Why the Crypto Markets Seem So Broken and How They Get Fixed After 10/10

0:00America leads the world in medicine development. It matters. We get new medicines first nearly three years faster. Five million Americans go to work because we make medicines here at home and not relying on other countries keeps us safe. But China is racing to overtake us. Will we let them or will we choose to stay ahead? When America leads, America cures. Let's tell Washington to keep us in the lead. Learn how at americancures.com. Paid for by pharma. Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining the live stream. Before we get started, a quick reminder, nothing new here on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only and my guess tonight may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit UnchainedCrypto.com. Quick note before we get into today's episode. Bits and Bits now has its dedicated feed. We're spinning off from the Unchained feed and moving to a new podcast and YouTube channel. So if you want to keep up with our weekly live streams and macro meets, crypto breakdowns,

1:03make sure to subscribe to Bits and Bits directly. We won't publish there until March, but subscribe today so you can be ready for launch. Be sure to subscribe to the new feeds at UnchainedCrypto.com slash Bits and Bits. Today's topic is the crypto markets. Here to discuss our Rob Hattick, general partner at track and fly capital and Gracie Chen, CEO of Bicat. Welcome, Rob and Gracie. Thanks for having me, Laura. Hi, everyone. So in 2025, we saw FinTech and crypto start to converge on the same competitive space. There's been a few attempts to create an everything app and we're already seeing some of the players maybe pivot away from that while others are continuing in that track. This is a concept that's actually mostly from Asia. We chat is probably the most commonly cited example of that. Meanwhile, we are seeing others like Bicat, Robin Hood, just merging crypto and track five. Bicat is a prime example with its universal exchange. Gracie, I would love to hear

2:08more about the universal exchange and what your vision is for that. Sure. In crypto world, we are very familiar with the term CX and DX, centralized changes and decentralized changes. After FTX collapse, there were a lot of debate on whether there should be more DeFi trading, DX and maybe CX have too much power because we are the custodial platform together with the trading platform and some users also have their assets on CXs, doing some earning, etc. I think after three years after FTX collapse, things could go down. Definitely people still trust CX. The UX kind of for market share went up, about 20% from it was probably like 5 to 10% to where it is today, 20% in terms of a total trading volume market share. But for us, emerge or a future trend that we observed from 2022 until maybe 2025 and that made us want

3:13to pivot to UX. The trends being the first one, again, still DX is becoming more popular, especially for new tokens. A lot of people realize CXs have a relatively tedious listing process and we do have team, we do have resource, for example, we need to get the market maker ready when we need to list any centralized changes token. But still, there are only probably 600, 700 tokens available on CX trading and we get Binance Coinbase may have slightly smaller range of tokens. And then what if people want to trade those tokens who announced it, who are outside of this top 600, 700 tokens. So we embedded our ability from Big and Wallet, which has already enabled unchained kind of swap and trading. That means, again, outside of this 600 listed DX tokens, people can trade them on DX or decentralized wallets. So we embedded

4:21their ability into CX and have our users be able to trade in decentralized tokens or slightly, you know, much more much more choices out there. So that's the first trend, embedding or integrating CX experience with the DX options, the DX tokens. The second trend that we saw, especially from 2025, is the race of, is the rise of RWAs. For example, tokenized stocks, tokenized commodity, like go silver, copper, oil, etc. These are becoming more popular. And it is, of course, people talk about that for a long time. But it's until 2025 that we see some good players in the space. For example, XOX and UNDO, they both provide tokenized stocks with the relatively comprehensive structure of technology structure using like ROCOS to feed the price and the auditing process. Every single stock, the underlying, there is a specific SPV that holds the real

5:29stocks. And then they maintain burn the tokens accordingly when the users needed to trade them. So assets or players like this made RWAs and tokenized the stocks and commodities more feasible and more popular. So we also partnered with them to enable those assets on our platform. And then, of course, we can chain more on AI. But basically, these are the trends that we realized as an exchange ourselves. It's not really accurate to car ourselves just CX because now we have all those DEX assets. And we're not just serving crypto users, we're also serving some sort of like track by users or at least users who may be going to use stablecoin to buy track by assets. That's why we think in our self a CX is not accurate. And then we pivoted to UX universal exchange, universally asset classes. We want to enable users to trade, to be able to trade again, universally valuable assets that includes Forex, commodity stocks together with

6:34cryptocurrencies. Yeah, so that's a very important strategy where we shifted or we came up with in 2025. Under of 25, a raw September in my seven-year CEO letter, I wrote about CX for the first time. And of course, a lot of the way we also see some, I would say, great minds share, great minds are alike. Coinbase and Brian Armstrong called everything strange. OK, X is also in my opinion leading going to the same direction. NASDAQ last year also mentioned that they want to tokenize their US stocks and enable 24 5 trading hours. And I see this year, January mentioned that they want to also head to that and enable 24 seven, which is more aggressive in terms of trading hours. So we are all building towards this kind of trading platform that provide RWA assets, more tokenized

7:35options using blockchain to settle the transactions and broker the unbroker. I would call that maybe short in that. Yeah, so that's the the UX world that we are building. And Rob, as an investor in BitKat, what interests you about this vision or why do you think this makes sense for the future of BitKat? Yeah, I mean, I think Gracie, she kind of talked about the high level trends that we're seeing, which we're seeing as well as investors. We talked to not just, you know, all the centralized exchanges, but also all the decentralized exchanges as well and the teams behind them. It's very clear when you look at just user behavior right now. Like, users want the place to trade everything. They were seeing this a lot in the crypto space where people are talking a lot more about trading inequities. We're seeing this on things like trade XYZ, who obviously has been offered in perps on hyperliquid for RWA assets and commodities. We're

