industry. A lot of  leverage got flushed out of the system, it seems,  

[02:04] and the sustainability of exchanges was called  into question. How long did it take to get over   that for you guys? If you feel like things are  good right now, what was that transition like from  

[02:19] feeling not very good to feeling good? Has that  just sort of changed with the tides of the bear   market feeling like it's over? Was that the  catalyst, or was it something else along the way? Well, I think it's a mix of things. When  you have your plan and you're executing,  

[02:36] you're making progress every day  and sort of compounding wins, then   you become more optimistic over time. I think  we're a very optimistic team. We're optimistic   about technology. We're optimistic about the  future of the world, and that's always been there,  

[02:52] but I think having the market feedback a  little bit more across the industry has been   something that's encouraging. What are you  most optimistic about inside crypto today?  

[03:07] I'm optimistic that we can build a better  financial system that delivers broader   access to everyone, the same way that the internet  sort of democratized information. I believe that  

[03:20] blockchain and crypto can democratize finance.  So, do you think crypto's been through a bunch of   cycles, right? It kind of felt like initially the  cohort of people that were benefiting from crypto   were the average person, right? You had a chance  in crypto, and that kind of retail individual  

[03:38] it feels like they're just falling by the wayside  now. And it feels like it's becoming more and more   institutionalized, and it almost feels like the  Wall Street-ification of crypto. Do you think Wall  

[03:51] Street is joining crypto, or do you think crypto  is actually replacing pieces of Wall Street?   I think it's a little bit of both. I do agree  that crypto is more aware of the existing  

[04:06] financial system and building stronger bridges. I  think the bridges go both ways, though. It's both   bringing traditional RWAs on chain and giving them  access to far more people, but it's also about  

[04:22] pushing some of the technologies, or for example,  the capability of verifiability, and reducing the   amount of trust people need to have in systems,  and pushing those out to the rest of the world.

[04:35] So, you guys raised a quarter of a billion  dollars. Where are you today versus where   you thought you would be when you first got that  monster raise back in 2022, was it? 2024. 2024,  

[04:50] yeah. I think the future has become a lot more  clear, of course, as you go down the road; you   can see the road more clearly. We've made a ton of  progress in building a strong technical foundation  

[05:06] that has introduced a lot of new  tech like parallel execution,   asynchronous execution, a new database, a new  consensus mechanism called Monolithic BFT,   a new block propagation mechanism called Raptor  Cast, and a new storage model. So, there are all  

[05:23] these different pieces of technology. When  we raised, as you were mentioning in 2024,   we were actively working on a lot of those  things and had proven them out in isolation,  

[05:35] but then putting all the pieces together, now we  have a really performant system. But, I think the   thing that's really exciting is now with that  really strong technical foundation, where it's   a decentralized blockchain with 300 millisecond  block times, with 600 millisecond finality,  

[05:53] with 200 validators, with 10,000 transactions  per second throughput. We have all that already,   but what's really exciting is what that enables.  And the next step, I think, are some improvements  

[06:06] that we have planned that will really increase  fairness and continue to increase performance and   I think that's a good point because it feels like,  to some extent, infrastructure in crypto, like the  

[06:23] infrastructure buildout, cost a lot of money. It  made some users a lot of money, but it's like the   people who raised from sort of 2024 onwards are  yet to see the fruits of that labor, if you will.  

[06:35] With that infrastructure, what have you guys  built that you're unable to do on other chains?   A lot of things. Well, first of all, I would say  that although there were a number of projects that  

[06:49] raised around that time, many don't even exist  anymore, or they've really faded out. And so,   I think the team is— Things like what? Scroll,  Barracuda, those sort of things, you mean? Yeah, I  

[07:04] think, and of course, they might still be running,  but when you look at the level of activity or   revenue or anything like that, it's clear that  they're really in a dormant state at this point.   So, I think, being in a stronger position now than  we were then, and having built all of the things  

[07:24] that initially we had in the original version of  Monad, we're now in a very strong position as the   most performant, most decentralized blockchain to  now go take the next step. And that next step is  

[07:39] around protecting users better, ensuring  that when users submit transactions,   no one can see those transactions and front run  them, or rather that they get fair execution,  

[07:53] So, you guys say you're the most performant and  most decentralized. So, more performant than   Solana, more decentralized than Solana? I agree. I  believe that Monad is more performant than Solana.  

