In this episode, Chris Perkins from CoinFund and Brian Rudick from Upexi join Ram Ahluwalia and Steven Ehrlich for an in-depth discussion, analyzing why certain DATs (Digital Asset Treasuries) might be more suitable for some investors than traditional ETFs (Exchange-Traded Funds), decoding how the mathematical logic behind premiums supports bullish perspectives, and exploring what kind of investment vehicles can truly stand out.

The episode also examines whether the current moment represents a genuine altcoin season or merely a false signal, discusses the significance of Galaxy launching tokenized stocks on Solana, and explores a key unlock point proposed by Perkins that could potentially revolutionize the market landscape. 

Guests: Christopher Perkins, Managing Partner and President of CoinFund; Brian Rudick, Chief Strategy Officer of Upexi

Hosts: Ram Ahluwalia, CFA, CEO and Founder of Lumida; Steve Ehrlich, Executive Editor of Unchained

Source: Unchained

When: September 5, 2025

Original Title: Bits + Bips: Think the DAT Trend Is Over? It May Have Only Just Begun

Key Takeaways:

• Chris Perkins: "This is the summer of DATs. 2021 was DeFi summer - this is where DATs came on the scene and established themselves as a core innovation."

• DATs can compound shareholder value through premium equity issuances in ways that direct token ownership cannot.

• Proof-of-stake tokens with higher yields and smaller market caps may support higher DAT valuations.

• Clear regulations will force big tech/finance into crypto, potentially creating one of the biggest altcoin booms ever.

• True on-chain equity issuance (not just tokenized representations) could revolutionize capital markets and force traditional finance onto blockchains.

Opening

Steve Ehrlich (Host): Hi everyone, welcome to Bits and Bips, exploring how crypto and macro collide, one basis point at a time. I'm your host Steve Ehrlich, high scribe of the Unchained Kingdom, and I'm here with Ram Ahluwalia, maestro of wealth, leader of Lumida.

Ram Ahluwalia (Co-host): Let's go!

Steve: And we have two special guests. First one is actually a repeat guest - Chris Perkins, the golden hand of CoinFund. So welcome Chris.

Chris Perkins (Guest): Hey thanks Steve, good to see you. I always like when people blush with a Game of Thrones nickname.

Steve: Brian, wait till you see what we have for you. And then we're also here with Brian Rudick, guardian of the Solana crown at Upexi.

Brian Rudick (Guest): Very nice, thank you so much for having me.

Steve: Yeah, no problem. You can thank ChatGPT for those wonderful nicknames.

Guest Introductions

Steve: Brian, why don't you just take a second to introduce yourself and your firm since it's your first time on the show?

Brian: Yes, thank you very much. I'm Brian Rudick, I'm the chief strategy officer of Upexi. We are one of the largest Solana treasury companies, and we were actually a first mover in the space. So we did the first large-scale equity PIPE to create an altcoin treasury company. We also did the first in-kind convertible note to raise additional funds. We have about $400 million in Solana.

Prior to this, I led the research effort for GSR, one of the largest digital asset trading firms, for four and a half years. Before that, I spent a decade on Wall Street, mostly managing a book of bank stocks, always in a long-short construct for firms like Citadel, Balyasny, Millennium. I mentioned that because DATs are just banks, and that's what got me really interested in this and allowed me to really internalize where all the value creation for shareholders comes from for DATs.

Steve: Wow, that's quite the provocative statement there.

Brian: Yeah, we could certainly get into it.

Steve: And before we do, Chris, I know you've been on the show before, but just in case there are some new listeners, why don't you just briefly introduce yourself and your firm as well?

Chris: Yeah, I'm Chris Perkins, president of CoinFund, one of the managing partners here. We're early-stage investors with seed, venture, and liquid strategies. We've been around for 10 years. My background was also in traditional finance. I actually started as a US Marine, was in Iraq, came back and had a career both at Lehman - so blown up in Iraq, blown up at Lehman - and then I went to Citigroup prior to joining CoinFund four years ago.

Market Recap and September Outlook

Steve: Alright great. So it's been a couple weeks since we hosted the show due to summer holidays and some other things. So Ram, why don't you start - just give us a quick recap of the month and sort of your take on what's happening so far. Historically, I think most people listening here know that September does not tend to treat Bitcoin and crypto very well. Is there reason for hope this time around?

Ram: Right, well that's where we left off, I believe, on the last show I was on - discussing just the negative seasonality around Bitcoin and shared that I thought Bitcoin would struggle to get above $65K due to that and some other factors. You had a lot of enthusiasm around the passage of the FIT21 Act, stablecoin bill, and after that it's hard for markets to see forward through that.

You're also seeing just a softness in what I call animal spirits. So high momentum names that retail traders love have just been weaker, which generally also happens this time of year. So I think that's part of what happened the last year and the year before that too.

The Clarity Act is something to stay focused on - maybe we'll touch on that soon. I doubt it gets passed in the first attempt, just like the current stablecoin bill as well.

There are some concerns around Bitcoin and the four-year cycle, which for those that follow the cycle says that Bitcoin tops in November. Some people say the cycle's over - I don't think that's the case for where we are now. So when people are excited, I was pessimistic; people getting pessimistic, I'm getting a little more cheery. So we're kind of in no man's land though.

I believe those were the highlights. I think one thing else I'd share is that several of these DATs are just not performing well. We have DAT exhaustion, there's too many DATs, it's a bubble in DATs. We've been talking about this bubble in DATs for a while. When Wall Street sells too much product, be cautious.