8:36seeing this. And, you know, a lot of the the spot equities as well. So Gracie mentioned things like X stocks, which Kraken acquired. And so there's a lot of demand to be able to trade cross assets, to be able to do complex R, to be able to do, you know, complex strategies that are only enabled on chain or maybe being on chain and off chain and having both this X and the DEX opportunities, like Gracie mentioned, but do need across different types of assets. And so, you know, it makes a complete sense that Gracie and team are one of the first to really think through like what this could look like. A lot of the competitors are also thinking through, you know, being the everything exchange. But generally in Asia, people have been quicker to adopt, you know, kind of new digital technologies. We've just seen that over time, seen that with payments over time. And, you know, Bickett's been at the forefront of that. So we're super excited for what they're building. And we think it's going to be quite interesting to see kind of how this plays out. I do also think the one

9:39really interesting piece that is true about being in tokenized equities, tokenized stocks, tokenized commodities, and crypto together is that it allows you to serve a global audience in a different way than you can in the current structure of how things work from a regulatory perspective. And because of that, that means that you can bring these really awesome platforms that Bickett has, which primarily might have just been Asian to a European audience. So we're to Latin American audience and African audience, American audience even. And, you know, vice versa, you know, Coinbase is going to try to go international as well. But I think historically you've seen that, you know, the a lot of the Asian exchanges, they understand customers a little bit better than the US ones do. And so kind of that convergence and being able to go global provides a really interesting opportunity that just doesn't exist, you know, outside of this space. Yeah, I was actually going to ask Gracie as my next question. So this is a perfect setup, you know, about Bickett's customer base because obviously, so it's non-US is very global. But I'm sure you,

10:42you know, have certain regions that are more popular. And I was wondering, so first of all, you like who the traditional customer base is, but then also now that you've rolled out these things like the tokenized stocks and the Forex and all that, if you're seeing that a different type of customer is either coming in for these features or if there's like certain geographies or certain types of customers that like were existing customers but are now, you know, taking taking up these more trad-fi kind of investments. Yeah. Yeah. So Bickett started off seven years ago, seven and a half years ago, which was mainly based in Asia. For that reason, even until today, we do have more than half of our users being Asians. East Asia, Southeast Asia, some areas that we see a lot of growth for the past few years. Then I think in 2022, which is exactly the same year when I joined Bickett, when we started to globalization. So since then, we have more users coming from the world,

11:45Latin, Europe, we see some growth there. In 2022, we did struggle whether we should have a Bickett US kind of setting in the United States, but that was still a question around the FTX time, but after that, we decided now to go into the US market. We even ended lots of collaborations and development in the US market with, for example, partners or KOLs. But this year, in 2026, we are really considering entering the US. So hopefully, there might be some interesting and good news coming up about the specific US market end of this year or later in the first half of 2027. But other than the US, we are quite globalized, I would say, with some 100 different countries and regions in terms of users' profile. But again, Asia is a big base that we have. Then back to your second part of the question around the UEX version for users. I actually

12:48want to clarify, because this could be a common misunderstanding that is Bickett still a crypto exchange or is Bickett directly competing with companies like Robinhood or in Asia. There's food to Moo Moo. They are the same company, but with different brands of the more local brands versus mobile brands. But basically, some traditional brokers. They are our direct competitors. I wouldn't say, I wouldn't agree with that. We are still serving the need of our users who hold a stable coin rather than a fee currency. Also, when they trade, even if it's a traditional financial asset class, for example, US stocks, it is tokenized US stocks rather than direct to US stocks. Because the traditional financial world has been around for, well, 400 years, I guess, that is to the first stock exchange in Amsterdam, in Netherlands. But for the past, less than a century,

13:57the financial world isn't evolved a lot. It's still on the quite T plus two kind of settlement period. You need to have a quite tedious process to open the account, etc. In our opinion, we don't want to go back to that old financial system. We think blockchain, just like how stable coin and crossbow transactions are much faster and cheaper than traditional crossbow transactions. Similarly, the current tokenized stocks and the tokenized world, probably liquidity-wise, we can improve, but in terms of the settlement and the technology itself, it's just faster and cheaper and more advanced. So we're still focusing on the enabling the crypto users. The major difference is they used to use stable coin, for example, USCT, USDC, to purchase crypto currencies on us. But now, we want them to use stable coin to trade many other asset classes.

15:05But again, when I clarified, still many crypto users and the tokenized version of everything, whether they go back to the traditional financial world of settlement, etc. And then in 2025 and 2006, after we rolled out UEX, we did see a slightly structural shift in terms of we have more VIP clients. We have more institutional clients interested in this goal. Again, still crypto users. But many VIP clients shifted some of their money at other exchanges or even at traditional financial brokers to be get because they can now trade all the different assets under one umbrella, under one room. And then, yeah, it's just like slightly different over there in terms of selling more valued assets, more valued clients,

16:07and more VIP clients. And I just want to follow up on what you said about entering the US. So, would you do like a typical kind of create a US entity to do that? And then, you know, so it's similar to like a Binance, Binance US, it's a situation is that how you would do that? Well, honestly, it's not because it's not what that I don't want to tell you. It's indeed we haven't decided. We're still in the period of time of acquiring some licenses and talking to our local partners. That's why I estimated this will only be done later end of this year or earlier in 2027, maybe after a year later. Right now, in Q2 and Q1, our key focus in terms of compliance and global expansion is actually to get the Mika license and Dubai viral license. Actually, the Dubai viral license was supposed to be done in Q1, but given the war in the region, it's definitely delayed to Q2. But for the first half of the, those are the key things.