[08:09] Solana is a great blockchain, and I have a huge  amount of respect for the team and what they've   built. But, I think there are several things that  really differentiate Monad, and those are really  

[08:21] in the realm of our focus to deliver really, like,  sub-round trip time around the world block times,   with our multiple concurrent proposer system that  we're building, as well as user protection from  

[08:38] front running. And even with Alpenglow, Solana  is still massively behind you, do you think?   I'm aware of, I'm a fan of Alpenglow as well. I  think they're doing some interesting things there,   but it's not a multiple concurrent proposer  consensus mechanism, either. And so,  

[08:55] why does that matter? And who does it matter  for? Does it matter for me if I want to go and   make some trades on chain? Is it really mattering  for people who are doing high-frequency trading?   Does it matter for somebody who wants  to collateralize some RWA on chain and  

[09:12] borrow against that in real time? Who is the end  benefactor of the extra performance, do you think? It really affects everyone in the same way that  having faster internet is better for everyone,  

[09:26] even if not all of the activity that you do on  the internet necessarily requires an immediate   response. It is still just strictly better. But,  in addition to that, having really frequent block  

[09:39] times, really cheap gas, and great user protection  ultimately result in the most efficient markets   where folks that are quoting on chain can update  their markets as cheaply as possible and thus can  

[09:52] quote as tightly as possible and thus give  the best prices to end users when they come   to the blockchain to go and make their trades.  So, even though you as the retail user might  

[10:05] only make one trade a day or one trade a  week, the liquidity you're interacting with   is the result of professional traders that are  updating their quotes very frequently, and the   more frequently they can update them, the tighter  they can quote and the cheaper your price is.

[10:21] And so, if we compare this to Hyperliquid, for  example, obviously Hyperliquid, quite famously,   has only got 21 validators right now, so you can  say, yeah, they're nowhere near as decentralized,   the foundation themselves, so it's a fair point.  But, the performance of Hyperliquid, obviously,  

[10:39] and the liquidity of Hyperliquid is very hard to  match from any other chain, and the daily volumes   kind of speak for themselves, and the uptake of  tokenized perps and all that kind of thing on  

[10:52] that chain has gone from strength to strength. Do  you see something like Hyperliquid as a competitor   to yourselves, or do you think that actually,  because they're an application-specific chain,  

[11:05] not really in our wheelhouse to be competing  against? We're focusing on Sui, Ethereum, Solana.   This is our sort of focus of who our competitors  are, or maybe somebody else completely. Yeah, I think both are extremely important  efforts, and I agree with you that they're  

[11:21] distinctive in nature. It's been really impressive  to see the execution of the Hyperliquid team, both   in standing up the exchange and rolling out more  and more markets, and rolling out markets that are  

[11:38] really frontier for crypto, like more RWA markets,  but then also getting liquidity on those, and   in many cases, sort of bootstrapping the liquidity  themselves. The founders of Hyperliquid are  

[11:55] very talented HFT traders. They're good at making  markets, and I think that initial liquidity is   really important to bootstrapping as well. So, to  build a great exchange, you need great technology,  

[12:09] and you need great liquidity, and you need great  user acquisition, and overall it's a really   challenging and compelling effort to solve. What  Monad is solving is a broader and different,  

[12:22] although in some cases with some parallels,  problem, which is the problem of delivering a   global system that anyone anywhere can access,  that is not controlled by a singular party,  

[12:37] but rather is controlled by code run by many  validators that are keeping each other in check.   It's an open-source system, and it's a really  performant system that allows anyone to build   any program and have that be operated  by all this network of validators  

[12:53] that are all keeping each other in check. So, it's  a more general problem as opposed to Hyperliquid   exchange, which is a much more specific problem.  And I know that Hyperliquid has Hyper EVM as well,   but they're like, I think, two-second blocks or  something like that. They're doing something,  

[13:11] yeah, they're much more focused clearly on the  exchange than the general-purpose blockchain. And   I think those are two really big, meaty problems  in the space for great builders to focus on.

