Stablecoins & the Future Financial System

**a16z Crypto Podcast Transcript**

**Erik Torenberg:** Crypto can help decentralize the power structures that are emerging in AI. Chris always talks about, do you want to be the indie band or do you want to play like the Super Bowl or the Mega Stadium? And I think like stable coins really have the ability to appeal to like a much broader audience. Stable coins are beginning to really gain traction. So there's something like $16 trillion in volume on stable coins per year. I actually think it's a great time for folks to be building token networks. Crypto is like a fundamentally radical set of technologies that is very, very hard for incumbent players to adopt and run with. Precisely because it is so fundamentally disruptive to the way that they do things. What's actually working in crypto right now? For a long time, this space has been defined by bold visions and has elicited strong skepticism. So today, we're getting clear on what's real, what's being used at scale, and what's coming next. Joining me are two of my fellow general partners here at A16Z, Ali Yahya, who leads investment across crypto infrastructure and developer tools, and Ariana Simpson, who focuses on early-stage crypto networks and founders building at the edge. We get into why stablecoins may finally be crypto's breakout product, how AI agents are creating new demand for crypto rails, and what's changing in policy that could unlock the next wave of token networks. We also talk about the enduring vision for decentralized social, the evolving smart contract landscape, and why Ethereum is still widely misunderstood. Let's get into it. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com forward slash disclosures. So I'm excited to do a deep dive with you on where we're at today in this space. So crypto is a space where people have long been excited about the vision and the potential, and people have long also been skeptical about where the use case is, what's happening, what's actually working. So here we are in May 2025. Why don't you give some context on what's actually worked so far, what's working right now?

**Ali Yahya:** It's quite interesting because if you go back all the way to 2009 when the original Bitcoin white paper was published, one of the first few lines of the paper describes Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic payment system, which was kind of the original vision behind what a blockchain could do. And it's really taken us like 15, 16 years to get to a point where the technology is mature enough to actually make that a reality. And this is now manifesting with stable coins. So some of the big issues that Bitcoin had that made it impossible for Bitcoin to become that peer-to-peer electronic payment system is that one, it was extremely inefficient and very slow. And it still is. And therefore, it's become more of a store of value type of system as opposed to stable coins. And two, Bitcoin is not a stable unit of account. And so it's very hard to use it for payments. And so since then, one of the big things that has happened is that the infrastructure has matured tremendously to the point at which now we are at a level where a transaction of any amount of money can be done for less than a penny in cost. And it can be done in under a second, roughly. Like those numbers are approximate, which finally makes something like a peer-to-peer transaction of a few dollars viable on the blockchain. And that combined with the regulatory clarity that we're having now as of the new administration makes stable coins something that are really beginning to happen. So that's maybe like the biggest thing that's going on in the crypto world at the moment is that stable coins are beginning to really gain traction. So there's something like $16 trillion in volume on stable coins per year. And there are many traditional financial institutions that are beginning to use stable coins to rip out a lot of the backend of their financial systems. And these are like fintech companies, think Stripe, think Revolut, think Robinhood, some of the companies in the traditional financial system that rely heavily on the trad financial system are now realizing that stablecoins are a much better way to do things. So that's kind of like the biggest thing that's going on. And we believe that'll likely lead to this cascading trend of adoption because once stablecoins become a more kind of mainstay of the way that the financial system works, that opens the door for a lot of the other more advanced and futuristic ideas that crypto has introduced, like DeFi, to begin to also gain adoption. And I think that as a result will lead to all of the other things that we believe crypto can offer to really start to ramp up.

**Ariana Simpson:** One interesting thing, though, is that stablecoins, at least us who are in the industry full time, have been thinking about for like years and years, because I remember talking about them in 2017, 2018. And I think there was always a narrative about them being useful for remittances or in countries that have had hyperinflation. And for those countries, Bitcoin is a better store of value than their native currencies, because sometimes it goes up, unlike those which only go down. But it's not ideal because, again, as Ali mentioned, it's not a stable unit of account. And so it's interesting to see that even though this has been talked about for years, now it's really having its moment. And I think, to Ali's point, a big part of why that's happening is because the infrastructure has evolved to a point where you can now efficiently move money and you're not having to spend a huge amount of money to move the money, among other things. So I think that's why we're starting to really see it shine now. I would also add that it's intersecting in interesting ways. We're still super early in this, but there's obviously a lot of talk about AI and agents. And if you want to dispatch your agent to go transact on your behalf, you can't really give them your bank account or your credit card, but instead you can give them your crypto wallet. And so this interplay of agents buying or spending money on behalf of their users with stablecoins is a really interesting theme that we're starting to explore.