17:12But if we, what I would, what I am able to share is that when we are thinking about the US strategy, we don't necessarily plan to do it just by ourselves. We will definitely do it with some partners, whether it's a joint venture kind of setting or acquire some partners, etc. to to build the foundation are both visible. So rather than, you know, ourselves applying all the licenses by ourselves, I think it would take a much longer time if not a lot of more money as well. But yeah, that's roughly the current plan. Okay, so I do also want to ask about one other new feature that is, you know, really tapping into kind of like what's happening in the wider world of crypto, which is you built this AI agent hub. And obviously right now everyone's wondering how it is that crypto and AI are going to intersect. It's very clear that this is going to be probably one of

18:14the biggest new areas of crypto. So, you know, tell us what the AI, AI agent hub is and, you know, what how it works. Yeah, you have very updated because we just announced our beget agent hub. I think within 24 hours. Thank you for doing that. Yeah, so, so a key thing is we do see AI evolve a lot for the past 20, since 2022, and of 2022 when chain GPT came out, right? From the stage of, you know, only chatbot to start with, then to more kind of like protocol, like Anthropic, MCT, and then to more things like Cloud Hub and GPT that provide skills, some domain expert skills and reusable capability modules to where it is now. That's why OpenClaw is so popular,

19:21because OpenClaw has the persistent memory, have like the active kind of more active and multi-agent collaboration, cross-platform collaboration. So, in my opinion, OpenClaw is probably the first open source framework that can successfully integrate all these abilities of chatbot, MCP, skills, agent, et cetera, that can be included into one deployable system. And then we see a lot of potential in that in terms of helping our users make better investment decisions or trading decisions, because those OpenClaw or this kind of operating system, agent OS, we call it, agent OS kind of setting, can really understand our users own portfolio, goals, behavior, habits, et cetera, so that help them make a better decision. That's one thing. We have heavily

20:27investing and then very, very, I would say pretty fast in terms of rolling out our OpenClaw platform, as well as integrating many abilities to and to how our users prepare. Another thing is our AI team, which was formed earlier last year, actually wrote out more than 25 different scenarios within Biget, where AI are used. For example, customer service, translation, those are simple things that you can, anyone can think of, but maybe more subtle kind of applications of AI in terms of CX or UX kind of setting could be New York transaction KYT in order to detect fraud or any potential risk from hack or from sanctioned accounts, et cetera. KYT, that's one thing, a lot of marketing campaigns that they actually just rolled out a greasy AI a few weeks ago.

21:32And that was just a fun experimental project that AI, me, put me in a cute avatar and they detected the collected my voice and made an AI voice of mine. And also the whole memory of Grecia was built on my past interviews and my opinions. Not just for crypto, but also for some personal growth, career advice, et cetera. Anyway, it's some fun project that we rolled out and then get agent is a more serious kind of chatbot that help our users make better training decisions. And all these things that we realize we have accumulated a lot of ability and it's time to share with our clients what all these different AI tools can do. And that's why we put out all the, I think we published 60, 50, 58 tools in nine major different modules to cover the whole trading lifecycle in terms of different products like spot products,

22:38futures product, copy trading, RMP2P, et cetera. And using all these different skills that we mentioned earlier, MCP, API, chatbot, et cetera. And Rob, I'm sure Dragonfly is looking into this area in a big way. You guys just raised your $650 million fund, congrats. And I heard his seat talking on bank list about how he thought the unique use case for AI agents that humans can't do is crime. I'm sure you're not investing in that, but talk a little bit about, you know, how you think crypto and AI will come together and, you know, how you think Bitcoin or other centralized exchanges are just like existing, you know, crypto entities will begin to adopt more AI. Yeah, you know, we're definitely not investing in crime. So I appreciate you saying that. I, so right now it's still very much, it's very early today, right? And so there's a lot of conversation online about, okay, well, you know, what role will AI and AI agents play relative

23:40to, you know, crypto, whether it's permissionless crypto, whether it's, you know, obviously permissioned or centralized exchanges, et cetera. And a lot of what Grace is talking about is, you know, really interesting modular tooling that people can use for trading, which are better than, you know, the things that have existed before, but are not necessarily what I would say, you know, agents in the way that, you know, most of the conversation that we talk about, agents when you can let them go free and you can let them go and kind of learn and constantly learn and do new things and to be able to, you know, potentially see them go in really weird directions as we've seen with things like mulbot, you know, et cetera. And so it's, it's where those two will play in the intersection. I think it's still actually very much up in the air. We've seen a little bit of interesting, you know, kind of work around things like, you know, decentralized inference and training. Some, a lot of these things have not worked, but we're seeing a little bit of signs of life and a few different parts of the market right now. It was so far, it's definitely, you know, net