[13:23] Yeah. I'm interested to know, Keon, how much  of your building today do you write yourself?   And how much of it is written by your AI of choice  or multiple AIs? And when you're doing that work,  

[13:39] how often is it making mistakes? How often are  you vetting all the code? You know, I think I   forget his name, but one of the lead researchers  at Anthropic now does like 95% of his code,   No worries." Where are you guys with that? And  because we've seen in crypto over the last, well,  

[13:59] the last year really, yes, the dollar amount of  hacks hasn't been bigger than it was in, you know,   2025 or whenever the Bybit one was, but  the frequency is just— It's kind of hard to   wrap your head around. Now every day it feels  like some old dead chain has lost the last $2  

[14:13] million that it's got. And so, yeah, how are you  guys using it with your building at the moment? Yeah, it's a great question. I'm a big  fan of AI. I'm a huge fan of AI, actually.  

[14:29] I think it's extremely powerful at solving a lot  of tasks that are very annoying and complicated   and detail-oriented. And when I reflect on  previous, you know, before starting Monad in 2022,  

[14:45] I was a quant for 10 years, and a lot of the  time I spent there, in retrospect, was a lot of   munging data, or reshaping data to fit into the  interfaces that we had, or cleaning up data, or  

[15:01] having ideas, but then taking a long time to  prototype and test them. And AI is really good at   a lot of those very defined tasks where the spec  is clear, you have the architecture in mind,  

[15:14] or if you don't have the architecture in mind,  then you can ask AI to produce one for you,   and you look at it and can immediately find  the flaws in it. I think where AI is not very  

[15:26] good is making decisions about what the right  approach is. A lot of times, in my experience,   even with the best models, you'll ask it, "Should  I do this?" or it'll present you with choices,  

[15:39] and it's very obvious to you, the human, but it's  not obvious to the AI. So, I just want to say that   as a preface: it really obviously depends a lot  on the task. I'm at the Monad Foundation, so our  

[15:52] job is much more oriented around analytics and  measuring things and building dashboards, and   AI is amazing for all sorts of things  like that. For writing the Monad codebase,  

[16:06] that is done by hand, by engineers and  researchers, but they are using AI a lot to   analyze what they've built, or to automatically  review and make comments. Or the researchers,  

[16:25] they'll have an idea and they'll say, "I need  to think through all the consequences of this,   but I can actually ask AI to  model this out and tell me   if I'm going to go down this path in the decision  tree, what's at the end of that tree?" Tell me  

[16:39] automatically, and it can do that, and that really  speeds up research. So, it's really both. You have   to really pick your spots. It's very powerful,  but we're not live coding the entire blockchain. That's really well summarized, actually. It's  incredibly powerful, but it's so hard to just  

[16:58] give it a very large task to go and do. If  you hone it in to do one little thing, then it   can do a phenomenal job with that. Do you think  LLMs themselves are the kind of final boss of AI,  

[17:13] next word? Well, I do think it is meaningful that  we haven't seen any video games that have been  

[17:26] genuinely novel or really surprising in terms  of their dynamic that were just built by AI.   Because I do feel like we understand how a lot of  video games work. We know that there are RPGs, we  

[17:41] know that there are first-person shooters, there  are real-time strategy games; there are these   different kinds of games, and then if you ask AI  to go build you one of those, it can do that. But,  

[17:54] I haven't seen anyone, and I would love for  someone to prove me wrong, but I haven't seen   anyone produce a game that was a new genre  that you'd never heard of, or just some   experience that you were immediately very shocked  by. So, I think that's a good example of how  

[18:13] AI is really good at reusing components, reusing  ideas, finding things, putting them all together   in a way that works well, but really not good  at synthesizing new ideas and being creative.