**Erik Torenberg:** Actually, to that point, it's kind of ridiculous to think about the way that the financial system works today, where even a normal local and domestic financial transaction where you go to a coffee shop and you buy a coffee with a credit card, that transaction involves like the point of sale, the payment processor, the issuing bank, the acquiring bank, the credit card network. And each of these intermediaries takes some cut, some fee on the transaction to add up to something like multiple percentage points on the transaction. And that is the case in a domestic transaction. And if the transaction happens to be international, then that entire stack of participants and intermediaries gets duplicated and mirrored on the other side to the point that any kind of financial transaction across borders is insane in terms of its inefficiency. It can take up to like three to seven days to move money from one country to another, and it can cost like up to 10% of the transaction to do it. So when you have a technology that can now, again, move an arbitrary amount of money from anywhere in the world to any other place in the world for under a penny and under a second, that truly is very transformative and it'll be very disruptive to the way that the financial system works. So to Ariana's point about AI agents, it's kind of inconceivable that an AI agent that a human may want to participate in the financial system would have to go through all of that inefficiency and deal with all of these arcane human intermediaries, some of which are not even really automated. That's inconceivable. And the only real way to bring online millions or potentially billions or more AI agents into the kind of the financial system is through a technology that's fully based on software and is as efficient as like the crypto rails that are now available and now can be used.

**Ali Yahya:** Yeah. So say more about some of the use cases that stable coins are currently enabling. Is it mostly on an institutional level? Is it on a consumer level? Or where's the common interactions people are having?

**Ariana Simpson:** I think it's both. It depends what markets you're talking about. There's a company in our current accelerator batch called Zarpay, which is operating in Pakistan. And they're basically creating a network of small, you know, the little shops, if you've been to Africa or wherever, they have these little sort of mobile kiosks where you can put money on your phone and that sort of stuff. And so they're basically using that network in order to create a way for people to come in and deposit their local currency and get stable coins. And then they're building a whole suite of like financial services around this as the atomic unit. And I think a lot of countries that have unstable currencies or other financial issues for which holding dollars or the equivalent of dollars in stablecoins is very appealing, immediately understand the value of this and are very attracted to using it. So I think it goes from that all the way through to banks and financial institutions. I think in many cases, there's been an interest in crypto and some of the banks and financial institutions have wanted to get involved, but it's been very unclear how they could do it, largely as a result of the lack of regulatory clarity, but also because crypto can be a little scary or whatever. And so it hasn't always been obvious for them to see a path. How do we get involved? What's the way that we can bring this to our consumers? And so stablecoins, I think, are kind of like a baby step in, in the sense that it's a lot more clear what the value proposition is. It's a non-speculative use case. And so I think it's just a good entry point for some of these larger institutions.

**Erik Torenberg:** Yeah. Help us understand better the stablecoin landscape around like what big companies or types of companies have emerged or will emerge as a result of it or how it impacts the crypto startup ecosystem more broadly.

**Ali Yahya:** So right now at the center of all of the action are the stablecoin issuers. So we got two of the major ones right now are USDC, which is created by this consortium between Coinbase and Circle. And then there's Tether. And so both of these are like the kind of the biggest two issuers of stablecoins today. Then, of course, both of these stablecoins operate on top of blockchains. So another important piece of the stack is the infrastructure on top of which some of these stable coins operate on. And then you have this kind of collection of companies at the periphery that are generally just companies that help connect the crypto world to the external world. And that would include wallets. It would include some of the fintech companies that are using blockchain technology as the backend, but have a front end that looks more like a Web2 type of front end and doesn't expose the crypto aspects to the end user as much. And all of those players will be a part of the story as well. So one of the things that we talk a ton about is what will this stack look like end-to-end as the space evolves? And one of the exciting things that we are hoping will happen soon is it will get legislation that sets the rules of the road for stablecoins and for what is required for an issuer to create a stablecoin, what kind of collateral is needed for the stablecoin to be compliant. And what that likely will do is if that works, and we strongly believe it will likely happen this year, it will, to some extent, commoditize the issuance layer because it'll be easier for new issuers to emerge and create their own stablecoins that are also USD denominated to the point that those new stablecoins are somewhat fungible and interchangeable with USDC and with Tether. Because if all of them are compliant, then you can trust that all of them are likely to be ultimately redeemable for a dollar and they're equally trustworthy, which means that then the issuers may no longer be the ones that capture all the value the way that they do now. And instead, a lot of the value might be captured by some of the other layers. Like for example, the infrastructure is likely to capture a lot of the value because a lot of the activity, a lot of these sort of transactions, stablecoin transactions that are happening, happen on blockchains like Solana, Ethereum, Zui, a number of other kind of important layer one blockchains. And all of those require payment of gas for all of those transactions. So those blockchains are likely to be important players in the way that this unfolds. That's on one another stack, and then the other end will be kind of the endpoint, the interface that connects this whole crypto world to the end users. So wallets will be likely important. One of our portfolio companies, Phantom, likely be well-positioned as a gateway or an interface for people to interact with stable coins and get kind of exposure to US dollars, regardless of where they may be.