24:44worse than we're seeing call it and, you know, are non-decentralized counterparts. We've also seen things like, you know, there's VVB, which is, you know, Eric Voorhees project right now, you know, they're doing, you know, sort of a permissionless, you know, sort of, I guess like private wrapper of a lot of the models on top, or you can get access to both, you know, call it the models that you and I maybe use every day, like, you know, a cloud and an opus and an open AI, et cetera. But also to some of the, like, you know, permissionless models that, you know, don't have the same rules, then allow you to do things like, you know, potentially, you know, create, you know, people's likeness that you can do otherwise, or something's allow you to do, like, porn and things like that, which you can't do in, you can't do a few's open AI. And so we've seen some, you know, kind of this, what I would tell us, like, cypherpunk ethos in some parts of the market right now, really start to pop up. And then of course, there's this long conversation around, okay, well, you know, agents will need to pay with stablecoin through crypto to be able

25:50to do agent to payments. I think there's a, there's a part of the market where that will definitely be true. There's some conversation around micro transactions, but it is also true today that, you know, you can do kind of one time use tokenized credentials and a tokenized credit card. And you can bring those costs way down and the networks can kind of sit on top of some sort of, like, you know, stablecoin infrastructure. And so where I actually believe, and I actually think, I see even I disagree on this. So if he was on this podcast and I would start arguing right now. But I actually think what we're going to see a lot of is we're going to see a lot of this, you know, stablecoins replace call it the settlement infrastructure for what still exists underneath like a visa network. And a visa network will still actually be quite, you know, useful in things like agentic payments. And so there's a lot of these areas where we're seeing a lot of, I would say just, you know, sort of experimentation today. And there's a lot of tooling that can help you be more efficient. It can help you do really interesting stuff on the trading side.

26:50But it's really, really early days today. I think Bick out again is, you know, kind of at the forefront of experimenting around this and providing access to their, their customers. And it's going to get a lot better a lot very quickly. We're seeing that, that, you know, kind of iteration cycle speed up. So that is exciting. And I think it's one thing that the markets will tell you right now. If you look at how volatile the equity markets are, if you have all until some of these other crypto markets are, I think the number one thing that is being, as being said, and being expressed is that nobody actually knows what AI is doing. And well, where we'll be in a year for now or even sooner. So I think it's a, as exciting time as I need to, to be playing around and experimenting and trying to be on top of everything that's going on. Okay, last question that I have about Bick get before we dive into the wider markets is just about the integration with morph chain, which is an L2 that has ZK fault proofs. But of course, as many L2s have essentially sequencer.

27:51So to start the partnership, Bick get transferred all of its BGB tokens to morph. And 50% were burned immediately. And the rest are going to be gradually released for liquidity incentives, you know, other types of initiatives. So Gracie, why don't you tell us why you decided to do this integration with morph chain? Sure. Yeah, morph chain, we know the team for a long time. We were initially their investor for I think two to three years ago. And basically last year, we were navigating our strategy for globalization and probably potentially, you know, it's for not a secret anymore, but it's also not highlighted that in the upcoming maybe two to three years, we are looking for potentially get listed in the US. So BGB became a plough. And it was a

28:54plough from token for a long time, even before I joined the company. But if we have a token ourselves, it could be a little bit of conflict of interest if we are also looking for an IPO plan. So that's part of the reasons that we thought about transferring the ownership of BGB. But even if we transferred all the BGB to morph foundation, Bick get wallet and morph. We are still supporting BGB as ecosystem providers, especially us as the exchange where we have a lot of BGB used scenario for launch pool, launch pad for VIP users to get a discount, etc. Those things remain unchanged. But the key thing is we do want to separate BGB from BGT. And we thought holding it to morph foundation is a good plan because we know the layer two

29:56very early. We are one of the investors and incubators. I think I think Dragonfly backed them up as well. And along the way supported us many of the important decisions we made, including this one. Okay, so before we dive into all the things going on in the markets, there's just a last question that I have, which is about, you know, you have a big user base in Asia and obviously Dragonfly invests in both the Asia and the West. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you think crypto differs between Eastern West, you know, and this question is for either one of you. Rob, do you want to go ahead? Yeah, I'm happy to start. I think, so as you mentioned, Laura, you know, Dragonfly, we've got offices in New York and Singapore, we've got teams in on both continents. We've been investing, you know, I think globally in far more global than any of our competitors for, you know, call it eight years now. And our perspective has always been,

31:02like, what does this technology do? And I talked a little bit about this one. Okay, what does tokenized stocks allow? What do tokenized commodities allow? What do these, these types of products that they allow you to go more global? They allow you to meet a global audience wherever they are. And they allow people access to things that they might not have in traditional technology infrastructure that exists today in these normal markets. And so our perspective has always been that to understand where crypto is going, you have to understand the end user. The end user today is a global citizen, right? For a long period of time, most of the end users of crypto were actually much more likely to be Asian than they were to be US or much more likely to be on that continent than they were to be here. And so our perspective was when you're going to launch a new protocol, you have to understand that your customer base is going to sit in all of these different countries and you want to understand their user behavior. And what we see in, especially in Asia is the customer base is far more digitally