My view is that you have one leading DAT per asset class - they're calling it "Coke and Pepsi." Maybe there's a Pepsi if you have a Coke, and then no one cares about number three. Some of these are trading below NAV.

Michael Saylor obviously leads MicroStrategy - or "Strategy" which they called it now. Changed the rules governing when they buy Bitcoin. I think that helped spoil the market in a certain way. The whole thesis around Bitcoin is like immutability, and you just change the rules, and then he changed them back. You change them back - like that doesn't help. Can't change things, but he had to change things. So these concepts are being tested.

DAT Performance and Market Dynamics

Steve: Okay, so yeah, let's talk about that since we have, I guess maybe our first DAT representative on the show. I mean Brian, Upexi was very early into the Solana treasury game. Talk about what the last couple weeks have been like for you.

Brian: I'd say not much has really changed. So for us, we're really focused on what we can control. For any DAT, that's really two things:

One is you want to be as visible as possible, so you want to maximize people actually knowing about you. So if they think about "hey I want to invest in Solana, maybe a DAT is the best way to do it," they think about Upexi. And so we announced this morning that we're at three different traditional finance conferences later this month. I'll be disappointed if our pace doesn't pick up over the rest of the year, and so we're really hyper-focused on increasing our visibility. We have a bunch of other initiatives afoot there.

And then the second component is issuing equity. When you issue equity above book, it is by definition accretive for shareholders. MSTR is selling at 2 times - they've come in a little bit - but it's tantamount to selling $1 for $2 or buying Bitcoin half off. And this is how they created literally $26 billion worth of free Bitcoin for shareholders over the last 6 quarters.

We're very focused on figuring out what we can do there. We have an equity line that we're hopeful will go effective very soon, and then we're always out in the market - and this is not M&A, it's the business model of a DAT - to raise capital in an accretive fashion. So we're looking at all options in order to do so.

Steve: Okay, and Chris, your thoughts?

Chris: I think Ram's too negative. If you step back, this is the summer of DATs. 2021 was DeFi summer - this is where DATs came on the scene and established themselves as a core innovation. And a lot of that unlock was frankly regulatory. Saylor proved it, and now we've got this regulatory unlock.

Now I'll agree with Ram there's a ton of froth. However, I believe, probably like Brian here, that DATs are going to emerge as a fundamental part of market structure within crypto, public-facing.

But this has been a major innovation, and the reason why not all of them have been successful is because it's really, really hard to pull it off. And we've been very, very active in the space.

To make a DAT work, you need about five elements:

1. Market timing has to be right - the market has to be ready for you

2. You need good fundamentals on your token

3. Foundation alignment really helps

4. You need really good advisors, bankers who know what they're doing, top-notch

5. You need a strong management team, good asset managers who know how to manage those underlying assets and drive that yield

And then perhaps most of all, you need a KOL - you need someone who can tell the story and who can translate. These DATs are beautiful convergence innovations - they bring it all together. I think they're here to stay. Yes, there's gonna be a shakeout, but the winners are gonna be really, really special things to watch, and we're very excited.

And by the way, I don't think we're at the end of this - I think we're at the very beginning. I think there's some amazing projects that are still coming out, and yeah, we remain really excited.

Solana vs Ethereum DATs

Steve: Brian, one of the interesting trends that came out when DATs first came to prominence, I guess post-Saylor, was the fact that the first companies to follow were focused on Solana, not ETH. And it was you guys, it was Sol Strategies, and it was Defiance Development Corp, I believe - I always get that last name confused.

But now I mean ETH recently hit an all-time high, and ETH treasury companies are raising billions, and Solana is all of a sudden in certain ways maybe the little brother to Ethereum again. What is it like for you right now? Because I'm sure when you're fundraising, investors are asking about the differences between Solana and Ethereum - they both can generate passive yield. What are some of the hard questions that you're getting in some of these meetings, and what are your responses to them?

Brian: Yeah, that is a great question. I would say that candidly, the knowledge in TradFi is quite low. So the most common question I get is like "what's the difference between Bitcoin and Solana?" - not even like "what's the difference between Ethereum and Solana?"

Steve: I thought we were past that.

Brian: Yeah. I mean there are some folks that have some sort of background in crypto or digital assets and will start to ask hard questions, but nobody's asking me about like "when is Solana gonna implement multiple concurrent leaders?" - like that type of thing.

I still think that there are some folks that don't truly buy into the value creation from a DAT. Like for me, it's really about having access to these value accrual mechanisms that, by the way, all compound.

So the big one is issuing equity above book value, which you can do either via an ATM or an equity line, or even if you go to any sort of convertible note issuance. Most options pricing models will have a really high delta there and will suggest there's a 90% plus chance of these things converting into equity because the duration of these notes are so long and the volatility of the underlying is so high.

So that is another way for DATs to actually sell equity at an even higher NAV than where they're currently priced. And so that to me is the big one. This is where MicroStrategy has created so much value for shareholders - it's more than tripled the return of Bitcoin, and it has barely any leverage.

But the second thing is when you get into pre-mine tokens or you get into tokens that are built on a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, you can do things like staking where Upexi is staking to earn an 8%+ yield, turning our treasury into this productive asset. And we're also buying locked tokens at a 15% discount. If you put that discount into any sort of yield equivalent, we're roughly doubling the staking yield on anything that we buy in locked form.