**Ariana Simpson:** Yeah. And it seems like for years, there's been this question of, hey, what's going to make it so that there's hundreds of millions of users? I'm not sure what it is at the moment across all of crypto or a billion users. They asked before that, kind of what's the iPhone moment? What's the product that everyone's going to be using? That's also a platform for everything. Is it stable coins or is it something else? Or how do we think about that? I think the odds are good that stable coins are that thing. I also don't think that necessarily there needs to be one thing. I think we mentioned AI. Ali has made some investments in that category. We've done some as a team. I think there's going to be different waves that bring in different users. A while ago, Web3 Games was a big entry point. Now it's AI and stable points. So I think the users do come in waves. I think there's a lot of it that sort of tracks the cycles that we see every couple of years in crypto. Chris always talks about, do you want to be the indie band or do you want to play like the Super Bowl or the mega stadium? And I think like stable coins really have the ability to appeal to like a much broader audience because, like we said, it's just a use case that makes sense. It's pretty clear what the value proposition is. And so it appeals to a broader audience.

**Erik Torenberg:** Yeah. Yeah, in part also because it addresses a very real pain point. Whether it be for people in third world countries that want exposure to the dollar because their local currency may not be as reliable. or people who want to move money between borders. And we talked about how that can be extremely inefficient. Or even companies that want to move money across borders. They still have to deal with all the inefficiency. Apparently, companies like SpaceX are already using stablecoins for treasury management to move money from one country to another in a way that's much more efficient than using the traditional financial rate. Bridge, which Stripe now acquired. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Stripe Sessions, their big conference was like all about stablecoins. So many of the talk tracks last week were about that. And so I think it's really indicative of the fact that this is permeating not just crypto companies, but out more broadly. And I think obviously the other necessary element in addition to the infrastructure improvements and all that is just the fact that now we have a more friendly regulatory regime, which is interested in seeing these kinds of things flourish.

**Ali Yahya:** Yeah. Just one meta point. It's one thing I've always appreciated about crypto investing is you guys as domain experts don't just need to understand the technology, which is complex enough in itself. But you also need to understand the policy regime, law, monetary policy, economics, foreign policy, and how all these things are intersecting with crypto startups. Yeah. I mean, I'm certainly not the domain expert on some of the policy stuff, but we've really assembled a super strong team who's been very involved in D.C. and trying to push the ball forward for the whole industry.

**Erik Torenberg:** Yeah. You mentioned Stripe getting deeply involved in crypto. It's interesting because people often contrast it with AI and say, hey, AI is mostly sustaining innovation. And that, of course, there's massive companies that have been formed, but a lot of the gains have gone to the biggest companies, whereas crypto is mostly a startup innovation, though some bigger companies are getting involved too. It's funny, like maybe Facebook was just a few years too early if they launched Libra in a more friendly regime. Might that have worked? How do you think about the startup versus incumbent distinction in this space?