[18:25] Actually, there was a paper that was released in  the UK last week, I think maybe the week before,   that basically found that conclusion: that AI is  not very inventive, but it can do amazing stuff.   I think the Navier-Stokes proof kind of  brings that into question a little bit,  

[18:40] but then there is some argument  that actually they stole   the idea anyway and then sold it, but you  know, so it's kind of a thing. Well, I think,   even with Navier-Stokes, my understanding is  that it's a lot of reusing ideas that had been  

[18:59] thought of before, but in a very painstaking way  where it's searching the entire decision tree and   bashing lots of mathematical techniques that  people have used occasionally to ultimately  

[19:11] find one of them that works well. And I think  that's a great, again, great use for AI because   it's incredibly painful for an individual,  a human mathematician, to go down that.   Maybe you're guided much more by intuition, but I  don't think, and you know, I could definitely be  

[19:29] wrong, but I don't think that it's coming up  with completely new mathematical techniques. This is a paid promotion for Kalshi. This content  is directed at persons outside the United Kingdom.   Kalshi is not FCA regulated and  is not available to UK customers.  

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[20:43] high risk, and you can lose all the money you put  in. Terms and conditions apply, check the screen. What's your current AI stack today? What are you  using? What's your spend per month? So, I'm on,  

[20:58] you know, like $200 plans for Codex, Claude  Code, and then I use Conductor to build a lot.   It sort of switches between the models, but more  importantly, it runs them on a remote server so  

[21:16] that it's always running even when I close my  laptop, and it's more secure because it's not   doing a bunch of stuff on my computer that I, you  know, log into my email with, for example. So,  

[21:28] it's more isolated, and the isolation thus allows  me to let it run a lot more freely. Obviously,   Monad is open source. So, you just mentioned that  you're using Codex and Claude Code. How often do   you use any of the open-source models, if ever?  I am personally not using open-source models,  

[21:46] although a lot of other folks on our team are  heavier users of AI where they get to the point   where they would exceed the subsidized plans. But,  I do think that over time, I and others will shift  

[22:04] over more to open models as well. On that note,  do you think that there is any moat in models,   or do you think that as soon as open source is  well distributed enough and everyone's got their  

[22:18] own local hardware, that's the end state of  this? Yeah, it's super interesting because you know, when Opus 5.5 came out, it looked like  a lot of, when we were analyzing the usage of  

[22:40] models within our company, we saw a huge  spike in usage of Opus 5.5 because everyone   switched over to it. They heard that it was a  better model. It was a better model. And then  

[22:53] they also weren't very aware of what the pricing  was like. The big labs with their own harnesses   do a good job of sort of obfuscating that from  users, so they didn't realize that they were  

[23:06] spending a lot. And I think that there is, I mean,  in business, there are a lot of tricky techniques   that businesses can use to get you to keep paying  or to overpay basically relative to your actual  

[23:19] usage, and you see that in all the seat-based SaaS  models, or fitness memberships where they make it   hard for you to cancel, or all that stuff. So, I  think that we'll see a good amount of that in the  

[23:32] space as well. Like right now, both are focusing  on IPO, and so they're trying to optimize revenue,   and they have levers that they can pull that  literally make them a billion dollars or not. They  

[23:44] can choose whether to pull, that have different  impacts on end users. But, the other thing is   the end user is still happy because they're  still getting a lot of value from the thing.   It's just that more of the value is going to the  lab than just strictly the consumer surplus. Yeah.

[24:02] And what is Monad's AI strategy, if you have  one? How are you guys planning? I actually   think the question is more, who do you think the  next 100 million users on chain are going to be?  