And we have this buy-and-hold strategy - we don't intend to sell any SOL - so there's no reason for us not to do that. And so these additional value accrual mechanisms are things you can't get by buying a token natively or in other instruments like an ETF. And so I think a lot of this is investor education and just walking them through how powerful this model can actually be when you're underpinned by the right token.

DATs as Banks - Business Model Explanation

Steve: Can you elaborate on the statement you had at the outset around "DATs are banks"? Like banks are FDIC insured, they can rehypothecate, they have a lender of last resort. What were you getting at there?

Brian: Yeah, this is a massive simplification, but banks earn spread income - they raise funds from depositors, they lend to borrowers, and they make the difference between the yield on loans and their cost of deposits. And then also a massive simplification, but investors will basically present value all of that future spread income and add it to book value. Banks generally trade above book value.

They don't really issue equity because it's hard to come by loan growth, but there are historically some banks like MNT that had just issued equity again and again because they traded at this premium multiple and they used it for this roll-up strategy. And they just basically - it's more of a BDC, I would say.

Steve: BDC?

Brian: Business Development Company - like a private credit fund that's publicly traded. They make loans, they earn spread, they've got some back leverage, they're trying to capture that spread, and we're kind of the same way.

So we raise funds from the capital markets, we invest into Solana, we earn the difference between the return on SOL and our cost of capital. When the market thinks that the return on SOL will outpace our cost of capital - that spread will be positive not just this year but in future years - they will present value that, add it to the NAV, and that will work out to be something that's above 1 that we can then monetize for shareholders.

Steve: Got it.

Education vs Marketing Debate

Chris: It's hard to underscore the importance of this education right now. We have these DATs running around to all the traditional long-only investors and explaining what Solana means, how it's a yielding asset. Like that education is just so good for the asset class, and I mean I think that's probably the biggest benefit to the ecosystem of what we're seeing here.

Steve: Is it education or marketing/promotion?

Chris: It's both. When we first started, there were a lot of questions as to whether this was just a money grab and whether DATs were this existential threat to the token ecosystems they're underpinned by because you could be a forced seller at exactly the wrong time.

Then I think folks have seen Ethereum's success, and Tom Lee is on CNBC every other day, and in my opinion, this is what lifted ETH from $2,700 to $4,700.

Brian: Yeah, so I think now there's this big focus by a lot of other token ecosystems to really embrace and push DATs forward just as another key visibility mechanism to get them out there, especially to traditional investors.

DAT Saturation and Competition

Ram: There's so many DATs, you know. Like I wonder if you were to poll someone on Twitter and say "can you name 8 tickers for DATs?" I don't think anyone could. I know Chris could, I know Brian could. It's like I think about the dad who has like eight kids - I struggle with three kids' names, I call one by the other name.

People know MSTR for sure - it took years to build that brand awareness. It literally comes down to these things like how many elements can the human mind recall, and you're competing for those slots in the context of other tickers. It is the attention game, it's not just the product game, which is where Brian and Chris, you were focused on - the value creation machine and the financing machine and the staking yield packaging machine, etc. Like there are not enough slots in the human mind for all these players to succeed and thrive.

Steve: What do we make though - I mean the attention game - I mean Tom Lee and Bitwise, their NAV is I think 1.1 now and it's been dropping. What do you guys make of that?

Brian: So I haven't been super close on other ecosystems, but my impression is that Bitcoin has kind of become saturated. I think you're seeing some like Semler and SQQQ that are trading at like 0.7, 0.8 of NAV. I don't think that Ethereum is saturated, but I think it is a bit of a race.

And so I think you're seeing some of the players in there sell equity all the way down to 1 times, whereas you had someone like MicroStrategy that when they were the only game in town, they would only really sell via their ATM when they were at 1.6, 1.7 or higher.

So I think all that selling pressure out there - and I see why they're doing it, they want to be the biggest because whoever's the biggest gets the most trading volumes, and then you can issue the most equity via the ATM because that's what you're kind of limited by.

So that, in my opinion, is what is happening out there in the other token ecosystems. I do think that Solana has the highest staking yield, you can buy locked tokens at this discount for built-in gains for shareholders, and so I do think there's some argument for a Solana DAT to trade at this higher NAV versus some others. And so far that is proving to be true.

But again, I mean it's out there in the public news - there are other Solana DATs coming, so we'll see if that does anything to the NAVs either way.

Investment Strategy: Spot vs DAT

Steve: You're at 1.7 right now, I was just checking your website. Chris, in your view, what's the better move - like is it better to own spot commodity or own the DAT? If I look at Ethereum, like Ethereum's got a bit of a forced bid from these DATs, so it's an accumulation bid. And if you're a DAT, you're issuing shares - that's called dilution, that's sell pressure. Isn't the simple idea just buy what people are forced to buy? Keep it simple.

Chris: Okay, so it's still super early as we get into a lot of the DATs, and I'll give you an example. Last week we put together a letter to the SEC and FASB because LSTs - liquid staking tokens - were considered intangible assets. And so we still need to have a lot of things to come together. A lot of these DATs are only getting the machine running right now. I saw that one of our portfolio companies, Ether.fi, benefited from Ethena putting some ETH to work there, so it's very early.

But when you step back, let's look at ETH as an example because there's a little more complexity around the ETF. You can invest in the ETF, you can invest in spot. For a lot of investors, they can't touch spot - that's off the table. That brings them to the ETF.