**Ali Yahya:** Yeah, crypto is like a fundamentally radical set of technologies that is very, very hard for incumbent players to adopt and run with, precisely because it is so fundamentally disruptive to the way that they do things. I was at Google a while back. I was at Google X working on a robotics project, but I was already very interested in crypto. And Google X is supposed to be like the moonshot factory and it's supposed to be super innovative and open to new ideas, open to start new companies. But they don't want it. New ideas. I tried to get Google X to touch crypto. I tried at Facebook, by the way. Same thing. And it's like Google would not touch crypto with a thousand foot pole unless it was like a very, very kind of vanilla, we will run some note or whatever. Were they like, this makes no sense? Or were they like, it's evil? I think, yeah, they kind of fundamentally didn't get it. They were afraid about the optics. They were afraid about the regulatory association with it, the reputational consequences. Also, like the whole Web3 vision, the vision of decentralizing web services, which is I think the kind of the most futuristic vision for crypto is fundamentally disruptive to the way that these companies work. These are centralized companies that make money and have power by virtue of being so centralized. And if you build something like a social network that is fully decentralized and has no core central company, like no monopolistic tech giant that's worth $44 billion that controls what recommendation algorithm is used and who gets to follow whom and all of the data and the social graph itself, then that company no longer has a business model. It's a very, very different business model to build a social network that's decentralized in the way that a company like Farkaster currently is. And so for a company like, say, Facebook or Google in its own way to decentralize itself and to truly embrace crypto with arms wide open, it would have to cannibalize its own business model. And I think that's actually becoming true for AI as well. I think that it was very, very true that AI was a very sustaining innovation before, but it's gotten so powerful that there are many elements of it that are disruptive. Google wanted to fully embrace AI. It would have to replace search with an LLM instead of having its current model. And of course, that's a hard thing for it to do given the kind of the insanely profitable business model that they currently have.

**Ariana Simpson:** Yeah. Is that still the vision that we'll have decentralized social networks, decentralized marketplace, or where are we on that vision? And what are the bottlenecks to that vision being realized of networks at scale that are truly decentralized and competing with some of the centralized ones? Is it technological or is it that people just don't really care about this in the same way or like why hasn't it happened yet? I think it's mostly a consumer preference issue. I do think like now some of the products have gotten really good, like Farcaster, for example, the product experience is very good, but it's just challenging to get people to switch because the reason you're on the social network is for the graph. And so it's difficult to export an entire graph. I think like users are accustomed to being the product. If you're not paying for the product, you are the product. And I think in many cases, consumers are used to that experience. And, you know, ads are annoying, but they're not necessarily that bad. And so people just accept it and don't think too much about it. And by the way, this is interesting because if you look at like all of the big social networks, none of them have been started in the last decade. And that's not true just of crypto. It's true in general. And so it's just very difficult, I think, to get over this hurdle of reaching a critical mass whereby people actually say, oh, I'm in the network and I'm going to stay in the network. So it's not just a crypto thing. I think it's just difficult nowadays. People only have so much attention. And with the networks that there are, most of the attention span has already been captured. So I think we may need to see some of the existing ones falter before there like enough room for some of the new ones to really take hold.