[24:16] That's a great question. I think a good number  will be agents. I think that we've found that,  

[24:30] yeah, it's a lot easier to, for example, to give  you one example, when we talk to developers,   it's actually a lot easier to just say, "Go  ask your Claude about this thing," or "Go   ask your Claude to switch you to this thing," as  opposed to having to go through all the annoying,  

[24:46] the documentation really is evaluated at how  good it is at helping the agents be productive.   And so, yeah, I think it's inevitable that more  decision-making, both for developers in their  

[25:01] architecture, but also users in their spend,  is going to be driven by agents rather than   humans. Now, you could argue about whether  that's still a human user at the end or not,   but certainly the interface is an agentic  interface. And what's Monad doing to actually  

[25:16] accelerate the agentic use, I guess? Well, we're  very focused on the X402 standard. So, we have   quite a good amount of X402 usage on Monad  already. We have something called the API hub,  

[25:35] which builders can basically advertise their API  to agents on our shared web page that's easy for   agents to access. We're a founding member of  the X402 Foundation. Excuse me, we're a premier  

[25:53] member of the X402 Foundation. So, we're really  helping to participate in a lot of the dialogue   and steering around that standard. And yeah,  there are a lot of different builders that are  

[26:06] building interesting startups, probably mostly  targeted at agents, that are building on Monad. You guys have recently surpassed  a billion dollars in TVL.  

[26:22] Application revenue on chain is about $250k in  the last 24 hours, about $45 million since the   chain's been live. And in chain fees on Monad,  like $2.2 million since the chain's been live.  

[26:39] Which, if any of those stats, do you  define as success on the path to success?   I think they're all quite important statistics.  They're important for different reasons. I think  

[26:58] that TVL, although frequently maligned in  the space as being an imperfect measure,   is still a significant measure because it's  people putting real money at stake in order to  

[27:13] utilize the services in a particular protocol or  ecosystem. And so, that billion-dollar mark is   definitely a show of trust from the market.  Application revenue is super important to us,  

[27:27] just having sustainable businesses building  on chain and on Monad being enabled by   the cheap fees and fast finality. One  other one that I'll just mention as well  

[27:42] is payments volume and card settlement volume.  Monad has a really good fit there because,   being a protocol with sub-second finality, it  means that it's really easy for card issuers to  

[27:55] have their users hold the balances on Monad.  When a user swipes a card, they can finalize   that transaction in less time than the card  networks need in order to finalize. This is  

[28:08] not true of many blockchain networks out there.  Monad is really kind of unique in that regard.   And so, if we stay on payments for  a second, what are you guys doing to   tackle the payments and privacy issue? Because  obviously, if I have money on chain and I want  

[28:26] to go and buy a coffee, I don't really want  everyone knowing my entire bank history. Yep. That's a great question. We actually just  announced Monad private settlement today   here at the Open Conference. So, very timely. But,  basically, it's an effort to give banks their own  

[28:46] sort of federated system space where user  balances can be private, or any other information   about users can be private. And these sort of  special zones exist within Monad and can still  

[29:04] be—they get sequenced by the Monad blockchain  network, they inherit all of the properties of   being part of this network, including access to  liquidity, but they are private by nature. So,   that means that if a user has a balance at a bank,  and the bank is maintaining all the user balances  

[29:23] in this private environment, then the user could  make a payment, and that could interact with   another user who's in a different bank, and then  the transfer kind of happens through Monad L1, but  

[29:38] the actual sender and recipient are not revealed  in that process. And so, it sort of gives privacy,   but also enables compliance, so that those  individual banks can still be aware of what's  

[29:53] going on and can selectively disclose information,  if needed, to auditors or regulators, but it's   still private to the rest of the world and still  composable with all the liquidity that's in Monad.

[30:06] So, effectively, it requires a third-party  intermediary to shepherd the transaction. Yeah,   this is really designed for medium enterprises,  banks, exchanges, which is to say that they have  

[30:20] requirements for confidentiality. They couldn't  build directly on an open network like Monad,   but they can get almost the same thing, the  best of both worlds, by using a Monad private  

[30:35] settlement zone. Do you think that's the end  state of this, or do you think there is another   layer where it can just all be settled on chain,  it'll be private, and you haven't got to have this   third party? Because that kind of feels just like  banking on chain. Maybe it's a slight improvement,  

[30:49] but it would be an improvement for me because  it'd be very convenient for me to have my money   on chain, just like, "Send your USDC here." Okay,  that actually is an improvement for me, but for   my mom, definitely isn't. Do you think that these  improvements just improve these sort of like app,  

[31:12] on-chain banking intermediaries? Do you think  they actually improve things for people who are   external to crypto? Yeah, I think I would argue  that it is an improvement for your mom as well. It   still requires the interfaces to be built between  the app that your mom is using on her cell phone  

[31:32] and the actual settlement environment. But,  your mom could still experience the same UX that   she currently has, but maybe could get access  to higher yield by being able to plug into  

[31:47] higher yield-bearing opportunities that  exist in this shared global network with   competitive global yields. What do you think  Monad's killer breakthrough app is today?  

