And yet it seems like tacitly, implicitly Circle, by complying with these regulations, is sort of moving to become sort of the de facto central bank digital currency of the United States, and I'm curious your thoughts on that, if you think there's any truth to that, and what sort of the risks are if we move towards, like, a centralized system for, for stablecoins as opposed to a more open permissionless system where there's a lot of competition and options, and just what that looks like in your mind.

Sure.

Uh, we could write many, many books on this subject you've just outlined, so I'll, I'm gonna try to, to synthesize it.

Uh, so directly to answer your question, uh, no, I don't think Circle is becoming a de facto central bank digital currency.

Uh, there's no chance of that.

The, uh, as you remember, just going back a few years, there was so much, uh, uh, momentum towards this idea that the US would launch a central bank digital currency, and then it stalled.

And the reason it stalled was, um, probably more to do with marketing than with reality.

What is the big unlock that you see that would come for the economy overall if the CLARITY Act came into place, and like, you know, what does that look like as that starts to play out and we move more towards tokenized fiat, tokenized everything? [laughs]

And it is the fruition of what you've said on our show that Genius Act would do in one way or another, which is give all these companies the means to make their own money.

Yep.

Yep.

Um, so let me take a different...

The, the obvious benefit is, um, you're not funding either Tether or, or Circle.

Uh, you're, you're...

If you're a company, a- an exchange or like a Stripe, a payment processor, you are, um, uh, getting...

Mm-hmm.

Going back to that idea of, you know, building out and, and if people are looking at setting up ideas and businesses now, that infrastructure layer, can you talk to what you see around that with AI and crypto and the, and the, the overlap between them, or agents and crypto rather?

Yeah.

There's a lot there.

Uh, so I'll, uh, I'll just say that, um, very few companies will ever use blockchain to, uh, record settlements I don't think.

Uh, if they do it'll be a private, privately managed blockchain.

Uh, where while it's a very good use of a blockchain, I don't think most companies believe they need it.

Um, and I would...

But in this world and backdrop of- of a lot of change at the moment and, you know, with lots of volatility as well, what- what are good solid core skills and- and perspectives for young people to- to embrace at this point in time?

Yeah.

Lots of things people like to, uh, collect.

Uh, they will all benefit from tokenization.

And, uh, you know, probably worth, worth people understanding, we can't spend, uh, that much time here, but understanding what tokenization is.

It's a lot more than just, uh, getting a digital version.

It's a digital version that also has these amazing properties which cause that, that, uh, asset to be, uh, instantly recognizable as the genuine article without anybody putting out any effort, and generally at virtually zero cost.

So that's what makes having a tokenized asset better than an old traditional digital asset, where you couldn't verify whether or not it was the genuine thing.

Mm-hmm

Yeah, kind of why, you know, why it was kind of stunted, so to speak, not your typical bull market where Bitcoin saw a parabolic move, right, a parabola on the chart, altcoins having a true altcoin season.

Yeah.

Well, I will also tell your audience, I know nothing more than you guys do.

I really mean that.

I spend all day, I've done this for many years, and I don't know a lot more than other people.

I make educated guesses.

Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong.

Tell us a bit about your thoughts about what's been happening being built by Tether and where they're at now?

In fact, we were the first major project to release on atomic assets back in 2020. and we released i think 10 different series all but the last one completely sold out and i miss the good old days of of pack rip and um wax seems to be languishing right now and there's so many alternatives in the nft space i know you are probably optimistic about the future but why don't you kind of tell us what happened to to wax and how are you guys working to rebuild for the future so that it's still a destination for people to create nfts amongst other things

yeah i'd say uh you're right i mean wax really invented the concept of this consumer mass market uh nft phenomenon in 2020 when we did uh uh the tops uh you know the baseball card uh company We did a Topps drop with Garbage Pail Kids, that kind of 1980s brand.

And I remember hearing that the Topps people who were, you know, they knew nothing about blockchain.

I said, most people didn't.

And they thought it was digital.

And I'm like, it's not digital.

It's tokenized.

Uh, dumb Travis on that one.