But the ETF - they can't generate yield because there's a lot of constraints around daily liquidity. With ETFs, you have a T+3 unbonding window, you can't just stake. Eventually they'll figure it out and you'll have a total return product, but it is an inferior product - no offense to the ETF issuers - but it is, because you don't get that yield. And that's core to the investment if you're a long-term investor - you want that yield.

Okay, so that brings you to the DAT. The DAT has that wrapper like the ETF that you can buy on your brokerage account very easily and very accessibly. It gives you greater access to the yield of the underlying product. So in a sense, it's a better product because you can't touch spot because you're a traditional player - you're not allowed to, it's not part of your investment authorizations. It's a little bit better than the ETF.

So that brings you to the DAT. And now, at the same time, maybe someday a total return ETH product will emerge. So maybe you have a little bit of lack of transparency. I think the DATs are trying to say "wait a second, we're going to differentiate through transparency - this is what we're doing with the assets." And that's the game - is to give investors not just access to the asset, but to everything you can do with that asset, leveraging DeFi and everything else. That's the investment case in a wrapper that they understand and in a wrapper that they're allowed to deploy.

Oh, by the way, you open up the entirety of US equity capital markets. You can eventually - I mean it's no different than any other equity - you take it to your prime brokerage account, you can get leverage, and you can use all the other things that you use equities for as collateral, etc. going forward. So that's the case for this instrument.

You're right, Ram, there's plenty of froth. I talked about the elements - they all have to come together, it's super hard. It sounds like Brian's got it figured out, but that's the case.

The Power of Accretive Math

Brian: The one thing that I would just plus-one on is I really do think that people haven't fully internalized just how powerful this accretion is and compounding NAV over time. And so here is the math - and these multiples have come down, but these are the numbers that are fresh in my head.

So say I want to start a DAT to buy Solana, and let's say all the comps are trading at 5 times. So I raise $100 from Steve, I give Steve 100 shares. He now owns 100 shares worth $1 each. My DAT is holding $100. I now convert that USD into Solana, and because now I hold $100 worth of SOL, I achieve this premium multiple, and now peers are all trading at a 5 times NAV. Now my company has a $500 market cap, and Steve owns 100 shares worth $5 each.

Here's where the accretion comes in: I now want to go raise another $100, but because I'm trading at $5 a share, I actually only need to issue 20 shares. So I go out to the market, I sell 20 shares at $5 each, I get another $100. I convert that into Solana, it takes on another $500 market cap, and now it's a $1,000 company.

Steve has actually been diluted, so he owns 100 out of 120 shares, or roughly 85%. But now he owns 85% of a $1,000 company, and he just saw his investment move from $500 to $850 via one accretive issuance.

So my point is just this accretion math is so powerful, and you can trade at this premium that you could just use it to continually compound NAV. And as long as your multiple holds, your share price should move up commensurately.

The second thing is I personally feel, once we get past this wave of supply, that MSTR should be the floor in terms of NAV. They're trading at like 1.6 right now. I say that because there should be some sort of embedded growth premium for a smaller company. Like if we issue $100 million of equity at 2 times, it's going to be very nicely accretive for us, whereas if MSTR issues $100 million of equity at any multiple, it's not going to move the needle because they're so big.

So there should be this embedded growth premium for us. Similarly, when you are underpinned by a much smaller token, all else equal, there's more potential upside. So SOL is literally 4% the market cap of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is unlikely to 5x from here over any reasonable time period - it's the 5th largest asset in the world - whereas Solana has a lot more potential upside, all else equal.

So there should be more embedded growth premium there, and then access to these additional value accrual mechanisms that you don't get with MSTR via things like staking and buying locked tokens at a discount.

So for all those reasons, I kind of think when things shake out, at least I'm very hopeful that other DATs will end up trading at a premium to wherever MicroStrategy is based on market conditions. But that's at least how I think about multiples.

Steve: If you're able to take on meme-like properties in the process of driving these fundamentals, even bigger things could happen.

Brian: Oh yes, and let's be honest, this is a phenomenon we witnessed in crypto, we witnessed in equities as well. And that's the other thing to be mindful of.

Ram: Well, the whole goal is for these things to become a meme. Not all of them can - this is like a Highlander game, there could only be one. That's the nature of memes. You've got Palantir, you know Tesla was a meme, but you can't have them all be memes. That's my view.

High vs Low Market Cap to NAV Strategy

Steve: Now here's also a question for you - I think I have an answer as well, I want to get your perspective. So as an investor, would you prefer a high market cap to NAV or a low market cap to NAV?

Ram: I think you're going to say, Brian, "I want a high market cap to NAV because I can go accumulate the underlying spot." That's number one. Now the irony obviously is that you get more value with a lower market cap to NAV. So there's this reflexive property at work, and I think that game only works so long as the DAT has momentum. And when momentum breaks, you better get out of the way.

And the funny thing is, if you trade below market cap to NAV below 1, you're an acquisition target. If your market cap to NAV is very high and you do an acquisition, I believe that that asset price would drop. So I think this is more complicated - there is a very complicated kind of game theory that plays out.

Brian: I have so many thoughts. So high versus low NAV - it all depends on where I think my NAV is going in the future. If there's one DAT that trades at 2 times, one that trades at 5 times, if I think there's going to be convergence, I'd rather buy the cheaper one. If I think they'll stay where they are, I'd rather have the one trading at 5 times because their issuance is going to be more accretive.