[32:01] And if it's not live today, what do you  think would be a killer breakthrough app? I think that it's not really for me to decide.  I think it's driven by builders in the market.  

[32:17] With that said, I do feel that one really  unique thing about Monad is by having really   cheap execution, cheap gas fees, it's really  possible to bring a lot of computation that  

[32:34] was off-chain instead on chain. And so, one great  example of that is there's a protocol building on   Monad called Moose, which is the first fully  on-chain aggregator. And so, what that means  

[32:48] is that when people send a trade, right now they  trade on off-chain aggregators. And so, that thing   has a bunch of off-chain logic for deciding  where to route that trade or how to cut it up.  

[33:02] And those off-chain aggregators are using delayed  information because they're not actually executing   the transaction in real time; things might have,  some of the pools might have changed. Or, in   particular, some of the pools might be deceptive  about the pricing that they're actually offering,  

[33:19] and they might lie to the aggregator. Our  researchers at Category Labs have done some really   excellent research studying this phenomenon where  some of the venues on other chains quote really  

[33:34] tightly and then occasionally widen, sort of  alternating tight, wide. And the tight quotes are,   of course, to attract the trade, and then the wide  quotes are when the user actually interacts with   the market. So anyway, all that is to say that  there's this big problem in off-chain aggregation  

[33:51] where users ultimately don't get the best price  because the logic is not on chain and it's not   auditable by the system. Now enter  fully on-chain aggregation where   you have a smart contract that is going and  looking at all the options for where to trade,  

[34:07] in real time at the time that that trade is  about to execute, and picking the best prices.   And so, I think this is a great example  of an app that can only be built on Monad   given the really cheap pricing, fast block times,  and overall efficiency of the system. And it's  

[34:24] giving users a better experience because they're  getting better pricing than if they were routing   their trade through an off-chain aggregator  that does not give the users the best price.   Can you give an example of which applications  or chains are doing the off-chain routing?

[34:41] Yeah, almost all aggregators in crypto are using  off-chain routing. So, just like the biggest,   most popular ones. And it is interesting because  those off-chain aggregators are also dealing with  

[34:55] this problem of venues spoofing their tight  quotes and alternating between tight and wide.   0x, which is a really well-known  aggregator, published a blog post recently,  

[35:08] sort of calling out these venues for doing  that. And it's interesting because they're   describing a problem that their system has  that all their competitors have as well,   other than Moose. And they're pointing out  that it's quite a hard problem to solve,  

[35:25] but it's hard because of the premise of being  off-chain for the computation. Super interesting.   I think it's no surprise right now that for crypto  to take the next steps forward, it needs continued  

[35:38] adoption of RWAs, right? We've seen non-stablecoin  RWAs have roughly 30x in the last 2 years. And   if there's any space that's clearly growing at the  moment, it's on-chain real-world assets, right?  

[35:56] Where are you guys with tokenized RWAs? And  what do you envision as what would be defined as   success by 2030 in terms of, maybe it's TVL, maybe  it's something else that you mentioned earlier?