**Erik Torenberg:** Yeah. Yeah, in order for it to match the consumer expectations that we're talking about, it has to be a new interaction model or new value that's unlocked that goes straight to the consumer as opposed to something that's like abstract, like the same product, but just decentralized. And the forecaster with frames and some of its other experiments has been net new things and only it could do. And a Web2 and Blackboard is another example of that. Yeah, exactly. Ali, let's go a bit deeper on AI and the intersection between AI and crypto. What's working there? Where are you most excited? Peter Thiel actually had this tongue-in-cheek line back in 2018, which I think rings true, which is that AI is communist and crypto is libertarian. I think the meta point is that these two technologies are very different from one another. And in many ways, they're actually counterweights for each other. So there are many ways in which they are intersecting, and we can talk through a few of them. I think one of the most important ways is that AI is creating a kind of overabundance of media and of human-looking entities, agents that can pretend to be human, or deep fakes of video or audio that seems very human. And it's hard to know whether you're looking at something that's real or something that's purely generated. And crypto happens to be a really good technology to help authenticate media or help authenticate data in general. One of the ways in which these two worlds will collide is that there are crypto projects that are working on, among many other things, proof of humanity, which would allow someone, anyone, a user on the internet to prove that they actually are human so that anyone on the other end can know that they're interacting with a human and not with an AI bot or an AI agent. WorldCoin is one of these companies, is one of our portfolio companies, and they built an orb that uses biometric information and also uses zero-knowledge proofs to keep all of the biometric data private. In fact, the data itself never leaves the orb and only a code or a cryptographic object that is derived from the biometric data ever leaves the orb and from that cryptographic object that is not possible to infer anything about the biometric data itself. It's a technology that allows anyone to prove their humanity on the internet. There was that famous line in the 90s that on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. And that is very, very true now in 2025, where like on the internet, nobody knows you're human. Like you could be anything. You could be a dog or an ape or anything else. So that's one way I think that cryptography, blockchains will help deal with the immensity and abundance of signal and noise that AI will generate. Another big one is that crypto can help decentralize the power structures that are emerging in AI. At the moment, it seems like there will be a small number of very, very powerful players in the AI world, even though it's unclear as to whether there are things like network effects that drive defensibility. There are just a handful of really powerful players in the space, at least at the kind of the model layer, like OpenAI and the other kind of big companies that build foundation models. Crypto offers an alternative for creating AI systems that's more decentralized. And so an example of this is a company called Jensen, which is also in our portfolio that builds a kind of marketplace for compute. So someone on one side of the marketplace can provide their idle GPU capacity to the network. And then someone on the other side who might want to use the GPU compute for training a model or for doing inference on a model can, through the network, make use of all of that compute. And the network manages all of these heterogeneous computational resources to create something that feels like a unified cloud on which you can run all of these machine learning AI workloads in a way that's fully decentralized, in a way that is not controlled by a single company, and in a way that could actually be more efficient than a cloud by virtue of using capacity that otherwise would just go idle and unused. It's just capacity that's locked away in all of these like pockets that are far removed and not in one particular data center. There are many hard technical challenges to get there, but there are a lot of smart people working toward figuring that out. And we're very optimistic that'll also happen. It'll also allow for machine learning workloads to run in a way that is also verifiable. So this way you don't have to trust a centralized company, say Facebook or like one of the other social media companies, that the machine learning model or the AI model that they're running for say, like the recommendation algorithm is unbiased or has particular properties. You can actually, with cryptography, verify that those things are the case and that these things are executed in a way that's correct. You can use some of these decentralized systems for that as well. And then maybe the final one, which I think is the most futuristic and the most challenging, is having crypto help AI figure out the new business models for the internet. So one of the issues that AI will create with the current business models of the internet is that right now, the way that the internet works is that you have an aggregator, like a search engine, driving traffic to creators of media, like say someone who has written a blog post or someone who has like a page that has content. And there's ads as like the business model that mediates that whole interaction. And that entire business model goes away if you just have an AI that just gives you the answer that you're looking for. So instead of doing search on Google, getting exposed to a bunch of ads and then clicking through to a website and having all of those parties be happy because a business model includes all of them. Now, instead of that, you just interact with an LLM, you get the answer immediately and you never click through to the final page and you never get exposed to an ad. That kind of completely changes the way that the Internet works. and we're going to need new business models for the internet if that's the case. So one idea is that you could through, there are a lot of these research efforts to try to figure out attribution in the training of a machine learning model for what pieces of data contributed to a particular output. So you're asking an LLM a question, you kind of want to know what pieces of data that were used to train that LLM contributed to the answer that the LLM ultimately gives you when you ask it a question. And if you could know that, then you could come up with a business model that rewards the people who contributed that data originally. And crypto could be part of that. So there are open problems on both sides. You have to figure out this attribution challenge in the AI world, and there are people working on that problem. And then there's a challenge on the crypto side, like how do you build a network that can using that information compensate all of the parties involved in having the AI actually give you what you ultimately want.

**Erik Torenberg:** Are the big labs interested in crypto? Do they need to be interested in crypto for this to happen? Or is this largely coming from startups? It's funny, Sam Altman, of course, OpenAI, but also WorldCoin. So it has some familiarity. But what can you say about this?

**Ali Yahya:** For the most part, I don't think so. I think for the most part, the AI labs, they're just running with AI. And there's so much that's exciting in that world that I think crypto doesn't really factor in at all. But there are crypto companies that are very interested in AI and are thinking about the ways in which crypto will ultimately make a difference in that world. Yeah. So like this company I mentioned, Jensen, actually the founders are very, very deep in AI. They have an AI background, but they also happen to have a deep commitment to building things as open source networks that are ultimately decentralized. And so they are of the few people who really do straddle both worlds.

**Erik Torenberg:** Zooming out a little bit, what are some of the biggest misconceptions you think people have about the space right now?