And then for me, it kind of all boils down to risk-reward. Like if we trade at 1.6, 1.7, I look at 1 times as the floor, and then we're going to trade with some sort of beta to Solana. So the risk-reward is that Solana moves up very considerably. In times like that, our NAV will likely move up as well.

So Sol Strategies was trading at 1.5 times NAV back in December - it was a different market, there were many fewer options - but that can show you where these NAVs can go to. And then when you do trade at these higher NAVs, you can do more and more accretive issuances for the benefit of shareholders. You add in all those things and they kind of compound.

Versus like what is the downside? Maybe we drop down to 1 times, maybe SOL falls 50%. And so for me, it's just this very asymmetric risk-reward, which is why I've placed all my bets in that land essentially.

Altcoin Outlook and Market Dynamics

Steve: Alright, this is a really good conversation, but we do need to take a quick break to hear from the sponsors who make this show possible.

Steve: So I want to turn to some of the tokenization news that we've seen in the past, but I just want to go around the panel really quickly. Where does the altcoin movement go from here? One chart that has been circulating on Twitter - I'm sure you guys have all seen it - Bitcoin's market dominance is around 58% and change or so. I know during the peak of the COVID-driven boom, etc., it drops down to like the low 40s, even below 40. Not necessarily saying that history is going to repeat itself, but it does suggest that this rotation out of Bitcoin into alts has some more room to grow.

Brian, for someone like you, I mean that could be open season for perhaps Upexi's investors. But Chris and Ram, I mean this is sort of the time when guys like you also make your money. So maybe Chris, let's go to you first. I mean what do you think - where do you see us in this current altcoin cycle, and what are your goals in the next couple of months?

Chris: Very bullish alts right here. A lot of it is predicated on the regulatory de-risking that we're seeing. Even in the absence of clarity, you're seeing like yesterday that CFTC and SEC announced coming together to work to allow spot tokens to list. And so that crystallization of alts as largely commodities is going to be a nice unlock.

And I'll give you some alpha - what I'm looking for, and I think one of the biggest things to watch for as alt unlock, are listed futures in the US. Because as these tokens start having listed futures, you know immediately that they're a commodity because as you go through the process, the SEC didn't hold it up. It unlocks basis trading, right, where people go long spot, sell the future, and when you do that, spot goes up. It unlocks ETFs because what do ETFs rely on for surveillance? They rely on the futures market.

So the one thing to watch for are alt futures coming into play - listed futures in the US - because again, it's like the missing link for a lot of institutional buyers of DATs. Now we have some initial SOL futures for people like Brian, but as we go down the curve, I think this is going to be something that I'm looking for. I think it's going to happen now with the regulatory certainty that we're starting to see, and we have great conversations with regulators all the time. That's going to be huge.

And so aside from that, I think that we're seeing incremental focus on fundamentals. There's good projects, there's bad projects, and there's ugly projects. We'll continue to look at fundamentals, but I do think that we're starting this education process. It's so important with the DATs - people are going around saying "this is ETH, okay, this is what Solana is." And as we go down, investors are like "wait a second, these are different, they're nuanced. I like the utility of this token because it's at the intersection of AI and crypto - that makes sense to me."

So I'm very bullish, and I think we have a long way to run.

Brian: Yeah, for me I would say that thinking about it in the exact same way. Over the medium term, near term, I agree with Tom - it does seem like risks are mounting. Like national debt concerns, sticky inflation, tariff uncertainty, elevated valuations. But we've been dealing with these for a while, and so I kind of think like near term, altcoin prices will go the way of macro and policy risks.

Long term, I am supremely bullish. My view has always been that the biggest thing holding crypto back is a lack of clear rules and regulations. I think that we are probably going to get that with the Clarity Act sometime next year. I think that generally, incumbent big tech and big finance firms haven't really wanted to come into crypto and disincentivize themselves, particularly if it adds legal and regulatory risks.

But now, once we get regulatory clarity, they're going to have to come in in a big way. It's all these big incumbent firms that - this is a bit antithetical to crypto - they literally have billions of customers, they've got built-in trust, they've got billions of dollars worth of capital to throw at it, and they have the top developers. This would be something like Google Chrome adding in a crypto wallet, or something like Amazon adding in accepting stablecoin payments.

And we actually have the opportunity to potentially onboard the masses. And so I think we could potentially be on one of the biggest altcoin booms that we've seen over the medium to longer term.

Chris: Great point. So you have the DATs that are buying, you have trillions of dollars of stablecoins coming in that are buying, and then you have 401(k)s coming in that are structural buyers for the first time. That's pretty powerful.

Ram: I appreciate the macro noise - that's always gonna - I'm on the other side of macro. I'm actually on the bullish side of the macro, by the way, just to be clear. I think rates are coming down, I think that's bullish. I think fiscal deficits are bullish. Income tax cuts for sub-$50K are coming - that's bullish. There's some indigestion around tariffs, but markets are looking through all of that. Retailers which import from China, they're up substantially. So I'm actually bullish on the macro stuff. There's a couple of weeks to sort out in September, so timing matters.

I agree also on - and Chris, you made this point actually the last time you were here about "hey, after the stablecoin boom, you get the DeFi boom." I think that thesis is right on the mark. I like that thesis. I like that thesis in spot.

Ethereum has momentum though. These are digital assets, these are momentum - it's all about momentum. Momentum is the measure of the attention. And one last thing I'll say there is the person with the biggest megaphone for onboarding new flows - as Chris's point is flows, flows, flows - the person with the biggest megaphone is Tom Lee, not the guitarist.