32:05native. And some parts of Asia, Alipay has a 98% penetration rate, right? You do not see that type of digital money and that type of comfort with digital money anywhere else in the world, right? You do not see how comfortable people in the region are at things like trading different types of asset classes across, you know, like my mother has never put in a trade in her life, I don't think. And, but the, you know, the moms in Asia are often managing finances that way, right? They're often managing complex, you know, different types of investments, right? You know, the dads are as well. The whole family is like, it's much more ingrained when you think about how people, how people just work through their financial life and how they work through their investing interests, right? And you just don't see that exist in other parts of the world in the same way and mass. And so that comfort, that focus, that interest, means that we've seen higher rates of adoption

33:06more quickly across different types of products and asset classes in Asia than you have seen in the US. And so when we think through, okay, well, this consumer application, especially on the consumer side of this DeFi application, this financial product, we want to go launch it. How does this, you know, application, how does this product, how does it going to resonate in places in Asia as well as the US, as well as Europe as well as Latin America? Is it going to be built in a way that can be multilingual, that can be easily understandable, that will appeal to these different parts of the world? Or is it also true that this is a founder who understands how to reach types of customers? And that's really important as well. And so these are the types of things that we are focused on when we want to invest. But it's also true that we're seeing a lot of growth now in the US as it's become more acceptable here. And as we've seen, you know, tailwinds behind the administration and from a regulatory perspective. And so the idea is that, you know, crypto is really just different across

34:11regions in the way that user behavior is different across regions and the customers are different across regions. But so when you invest, you have to invest with the mindset and the understanding of how those customers behave in these different places of the world and how much adoption is taking places in those different places in the world. So that's the way we like to think through. Gracie, what would you say? Instead of Gracie, they actually just wrote out Gracie AI and asked my AI the same question, like how is crypto users differ from each other in terms of West and the East side of the market? Well, Gracie AI said there are few key differences for suddenly investment philosophy and time horizon, where Western users tend to have a longer term investment perspective. You crypto more as sort of value or portfolio diversification. Well, Eastern shows that in more trading or speculative behavior, second thing race appetite leverage use,

35:14third thing asset preference for regulatory mindset that that rough automation, fifth thing community and social influence. I find it interesting that sometimes I also forget how many interviews I've done in the last four years and how Gracie AI just collected all those information, which I actually agree. So to build on what Gracie AI shared, the real AI, sorry, the real Gracie, I would think before crypto, sorry, well, we were only doing crypto, the major difference that we saw, I very much allied with what Gracie AI was sharing. For example, some, you know, social fire or have to earn kind of gain-fight kind of activities were much more active in Asia. For example, we all know excellent affinity was highly, it was a very successful project at that time, where users came, most of the users came from Southeast Asia.

36:19And tap to earn telegram kind of era in end of 2024. We also saw a lot of users from Asia and even Africa. Tap to reach relatively easier, but of course, it's not that popular nowadays, especially with the introduction of AI. But basically, these kind of trends are quite obvious when we only serve crypto market. But now, adding the RWA markets or the unify, sorry, the universal exchange kind of version, in terms of RWA or track-fight assets, I kind of see at least the users who are trading RWA's, for example, tokenized stocks, beget whether they come from East or West doesn't make a huge difference. By default, our RWA especially tokenized the US stocks, do attract more Asian users than Western users, because Western users probably have already

37:24have very good access to some US-based brokers or European-based brokers, such as Robinhood. But many Asian clients, especially based in East Asia, some of them have very limited access due to capital control or due to the, it's hard to open the account, etc. So they tend to trade a lot of tokenized US stocks with us. But the trading behavior is a little bit similar in terms of the winner takes it all. The M7 stocks or some more ETF kind of stocks like QQQ are taking the major share of those trading, probably top 10 tokenized stocks and beget take about 80% of the total trading volume, although we provide more than 200 stocks to our users, for example. Yeah, so in terms of the RWA kind of asset classes, so far we don't see that much

38:28kind of difference in West and the East, but when there was only purely crypto users, I would say I agree, generally agree with what Grecia said, and it's probably a quite comprehensive and thorough coverage of how the two markets can be different. All right, so in a minute we're going to dive into what's hitting the crypto markets today, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Quick note before we continue with today's episode, Bits and Bips now has its own dedicated home. We're spinning off from Unchained and launching a standalone podcast and YouTube channel, focused on the Fed, macro, AI, and how it all collides with crypto. If you want to keep up with our weekly live streams and macro meets crypto breakdowns, make sure you're following Bits and Bips directly. We won't start publishing until March, but getting set up now means you'll be ready on day one. You can find the new Bits and Bips channels at UnchainedCrypto.com slash Bits and Bips. You can also find us by searching Bits and Bips on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

39:31Back to my conversation with Gracie and Rob. The U.S. and Israel have been engaging in war in Iran for a couple of weeks now, and we are now seeing the price of oil just shoot through the roof. And that's because the rate of hormones, which is where a fifth of the world's oil passes is closed. So, you know, a few days ago we saw oil trading or about a month ago, we saw trading in about $70. Earlier today, it spiked to past $110 a barrel. And I wondered, you know, do you think that crypto right now is just going to be at the whim of these macro trends? Or, you know, what do you see affecting the price of crypto? I don't think there's any doubt that macro is going to continue to play a big role in crypto, right? And this is true across all risk assets. It's unavoidable that, you know, this conflict in Iran and the Middle East is going to continue to drag on risk assets generally, right? There's, I think a broader conversation around, okay, well, what is your time horizon?