**Ariana Simpson:** Well, I mean, I think for the last few years, it's been really challenging to launch a token network in the United States in particular, because there was a lack of clear legislation. And then there were very aggressive folks in several agencies working on basically not allowing entrepreneurs to launch networks. And that applied to entrepreneurs who were very well-meaning and very much wanted to do things by the books. And so I think one of the challenges was that people obviously didn't want to end up in legal trouble and therefore, in many cases, pulled back their plans on that front, which really impeded their progress on the product side as well. So they couldn't really build their vision because I think tokens are part and parcel of what's valuable and interesting about crypto. And so if you remove that piece, it doesn't make any sense. So the thing that's a misconception, perhaps, is that the situation is very different now. We have a much friendlier administration in place. We have a very different situation in terms of the leadership of these agencies now. And so I actually think it's a great time for folks to be building token networks. And I think that message hasn't necessarily fully made it out there. So I'm hopeful that more entrepreneurs realize that the situation is, again, very different from what it was just a few months ago and start to come back in force.

**Ali Yahya:** I completely agree with that. I think another big one is outside of like our immediate circles, like outside of the world of tech, it's shocking to me that people continue to think of crypto as just like a thing that's supposed to be money only. Or they think of a blockchain as a kind of ledger for money. And I think that that misconception comes from Bitcoin, from Bitcoin trying to be money and only money and not really trying to be anything else. And the fact that this misconception is that like Ethereum is like Bitcoin and Ethereum is actually the silver to Bitcoin's gold. And that all that crypto really is, it's just another kind of attempt to doing what Bitcoin did. The fact that Ethereum actually is a fundamentally different thing than Bitcoin is still not widely understood. The fact that Ethereum is actually a kind of computer where you can build all sorts of different applications, where the software that runs on top of the computer has unique properties that no other software has ever had is, I think, not widely understood. And these are programs that, like the programs that run on a blockchain like Ethereum are programs that have a life of their own. They are programs that can make commitments that no one has to trust anyone to believe in. It's a program that is essentially free from interference from anyone, including the people who originally wrote the program. So that's a very unique property that no other kind of software has. It's a kind of technology that inverts the power relationship between the software and the hardware. Whereas historically, the hardware has always had power over the software because whomever controls the hardware can turn off the software or change it in some way. whereas in crypto with blockchains, the hardware commodities, these are people who run, like the miners, for example, or validators in the blockchain context don't have any power over the software that runs on top. And that's what makes a blockchain unique. And that's what makes it capable of doing so much more than just money. You can kind of build far more sophisticated primitives. So stable coins are the first thing, but the things that come after, things like DeFi, where you can build much more sophisticated financial primitives on chain or some of these other more futuristic ideas where you can do AI, you can do Deepin, you can do some of these consumer-facing applications like decentralized social networks. All of that relies on the properties of a blockchain computer that's not just a ledger, it's a full-on computer on which you can build applications. That, I think, is not something that most people really get.

**Erik Torenberg:** Yeah. Maybe gearing towards closing here, Ali, can you give a bit of an update on kind of the smart contract platform wars? As an outsider or someone who's paid attention at certain times and not at certain times. What I've heard or gleaned is Bitcoin, as you mentioned, has tried to be money, but there's a little bit of a nascent Bitcoin builder movement. I'm not sure if that's led to something particularly meaningful in this space. And then my understanding is that Ethereum has tried to optimize across multiple dimensions, both trying to be money, but also trying to be the base layer for sort of decentralized internet and committed to decentralization in a way that some people think is at the sacrifice of usability. And whereas Solana has not had the same commitments to decentralization, has really optimized for usability. One, is that a fair characterization? How would you edit the characterization? And two, how is this all played out or where are we right now on that level?

**Ali Yahya:** There's actually a really good characterization. The way that I would break things down is that there is a very large and multidimensional trade-off space. And it's very hard for any one system to cover the entire space. So it makes sense that you'd end up with different systems specialized for different things. And then as a result, having different use cases and different value propositions. So Bitcoin, I think, has been extremely successful at becoming like a kind of digital gold. It's been extremely volatile, but I think that there is this belief, there's a, there's mimetic value that Bitcoin is long-term, a pretty good store of value that will be around for a very, very long time. It's not going anywhere and we'll have properties that are desirable that are not provided by other things like fiat or gold itself or anything. It's funny, it's only been around for less than 20 years, but in my head, I treat it as gold. It's going to be there forever. Exactly, exactly. So it's really succeeded at that. And I think some of the things that has helped it succeed at that is the fact that it is so hard to change and the fact that it is so simple and you can't do that much with it. Those things are disadvantages in some contexts, but they're real advantages when