Steve: That's right, the heavy metal guy.

Ram Ahluwalia: It is Tom Lee who might be going on Joe Rogan's show, and what is he talking about? Ethereum. Attention follows a power law distribution. Keep it simple - what has momentum, what has attention, what benefits from regulatory clarity, what's been highly shorted and is now transitioning from non-consensus into momentum? It's Ethereum.

If you look at the Ethereum price chart, you wouldn't guess that people feel despondent and there's that malevolence out there, right? You wouldn't guess that. You look at that chart - oh no, people are happy, they're sitting pretty.

But I like Chris's point though, especially around that DeFi thesis. Look at Aave - it's a leading DeFi protocol on Ethereum, it's doing fantastic.

Chris Perkins: Yeah, but after DeFi, they're gonna go to the agents, right? Because you can manually try to optimize your yields - this is the whole Stablecoin thesis, right? One of the greatest gifts to crypto was that the regulators and the banks suppressed interest, because now you got to find yield. You got to go to DeFi and you got to realize "okay, I can do it, I'm okay with it," but my agent over here - we invested in a company called Giza AI Agents, they're awesome - let's let them do it. They can do it better because they're awesome at optimization.

So that narrative is coming together nicely.

Fed Policy and Macro Outlook

Steve Ehrlich: Ram, I wanted to ask you a question about the macro outlook. I think I know the answer, but I'm gonna ask it anyway because you tend to say things are "nothing burgers." But just given the tumult at the Fed - what's gonna happen with Jerome Powell? Obviously Trump is trying to fire Lisa Cook, and I guess we're gonna have to wait for the Supreme Court to decide what's happening there.

Ram: Nothing burger. Sorry, no one cares. But I wanted to get you on the record, but I kind of knew - what matters most? I know the answer is gonna be already, but I still have to do it.

In the long term, what drives asset prices? Earnings growth, the level and change of interest rates, the level of change in inflation which drives policy.

In the short term, what drives asset prices is positioning and incremental news flow. So that news around that termination is short-term incremental news flow - it's negative, it gets priced in, and then you move on. That's it.

Every buyer of an asset bought that asset fully informed about the background news information - that's what causes the pricing in.

The fundamental backdrop is strong. We just dropped a quarter with exceptional earnings growth, and we have more stimulus coming and rate cuts the economy doesn't need, which is bullish. I disagree with the policy, but I'm bullish.

I have exposure to small caps and rate-sensitive names and things like homebuilders now and consumer discretionary stocks because the backdrop is bullish and the consumer is strong. It is a strong consumer.

Yes, it's a bifurcated economy. Yes, there's pressure on the low end of the consumer - always was, always is. What matters is the top one-third - they drive two-thirds of spending on average consumer spending.

You can see utilization in different areas - travel and leisure, airlines. Banks are lending again. Bank lending activity is increasing. Bank deregulation is still coming - that's stimulative. They're talking more credit creation.

You're seeing private credit firms compete for deals. I talked to a sophisticated bank that essentially is like a private credit fund wrapped within an FDIC-insured charter, and they're starting to say no to deals because there's so much availability of credit now. At some point that's bad, but it's not now.

We're not seeing delinquencies flare up. Things are actually quite reasonable, and credit begets more credit. The cycle just keeps going. There's no external pressure to stop that from happening.

Galaxy's Tokenization Breakthrough

Steve: Why don't we turn to tokenization, because there was some big news this morning that we were talking about on Telegram. Galaxy tokenized some of - or sorry, they did not tokenize some of the shares, they just directly issued shares onto the Solana blockchain in partnership with Superstate.

I know that Chris, that got you particularly excited because there was no sort of middle layer - it was just a native issuance. And I think the hope is that that will be the future. So why don't you share some of your thoughts?

Chris: Yeah, disclosure - we're investors in Superstate. Good friends with Rob Lesner and the team, and gosh, this is a guy who decided to start a regulated asset manager and transfer agent in the depths of the Gensler era of destruction.

Fast forward to today - this is a big deal because today what we've had is we've had this idea of tokenization of RWA. As a banker, I hate RWA so much I can't begin to tell you because it's slang for risk-weighted assets and it gives me PTSD. I'm sure we're going to screw up the acronym here.

But the way it used to work in the past - and this is how stablecoins largely work as well - is you take an asset, you put it in a box, you issue a token to represent that asset, and then you set it off into the ecosystem.

But this is different because it's canonical. You don't have this stock that's locked up in a box in a Bank of New York custody account and then you issue a token on that represented asset. No, this is canonical. This is a canonical digital asset that we've actually taken a share, and that's the only representation of that share. This is a big deal.

When you put it on blockchains and they use Superstate as the transfer agent, it's regulated. And when you speak to people like SEC Chair Atkins, he's like "hey, we need to make IPOs great again, we need to make capital markets great again, we need to make them more accessible." What is more accessible than a public blockchain?

And this was issued on Solana. Incredible job. Solana's always tried to position itself to be the decentralized NASDAQ. What a great step forward for that team and that ecosystem.

So now you have these assets - they're not perfect, this is a great first step, and I would say this is an improvement of what we've seen in the past. I'm also very excited about the tokenization of private equity.

But this wasn't like some SPV where you're getting some piece of the SPV and blah blah blah. This is a true stock - a tokenized equity.

Now you can't trade it yet on AMMs. There's this thing called Regulation NMS - there's an NBBO. What this means in simple terms - National Best Bid Offer - is that equities need to get routed to the best price on an exchange. And if you have an AMM and you have the traditional system, they kind of don't talk.