40:34And how do you think through, you know, the structural backdrop of, like, what is happening in crypto? And we talked a lot about this, you know, even through this podcast, which is, you know, okay, we'll stablecoin usage continues to grow very, very quickly and significantly, especially across a lot of institutional use cases, tokenized equities and tokenized rule assets continues to grow. We've seen a real excitement around, you know, getting, you know, kind of this regulatory backdrop in the West to be more conducive to using, you know, crypto in a much of different ways. And we're seeing just like mass adoption of, you know, like tokenized rails for a lot of these, you know, fintechs, etc. And so, like, when you put all that together, you in a lot of what Grace talked about with what bid gets doing really well, which is bringing this kind of everything exchange to the market and bringing more global, you know, that's a really exciting time for this space. But in the near term, you know, the Iranian conflict is going to be the most important topic that is that we continue to talk through, especially when you think about like knock on effects. So, you know, the price of oil,

41:38as you mentioned, right, you know, how does that affectable, you know, relative growth in GDP, how does that affect inflation, how does that affect, you know, the excess capital that, you know, households have the ability to continue to invest and, you know, consumer sentiment. All of those are going to be negatively infected by, you know, a sustained conflict in the Middle East. I think it's also, you know, it's not just the straight-of-the-mews, as you talked about, Laura, but, you know, we're seeing attacks on different oil refineries outside of the straight-of-the-mews. We're seeing, you know, 70% of the world's oil comes from the region, even though it doesn't pass to the straight, right? And so, we're going to continue to see concerns there. I think it's also just true that the risk of, you know, call it, you know, like the risk of terrorism has gone up in the U.S. as well, you know, based on this, we've seen, I think it was the Kansas City Airport, of St. Louis Airport, one of them was, had a risk of a terrorist attack over the weekend and had to be shut down, right? These types of things are broad, they're going to affect the consumer. And so, you know, those are shorter

42:43that this conflict is the, you know, more likely that the, that the markets can find their footing. But when you take that and do account with a little bit of what we talked about earlier, which is just all of this, I think just uncertainty around how AI is going to affect the market. And, you know, we saw a block, you know, lay off 40% of their, of their employees. And the Citerini Airport, a couple weeks ago, the market sold off quickly the day after. And nothing was literally just like science fiction. And, you know, but, you know, we still see this, a lot of this, you know, discomfort in the markets. And so, it's a bit of an odd time, but I think we have the right, you know, long-term understanding and the right long-term conviction. Like, both crypto and non-crypto risk assets are, I think, you know, very, very good backdrops for growth in what is happening in our market. It was happening in AI. And what is happening, you know, more broadly in technology. And so, I'm excited about the future, but it's short-term. It's really tough, I

43:44think, to be, you know, really long and any sort of asset, risk asset right now. Gracie, what do you think? Agree. I think right now, first of all, I would say, the tension in the middle is actually feels very, very personal to me, because we do have an office in Dubai. And I've been to all these places that was affected during the war, Bahrain, Dubai, Qatar. Actually, you name it just every single country. And then even in Dubai, all these places that were ahead, for example, three months ago, I was just walking on Jumeir Abich with my seven-year-old son and my mother. And we just passed the Fairmont hotel every day, admiring the palm tree and pool. And now the same hotel was hit from the head of head of head of fire at the courtyard, because of the debris from the

44:48intercepted missile. So the whole kind of instability or geopolitical tension feels extremely real. And of course, it's impacting the global market. And this directly affects how I invest in general, because right now, I would say, risk of sentiment and diversification is no longer just a buzzword. It's a necessity. You can't put all your faith in one region or one asset. And of course, for us, we are quite convinced that our users should diversify and they should look for different asset classes, not just crypto, and especially Bitcoin is more of a risky asset today than a risk off asset, but also diversifying to some other global asset classes, including commodity. And then back to Bitcoin itself, sorry, do you have a full-up question, Laura?

45:53No, well, I was going to ask about Kevin Warsh, but if you want to talk about Bitcoin specifically, please do. Okay, okay, sure, yeah. So for Bitcoin itself, I would say right now, your 60K to 70K kind of price range is actually a good time to do dollar cost averaging. And I do think everyone should have a personal goal for Bitcoin accumulation. You know, by one Bitcoin, if they just started off or 10 or 50 or 100, although Bitcoin wasn't outperforming gold last year, or right now, I do believe it, well, it is the millennial's digital gold and it is a pure capture or reflection of liquidity. So if, well, what can more on Warsh, but basically if the new Fed in terms of the monetary and physical policy, if we have more QE, quantitative easing and interest record, I think Bitcoin

46:55will catch up with gold, et cetera. So I personally believe, still highly believe in Bitcoin's growth trajectory. And I think it's worth the investment, especially if you have a relatively long time horizon, three to five years, et cetera. But if you're waiting for Bitcoin to just go up right away, a very short term, if you're very impatient, I would say it's probably a NSAC classes that will take a little bit time. Okay, so I handed out what my next question was going to be, but it was about Kevin Warsh and I just wondered, you know, how you thought he might kind of handle what the Fed will be doing this year and how you thought that would affect the outlook for the crypto markets. Honestly, I want our Rob to cover this question more because I think he knows the US market and he probably have some access to some some policymakers in deeper views than

48:01then I am, for sure. But my quick three cents would be, I feel the market has already priced in the fact that Warsh is a hawk and that that's probably the main reason that drove Bitcoin down from where it was 65k to where it is now 65k to 65k. That's a huge job. Of course, when liquidity was pretty weak after 10-10 last year, the largest single-day liquidation, the any kind of bad news could be pretty bad. But similarly, any kind of good news could be pretty good and the market could be quite volatile. But I don't have very strong opinion or anything sort of like insight on the new Fed chairperson other than what the market already knows.

