Chronicle CEO: RWAs Will Lead The Next Bull Market (Biggest Wave Ever)

**Niklas Kunkel** (0:00)
Chronicle actually is spun out of MakerDAO. Myself and Mariano Conti actually created the first Oracle on Ethereum. Our goal was to build DAI.

**Andy** (0:08)
How do people get exposure to the tokenization movement?

**Robbie** (0:12)
What are you doing with BlackRock? What are you doing with BNY?

**Niklas Kunkel** (0:15)
We just wanted to build a decentralized stablecoin.

**Andy** (0:18)
Niklas Kunkel, founder of Chronicle and a key builder of decentralized Oracle infrastructure. Chronicle powers high integrity data for on-chain finance with deep roots in the Maker ecosystem and a focus on transparency, resilience and security. Niklas Kunkel, helping define how trustworthy data enters decentralized systems.

**Niklas Kunkel** (0:36)
I agree with that, but I'm a little bit biased because I helped design it.

**Robbie** (0:41)
Welcome back to The Rollup.

**Niklas Kunkel** (0:42)
I'm Andy.

**Robbie** (0:44)
We are in New York City. It is SmartCon week. We are here with Nick Kunkel of Chronicle. Nick, welcome to the show.

**Niklas Kunkel** (0:51)
Thank you for having us.

**Robbie** (0:52)
It's been a long week as you can hear from my voice.

**Niklas Kunkel** (0:56)
We spent the last two days at SmartCon, Rob, doing live streams, interviews, having conversations.

**Robbie** (1:02)
I've never been at a conference where DTCC, JP Morgan, BlackRock, the Fed, the White House, all in one area at a crypto event.
I put out this tweet, I think, last night. It was basically like, there's a really weird dynamic happening in the market right now, where over the last 48 hours, I've never had more bullishness from institutional capital allocators, the largest brands in the world on digital assets. While simultaneously, the price action currently as well as the sentiment in the more crypto native circles is down. It's apathetic. It's what are we doing here?
Monat is not going to be a good project. It's a scam. It's that L1 is dead. Why do we need new chains? We don't need more DEXs. What are we even doing here? There's this complete divergence in the market. How do we even explain this?

**Andy** (1:52)
I think the question is which one is real? Which do we believe? The bullishness that's happening off of Twitter, off of the charts, maybe inside of the rooms where business is being done, or do we believe crypto Twitter sentiment?

**Robbie** (2:06)
When you put it like that, I mean.

**Niklas Kunkel** (2:09)
I mean, I think crypto Twitter is usually like a looking back type of indicator rather than a looking forward indicator. Institutions are much less subservient to these short-term narrative cycles for these types of projects to be green lit for the enormous capital outlays that go into doing these projects, to be allotted. There needs to be a real tangible plan backing this. It's really irrelevant if what BTC is doing and what ETH is doing. I think this distinction that you pointed out is so important though.
Primarily because ETH and BTC and general alt markets going up or down has usually been correlated with the ebb and flow influx of retail. And I think this was kind of the first secular kind of cycle, right, where it was almost entirely institutional driven, right? I mean, even with DATs, right? DATs were not a retail driven phenomena, right? It was a very institutional driven phenomena, right?

**Robbie** (3:37)
Definitely.

**Niklas Kunkel** (3:39)
Same thing with asset tokenization, right?
And I think that's also why kind of we didn't have like an alt market, right? This cycle, right? It wasn't crypto protocols, right? For the most, you know, besides something like a pump dot fund, right? That were really generating all of the revenue, right? It was more, okay, there are these institutional products that are being tokenized, right? And it's the same classic business model, right? There's a management fee on these products, right? And we allocate into them on chain, right? But it's almost like that value escapes, right? So it kind of makes a lot of sense, right? Because retail is not seeing the upside, why they would be down, but as a space, right? I mean, the amount of growth and collaboration between, like you mentioned, right? Government institutions, financial institutions, and kind of crypto, particular DeFi, right?
It is like hyper growth at the moment.

**Robbie** (4:48)
We were saying, it feels like 2025 is like this line in the sand type of year. And Yano said this on a podcast I was listening to earlier today as well, where you're really earning your seat at the table, right? Like the table is being formed of the winners in terms of the market, right?
And obviously, we're at SmartCon the last two days. Chainlink is probably somewhat competitive with what you guys are doing. We can talk about that.