So I think the SEC is going to work through some of those challenges on what we call Reg NMS. But you can transfer these stocks peer-to-peer for people that have gone through the right onboarding process, and this is the beginning of unlocking this global internet to buy assets like equities. I'm hugely excited.

Last thing I'll say because I could go on forever - I get too excited. The IPO market cap last year was like $30 billion. The meme coin market cap was like $140 billion. It's an apples-to-oranges relationship, but we're soon going to be able to unlock the superpower of blockchains - transfer agents - and that's capital formation.

Capital Formation and Market Structure

Ram: Well, I mean capital formation - that gets me turned on. So yes, we need more capital formation. The registration and listing costs for public markets is way too high. The on-chain activities that are done by firms like Security Ties through Reg ATS and all this stuff is just trying to mix TradFi with permissionless networks - it doesn't work.

So the direction of travel is good. I think Galaxy's move is mostly symbolic. You get 24/7 trading - that's the main unlock. But the symbolism means you can get more to come.

The funny thing about this actually - I took my family to the beach this weekend, and as one generally does on a holiday, you dream up different things. I actually posted this on Twitter - I said "should Lumida..." So actually, like Robert Lesner, I started Lumida as a digital asset wealth manager in the bottom of the bear market. And the first thing we did is with SEC Chair Arthur Levitt - he criticized Gary Gensler in October 2022, and then we said digital assets need a regulatory framework.

And fast forward, here we are. So I wrote "should we tokenize the equity on-chain" on August 31, and then I see this news from Galaxy like "oh shit, something's in the water."

Second thing it means - I had no ideas are original. Chris, you know this as a VC guy - someone has one idea, somehow the magic of consciousness or whatever it is, I have no idea, 100 people all around the world have the same idea at the same time. It comes down to execution.

So I have no doubt we're going to see a lot more of this happen. I think it's mostly symbolic. What I'd really love to see is a way to get a permissionless market going that provides an unlocking of participants.

The things are sort of there - you got to have sanction screening, you got to make sure North Korea cannot get involved, right? Like these DeFi pools that are engaging this market.

And there's really fascinating things happening like Credit Coop. I don't know if Chris, you've taken a look at that - what they're doing to finance Rain Card, which is a credit card that lets a crypto native spend and they tap into the digital asset wallet on-chain, right? You can finance that on-chain. You can make a deposit and get a 14% yield on-chain - that's amazing.

That's a bank on-chain. You can deposit on-chain, get a 14% coupon, fully collateralized with T+2 duration risk. You get liquidity in two days. That's incredible - that's a mispriced short-duration high-yield asset. But it's all permissioned, and it's a step in the right direction though, same thing with Galaxy.

If you look at SEC Chair Paul Atkins about three weeks ago, he gave a speech - and this follows Hester Peirce's speech about a month ago, and it was timed a week before Fed Governor Bowman's speech - and both were pro-innovation. And Paul Atkins specifically called out tokenization and the rise of the super app, and Bowman also talked about tokenization as well.

So the regulators are starting to - they've already announced, signaling the market "hey, we're gonna get out of the way if it's lawful and compliant."

So moving into that world now, you're gonna see 200 fintechs - they already applied for OCC charters like Anchorage. Dozens will be approved in the next few months.

So I think Galaxy is very symbolic, but there's more to come behind it, and we need more permissionless frameworks to unlock the next level.

The Liquidity Challenge

Steve: I just want to build on that, Ram, because I think you made an important point, and Chris, you did too. Solana obviously is a permissionless blockchain, but Superstate is very permissioned.

I followed tokenization for a long time - I'm sure all of you have - and I can't tell you how many pilot projects I know this is not a pilot project, but of tokenizing some sort of credit instrument or whatever, and there could be a huge 9-10 figure top-line number, but there's no secondary market, there's no secondary liquidity because these things are siloed.

And I'm curious - I'm not sure what the process is in order to break down that barrier. Maybe we need a lot of companies to agree to issue on Superstate or some version of it, or something else at the same time, or prioritize those trading ties. But how do you do that? Because that's the key to unlocking this.

Chris: I have the answer. So what did we just do with stablecoins, right? How is this different than stablecoins? Yes, with stablecoins you lock them up, but the issuer has a duty to KYC and AML, and then the person that receives them - and then based on the activities of that individual, if you send your securities to North Korea, you're going to get in trouble because it's based on behaviors and activities, right? That's the stablecoin model.

And yes, they have freeze and seize, but does it really work because of latency? I don't know. But I think when you step back and what we're seeing right now, it goes back to what Brian's doing - this is a massive convergence trend, right? We're taking equities and we're canonically making them tokens. We're taking tokens and we're turning them into equities with the DATs, right?

So my question for Brian is: when are we going to tokenize and issue your debt canonically on-chain? And by the way, that all have different economics.

Upexi's Tokenization Plans

Brian Rudick: We have announced it. So yeah, two thoughts. One is I couldn't agree more with you guys on everything you're saying on tokenization. In my opinion, finance is built on antiquated rails. Stablecoins are literally just RWAs or tokenized dollars. It works on ACH, which was created 50 years ago. And even fintech is just this front-end wrapper that if I sent you 10 bucks with Venmo, it would use ACH on the back end.

Blockchain and tokenization reimagines the rails themselves. And then the second big thing is finance is rife with intermediaries - that's why DeFi has been this big thing. And so this can help us remove all these rent-extracting intermediaries that we really don't need given where technology has progressed to.