49:07Yeah, so I think my take is a little more nuanced, which is because I think the market doesn't know what to make of Kevin Warsh right now. So he's a digress point. He's like very clearly a hawk and you know, the things that he says and the writings that he's put out the ways acted before. There was also a lot of conversation is Warsh was handpicked by President Trump and I think as all of us can kind of surmise over the last two terms of President Trump is what the thing he typically seems to care most about is loyalty and people who really want to try to enact his agenda very clearly. My opinion would be and I think a lot of people would share this that Jerome Powell is actually done a pretty tremendous job post 2021 and managing the ship. The Fed was a little bit late to the hiking cycle but it didn't a pretty good job during that period of

50:12time. And yet President Trump has been out there just lambasting Jerome Powell basically every chance that he gets. And so I think there's something to be said about well you know what has the conversation been like between you know, Kevin Warsh and President Trump and how might that affect the way that he actually does act you know going into you know post-being assuming that he's confirmed. That said the Iranian conflict like we just talked about has made this a tougher job than it previously was going to be especially for the sustains and we I think I saw over the weekend that Goldman is expecting based on how long this goes on that the inflation will go from 2.4% to 3% annualized. It goes on for longer and oil continues to be constrained inflation will go even higher and if that happens then it becomes significantly harder for for Kevin Warsh or any sort of Fed share to decide to cut rates. And so I think it's very it's very uncertain right

51:20now on what exactly will happen. I wouldn't lean more towards the path that their you know Kevin Warsh will want to work with the administration more than Jerome Powell wanted to and but in what that would probably entail would be more likelihood of a cut cycle that said you know now with what's happening in Iran I can't be confident what that will look like. All right so I did also want to ask you know we've been alluding to this throughout the conversation and I'm sure we all know that there are so many theories about this on Twitter lots of podcast about this but the market you know crypto hasn't been quite the same ever since 1010 and I wondered if you had thoughts on kind of like what broke that day or do you think it was just the typical four-year cycle and we're going to you know be in a bear market for a while you know I'm hearing other people say that they really think that this will be the year that proves that the four-year cycle is dead so yeah curious for I guess your thoughts on was it really 1010

52:24and if so then what will kind of fix things or what happened or is it just the typical cycle. I'll start since since 1010 kind of has a lot of issues to do with one of the CX especially the technical glitch there so in terms of 1010 what happened exactly we kind of all know already it was triggered by a sudden my macroeconomic event when Trump mentioned that that he will start a new trade war with China although that kind of cooled down later but then the the technical glitch that happened mainly on on on Binance caused a lot of issue when during by the way it was also a liquidity vacuum I would call because it was I think in Asia Saturday morning and then the US market is also closed so the the whole liquidity is very weak and it's mainly

53:31reflected on crypto since 20 crypto is a 24-7 market that was one of the major asset classes that was still open and then a lot of high leverage in CX or in in certain DeFi protocols went wrong especially I would highlight USDE but USDE was mainly having liquidity sorry the the so-called deep-hanging on Binance rather than DeFi platform I think herself tweeted a lot on that clarification which I totally agree but other than USDE there were some you know BWBEs or BNSO which I wrapped version of Solana and Ethereum that that were highly de-packed from the original asset Solana or Ethereum and that caused some some more liquidity and then all coins were done so so that was probably the the main things that happened on 1010 or 1011 depends on your time zone but I would

54:37call it a series of things that triggered together triggered by the macro economic event together with the high leverage structure liquidity vacuum technical glitch on certain CX etc so it's not just one thing happened but yes the whole world looks very different from after 1010 maybe the high level point to make which is everything great said is true there's I guess two points to make first is I think on a more micro perspective just how much it matters to be able to do appropriate risk management and to think through how you know your Oracle setup what that looks like and you know to make sure that you're able to appropriately you know make redeem different types of wrapped assets and bring them on platform and you know etc and so we've seen you know obviously there was some infrastructure and risk management issues at some of these places as Gracie mentioned

55:38I think the higher level point to make and you know the fact that we looked so different today than we did before then is it's not clear to a lot of people from the outside in but 2025 was awful a year for the consumer in crypto it was the we've probably never seen so much capital lost by the traditional consumer in the year as we did as in 2025 at a time when we saw institutional adoption picking up when we saw stablecoin adoption picking up when there's a lot of excitement around you know what was happening you know in the space in terms of allowing it to enter the US market between you know what happened with the Trump and Melania meme coin what happened with the liquidations around the tariff tantrum and then what happened on 1010 we saw more capital liquidated last year than we had seen basically in the entirety of crypto before and so it's been it's really hard to go to a consumer and say hey we know that you've lost a bunch of money

56:42you know in derivative products on on this in this space but you know you need to trust us and come back and to continue to invest and so we have to as an industry do a good job of you know explaining why people should continue to invest in this space and this is obviously a trading point versus a hey I have like a long term buy and hold perspective on like what you know Bitcoin accumulation means and the dollar debatement story and digital gold and we need to continue to make those points but when the consumer loses money they don't come back and you know you see the that's the thing that we have to think through around how do we get provide value to the consumer that isn't just you know trading capital that may or may not get you know I have them lose money over time and you know I think this is something we've seen like Robinhood do really well right which is a lot of the criticism of Robinhood for many many years was hey like this is just a you know gamifying you know gambling right under speculation right and you know something like 70% of options