[36:11] Yeah, I think the growth of RWAs on-chain  has been incredibly exciting. I think   it's important both because when we think about  crypto as the universal market access engine,  

[36:25] we need to give users access to the best  opportunities, and equities and more generally,   yield-bearing RWAs are a huge missing component  of that. Today, we're announcing that X-Stocks  

[36:43] is going live on Monad, and so they're bringing  over a thousand tokenized equities to Monad   as part of this deployment, and they'll continue  to, as they continue to add other countries,  

[36:59] different markets, they'll continue to bring  those to Monad as well. So, I think this is   a huge part of our mission; our reason for being  is better access to global markets for all users,  

[37:13] and so I'm really excited that this is happening  today. And to your original question, I think   the success metric is really the  extent to which the ownership of  

[37:27] RWAs on Monad grows substantially in AUM and DeFi  TVL of that sector. What do you think the top five   on-chain assets will be by 2030? So, that  could be, you know, a stablecoin, it could be,  

[37:45] obviously, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever the top  five on-chain assets by 2030, what do you think? Now, does Bitcoin as an on-chain asset—is  that like, I think, you know, wrapped BTC?  

[37:58] tokenize being on-chain, I think. So, you're just  asking what do you think the top tokens? Yeah,   what top tokens, or maybe, you know, USD?  Maybe USDT has got a $5 trillion market cap.  

[38:14] Yeah. So, I mean, it's hard to compete with USDT's  growth; it's been absolutely massive and extremely   impressive. I think that the biggest crypto  assets in the space will be a lot bigger than  

[38:31] they are now, and I think that especially  assets that are really useful and that are   providing more functionality. Like, you know,  Bitcoin is amazing; it's like digital gold,  

[38:49] but it's very simple in what it does. I  think that the market will become more   familiar with smart contract platform  assets as being ones that are really   valuable because they're both useful  and they're also a great store of value.  

[39:04] So, do you think there's a chance  that Bitcoin isn't number one by then? I think so. Wow, interesting. Yeah. By 2040, would  you say that's definitely going to be the case?   I think so, because I think a lot of, you know,  this might be heretical to a lot of people.  

[39:20] All right, heretical, maybe. Yeah, no problems  to anyone who is a believer. It's, yeah,   I actually don't know. It's hard to say. Yeah, for  sure. Just speaking about tokens now, so not RWAs.  

[39:36] Will Monad be a top 10 token by  2030, do you think? I think that   we're working as hard as we can to ship  improvements that we think are incredibly needed  

[39:52] in the space as quickly as we can. I think the  track record of the team in delivering a lot of   new technologies that now other blockchains  are starting to notice and adopt and copy.  

[40:07] That track record is clearly there with parallel  execution and decoupled consensus and execution,   things like that. So, what we're doing  now is really pushing the frontier  

[40:22] by protecting users from front running,  from introducing Monad private settlement.   And I think that's the only thing  that I can really solve for is   making sure that our team is working as quickly  as we can to solve these really urgent problems.  

[40:37] So, when you're thinking about the token  itself, how important is it when you're   thinking about what you're trying to achieve? Are  you thinking like, "We want better tokenomics,   we want the token to be front and center of what  we're doing," or is what you're really thinking,  

[40:56] "We just want to create the best, most performant  blockchain, which creates an incredible ecosystem   for builders, almost like creating the best city  in the world, and that's what's going to bring   fundamentally better app revenue, better chain  fees, and more value to Monad overall anyway?"

[41:12] Yeah, so I always say that both technology and  business need to go hand in hand. We need to   deliver the best technology, and we also need to  work really hard to grow businesses on Monad, and  

[41:27] build those bridges to the rest of the world  and all the businesses in the rest of the world.   I think that a strong token is an important  part of a strong economy, similar to,  

[41:39] you know, when you talk about  countries, having a strong currency   is valuable to their own strategic objectives as  well. And you know, I can't control the prices, we  

[41:52] can't control the prices, but I think that having  very clear communication about our vision and   all of the improvements that are being  made, and highlighting the great work that  

[42:04] the team is doing, and that the builders  in the ecosystem are doing, and also,   as a foundation, we're the steward of a lot of  MON tokens and being really judicious about how  

[42:18] we spend them and spending them on things  that we really believe will ultimately lead   to greater growth for the network. These are all  things that we take really seriously. Right. This   has been fun, Keon. Is there anything I haven't  asked you that I should have done? No, I think  

[42:34] we've covered a lot. Awesome, awesome. Just want  to say thanks to you, Simon, and hope to see you   back in the future. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks. You had  great questions. Thanks, man. Really enjoyed it.