And then second thing is we have announced our intention to tokenize Upexi equity via Superstate. In case it's helpful, there were really two main reasons why we chose to do it with them:

One is just exactly what you said - so direct issuance of stock on-chain for global access, not a wrapper, which can fragment liquidity between wrappers. It's not restricted to just US, and also holders are getting the exact same legal and economic rights as traditional equity. So that was one big reason.

And the second one is we are hyper-focused on compliance and legal and regulatory risk. Superstate is doing everything exactly correctly - they're dotting every I, crossing every T. They're an SEC-registered transfer agent, they're working on regulatory clarity with the SEC via things like Project Open.

When you tokenize equity via Superstate, it has strict compliance with securities laws. So they have these allowances in terms of who can actually access your tokenized equity and who have actually KYC'd. And so we got very comfortable working with them to eventually put Upexi equity on-chain.

The Force Function for Adoption

Steve: I'll tell you what I'm really interested in - Chris, I understand your point about regulation and so on and so forth, but I'm waiting for one company to just put everything on-chain, especially one major company that would essentially force anyone who wants to own that share to engage in the on-chain economy.

Like imagine if Tesla decided to just completely go on-chain. At that point, I mean how many of us own Tesla shares even indirectly through ETFs? We would be forced to participate. I'm not quite sure what that would take, but I almost wonder if that's what it's gonna take - or like a hot upcoming company, I mean Palantir is obviously not up-and-coming anymore, but something like that that would essentially force the hand as opposed to a nice-to-have.

So Brian, we're waiting for - I'm waiting for a big announcement from you guys that you're delisting from the NASDAQ and just going completely on-chain. But I wonder if that's what it's gonna take.

Final Thoughts and Contrarian Takes

Steve: All right, so Ram, you know, and Chris may remember from the last time you were on the show, I always like to wrap up by giving each guest a chance to share something that was left on the cutting room floor, or if you have some sort of interesting contrarian opinion that you're dying to get off your chest and start a Twitter fight about, I'm all for that too.

Chris, why don't you go first?

Chris: I think we're in the period - the golden age of convergence. That's Galaxy equity. Now's the time institutions are coming in, and I think my contrarian take is that the one thing that's preventing further progress beyond this, as I said earlier, is a lack of futures - a lack of listed US futures - because they solve so many things. That's what I'm focused on.

Steve: And then in the coming weeks to launch - actually, if I could push you on that, because I mean there are futures for obviously Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, I think XRP too, barely yet. What are there - two or three assets in particular that you have your eye on?

Chris: Everything beyond those four. Seriously, this unlocks everything. It'll unlock ETFs, it's going to unlock basis trading, it cements them as commodities. This is what's needed next. This is one of the most important - we have a massive gap in the United States because, and honestly this was an SEC issue, they prevented exchanges from listing that. It looks like the window's starting to open, and that's what's needed. That's the missing link, and that's what needs to be solved for.

Steve: Okay, Ram, would you like to go next?

Ram: Well, I was just looking at the report for American Eagle - that was the Sydney Sweeney thing - that thing is up 24% after the close. So that's just evidence of these non-consensus ideas, like retailers that were beaten down on tariffs working. I expect that to continue to work.

I think the mortgage refi concept we talked about a few weeks ago - like Better Mortgage - still own both of those names. I think that's going to keep working too.

On digital assets, I think it's a timing thing. You just gotta wait a few weeks. It really depends on most of the data now. I would position for a rally through November - it's just you got to time it. Time it well. There's just some chop to get through.

Steve: Mr. Rudick?

Brian: Yes, I will stick to DATland because that's what I think about all day, pretty much. And yeah, maybe I'll talk about how many DATs can potentially work.

I think that I'm somewhere in between Chris and Ram. So my view is that only three to five different assets can really work over the long term for a DAT, and that there's only going to be three or so companies within each DAT that can really compound NAV and create value for shareholders over the long run.

The thought behind this is 95% of altcoins are down 95% over five years, and the biggest determinant of any DAT's success is going to be the underlying performance of the token that it's underpinned by.

And so I do think that a lot of these trades can work out - someone can come in at one times, see it move to two to three times when the registration statement goes effective, you sell, and it works out to be this really great annualized return almost regardless. But I think if you're looking for these long-term winners, it's probably going to be far and few between of these companies that could potentially come close to replicating MicroStrategy's success.

And just for me, I have two quick fun things, I guess. One, Ram, I know you are the king of the "Nothing Burger" - I tend to be a little more risk-averse, especially when it comes to stuff at the Fed, given everything happening with Lisa Cook, etc.

But it got me - I was watching an episode of The Office last night, and Nellie, the woman from one of the later seasons, came in, took Andy Bernard's job as office manager, and tried to use surplus authority by giving out everyone raises despite having tenuous authority to do so. And Dwight was going in to get his raise, and Jim looked at him and said "Dwight, you know it's not real," and Dwight looked right at the camera and said "Money hasn't been real since we went off the gold standard in 1971." And I thought that was pretty funny and reminded me why Bitcoin and crypto is so valuable.

And then two, for all NFL fans out there, welcome back to the season. For what I hope are millions of listeners in the Philadelphia area - go Birds!

Steve: And with that, thank you everybody for watching and listening. Thanks to Ram as always, and Brian and Chris for joining, and we'll be back next time with another episode of Bits and Bips.