Yeah,

no, I agree with all of that.

And just to emphasize one thing that Scott said, I think it's hard to estimate correctly over or under how long it takes for institutions to really understand this stuff and want to adopt it.

And I also think It's important to realize, you know, we spend all of our time in crypto, but this is still very early.

And I think there really wasn't a product category that most serious institutions wanted to adopt because a lot of what the industry was building was the sort of early idea of DeFi, decentralized finance, which has at its core the premise of disintermediation.

So what the industry was saying to these institutions was, we don't need you.

We're going to replace you with code.

It's about improving our business and ultimately adopting this technology.

I'm sorry, I did not mean to frame it like that.

No, no, totally.

So look, I'm a lawyer and I spent a number of years as outside counsel representing companies on a number of different regulatory compliance matters and spent a lot of time working on financial services and was just struck by crypto, honestly, as a personal passion.

I really felt that.

This was a technology that solved so many of the problems that I saw in the financial system.

So jumped into the industry full time as general counsel at Compound Labs, feeling like DeFi was the most exciting thing happening in the industry and wanting to help someone build one of these projects in the right way.

And I had a great experience, but learned very quickly that the laws and regulations just don't make sense for this technology.

Then on the front of Hyperliquid, more broadly, what do you think is the ultimate outcome for Hyperliquid Policy Center, Hyperliquid as a product platform, and then like the future of financial markets?

I'm sorry, I did not mean to frame it like that.

No, no, totally.

So look, I'm a lawyer and I spent a number of years as outside counsel representing companies on a number of different regulatory compliance matters and spent a lot of time working on financial services and was just struck by crypto, honestly, as a personal passion.

I really felt that.

This was a technology that solved so many of the problems that I saw in the financial system.

So jumped into the industry full time as general counsel at Compound Labs, feeling like DeFi was the most exciting thing happening in the industry and wanting to help someone build one of these projects in the right way.

And I had a great experience, but learned very quickly that the laws and regulations just don't make sense for this technology.

Then on the front of Hyperliquid, more broadly, what do you think is the ultimate outcome for Hyperliquid Policy Center, Hyperliquid as a product platform, and then like the future of financial markets?

Walk us through the last six to 12 months of the Hyperliquid Policy Center and your transition into being the

CEO.

It's been a long road.

It's funny that you go all the way back to the ICO days.

I feel like we've been doing this work for so long.

To me, Hyperliquid really is the next generation, the next phase of of what we in this industry are trying to build.

And so I have committed my career really to trying to figure out how we navigate the bleeding edge of law and technology.

Can you just help us get to the fact of the matter here? What is the path to bring perps onshore to the U.S.? How would you see this playing out?

But, you know, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on whether or not crypto perps are like a fundamentally different product from these real world asset perps or if you think they can be covered by the same rules.

Well, I guess I'll start.

I don't think there's anything unique about the underlying asset of any derivative that should change how the derivative is regulated.

And I think it is absolutely true that one reason we're talking about perpetuals now is because they have proven to be an extremely useful tool for hedgers and speculators outside of the crypto markets.

Granted, perpetuals were in some ways an innovation of crypto because they became popular because of crypto exchanges offering them for the first time.

But perpetuals are in so many ways just a better derivative for many use cases.

They don't have fragmented liquidity across many expiration dates, so they have much deeper liquidity.

And I know, like I said, it's a big question, but even in broad strokes, if each of you want to take a stab at that.

Where, where are things at with rulemaking when it comes to perps?

In progress, and I, I, I think we have to divide this into two different categories.

The first being perps that trade on already registered traditional centralized exchanges, and then separately perps that trade in DeFi protocols or through on-chain financial infrastructure like Hyperliquid.

And on the centralized perp side, I think that the CFTC is very constructive on providing guidance so that it's clear when and how a DCM can list a perp and allow it to trade in a retail-facing environment.

We've heard Chairman Selig speak at a couple of different public events where he's explained that he understands the benefits of perps and that they should be tradable on a DCM.

He describes them as perpetual futures in that context.

And so I think it's likely and, and certainly something that would be beneficial for the market and for the country for the CFTC to come out with some guidance based on what Chairman Selig has said publicly.

Because those-- I mean, that to me is a really important question that we're gonna need to sort out.

What's it going to take for US people to be able to interact with hyperliquid? It's a great question.

I think it requires rulemaking first from the CFTC and then potentially from the SEC as well.

And without giving you all the nuance of the legal issues, as I mentioned, the Commodity Exchange Act requires at this moment derivatives for the most part to trade on centralized exchanges that can register as a designated contract market, which no DeFi protocol can do.

So for starters, what we need to do is for the CFTC to write new rules that apply to on-chain markets that essentially say, here are all the risks that we were trying to address with the rules that are imposed on DCMs when they go into register.

Here is how we can address the same underlying risks in a decentralized environment without having that same type of registration.

The goal is not let's just take on risk that we didn't want to take on before because it's too bad and the opportunity in DeFi is just too great.

That's not the argument.

Coinbase has stirred up the pot in many ways and, you know, does that worry you like obviously there's a lot of um willingness from this administration night and day from prior administration um two questions one like is the clarity act uh like are we exhausting some sort of goodwill by like not passing that or making it more difficult in your conversation with regulators like are they more like, are they losing patience? And the second question is, what happens after this administration? Because there's a lot of talk around, hey, look, if you have a different administration, maybe a different party, are they going to try to unwind the or just go back to the prior model? Is that possible? How do you see that risk in the case where you have a very different administration?