57:45traded day or zero day options a lot of that is the these retail bases in places like Robinhood which are more speculative products but what have they done as done well on the side of that is they provided you know a really broad set of now wealth management products and spending products for consumers that now see Robinhood as a place for their financial future and now they can invest in across different asset classes right and that gets back to how this podcast started which is you know what is big at doing when they're they're launching their kind of unified exchange is they're providing universal exchange universal change that they're allowed to they're able to do all of these different things that affect their financial lives and that are allowed that are providing value to them and so I think that we have to continue as an industry to focus on that versus you know just like this speculative you know trading products so earlier we also talked about the cuts new AI agent hub and you know given the state of the markets and I agree with you Rob that like when you

58:45have 19 billion dollars in liquidations like people literally don't even have the money to come back in you know so that might just be what's also going on in crypto but when I look at the AI agent that's kind of the one area where I'm like well that could pick up because I've heard Gracie talk about before how she thinks all coins are just dead like she doesn't think there's going to be an all coin season coming and so you know that typical trend that we would see of all coins kind of having their season after the majors take off like it didn't happen this cycle if they not happen again I don't know but when I look at the AI agent thing that is kind of the one area where I'm like well this this is clearly something new that's blossoming in crypto you know I don't know do you think that we might see that materially impact the markets at any time soon and if so like in what way okay I just quickly built on what Laura mentioned around my very bold statement

59:48about all coins at that yeah of course it sounds a little bit strange especially as a CEO of one of the largest UEX or CEX crypto or all coins are the foundation of our business saying they are dead is a little bit too much I would say but by my point is in general investing in all coins it's a leverage a leverage it's harder to outperform Bitcoin still there will be a lot of all coins that has a growth opportunities they are seriously building on something a drag of actually make a lot of investment into those those space as well and then in terms of AI plus crypto kind of all coins I do I just struggle with this actually a year ago I made a prediction in January that with the development development of AI that those AI all coins could be a growth sector

1:00:52and even could be the only growth sector I was only half right about that AI is growing very very fast but the AI all coins are not if we compare for example coin gecko AI sector kind of all the all coins market cap it's only half an end of the year then the beginning of the year in 2025 so that kind of ties back to when I said all coins are dead it's very hard for for all coins to to grow in terms of in terms of the market share Bitcoin is becoming more and more dominant if you look at the total total market cap and then there are so many all coins coming up every day especially with platforms like pomterfong it's so easy to each one token an all coin token so with the market total size being same or even shrinking since Bitcoin is more dominating investitution as our institutional kind of adoption only go to the major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Ethereum

1:01:56the market of all coins is shrinking but the the quantity of the all coins is growing so each individual all coins just by mathematics itself should be shrinking and that's what I mean by all coins are dead or or it's harder to invest but now with AI I think again nobody will doubt the trend of AI but I still doubt the trend of AI tokens or AI all coins whether first of all many very good AI products you know like opal claw like open AI they are not issuing a token and then many so-called AI projects or AI offerings are not really doing a good job in terms of providing their AI services so that's what I struggle and I still remain very relatively negative towards but one sector that I am optimistic is we we touched upon that earlier in terms of

1:02:59how AI agents kind of communication in growth can enable more cross across agent transfer using stable coins or using cryptocurrency so that is a sector that I'm optimistic but if we're talking about some you know some projects that claims that they're building AI the AI tool AI agent to me many of them look more like just some coin just an AI meme sorry if this kind of provokes some some arguments around our coins around some projects who are really building I do again think that many good projects who are seriously building but it's just harder and harder to find them out you know the only thing I would add is I don't think all coins are dead as a rule what I do think is true is that they're more than ever there needs to be some story around why a token needs to exist how to cruise value and is this a protocol that's you know or a token attached

1:04:04to a protocol that's actually you know worth owning over time there's you know for a long period of time and we've seen this in traditional markets there's you know you shareholders care about how do you return capital is their dividends are there you know buybacks like what does that look like in terms of you know creating excess value for you know that shareholder what ownership do I have with this company or over time and I think it's very important that we get some version of a market structure bill that allows for more innovation at the token economic level and the token structure level which allows you know investors to feel better about what they're actually buying and this has really been underpinned I think by the fact that you've seen a couple of these M&H transactions circle buying Axelar and the I think it was Coinbase who bought the the vector dot fund team or tensor team where there was some capital that went to equity holders into the team but the token holders basically got nothing and that really underpins this idea that you know some of

1:05:06these tokens exist maybe just as mean coins attached to maybe a really good business or product but the tokens themselves just are are mean points and so what what we want to see is we want to continue to see you know more innovation at that kind of token structure level and then when you see that you'll see people more excited about owning certain types of tokens and certain types of markets and we're going to continue to see dispersion across you know the way some of these different tokens you know crew value or not and what performs well or not in 21 and 22 you used to see everything go up and everything go down together that the sign of a maturing market is that that is no longer happening that now that there is actual dispersion between the things that work and the things that don't and so that's a good thing for us even though I think it makes it harder than ever to invest in the space. All right well it has been so fun chatting with you both thank you both so much for coming on on chain thanks Laura thank you