Hyperliquid Strategies CEO: Hyperliquid Is Extremely Undervalued (...And What Comes Next)

**Robbie** (0:00)
Ladies and gentlemen, we are live from the Tokenization Tower. David Sheamus, welcome to the Nest.

**David Schamis** (0:04)
Nice to be here.

**Robbie** (0:05)
It's good, not a bad view, huh?

**David Schamis** (0:07)
It's pretty awesome, yeah, it's a great view.

**Robbie** (0:09)
You're a local New Yorker, New Jersey.

**David Schamis** (0:11)
I am a New Yorker. I live on Long Island, a town called Sands Point, but I've lived in the city for 11 years. Cool. And I grew up on Long Island, so I've been a New Yorker my whole life.

**Robbie** (0:23)
Great, man, great. Well, I'm sure you've been to the Empire State before.

**David Schamis** (0:26)
I have.

**Robbie** (0:27)
Obviously, not here, but it's good to have you. It's good to be here.

**David Schamis** (0:30)
My first job was at Salomon Brothers at Seven World Trade Center, one of the buildings that went down.

**Robbie** (0:35)
Of course.

**David Schamis** (0:36)
And my view was exactly the opposite.

**Robbie** (0:38)
Exactly the same.

**David Schamis** (0:39)
So it's kind of cool to face the opposite direction.

**Robbie** (0:41)
Yeah, man, great. Good. I mean, what a couple of weeks for the world, for markets. CEO of Hyperliquid Strategies, David, give us just a quick update on your progression here into Hyperliquid Strategies. I think a lot of our audience and folks will know you, but how did you get started? And what is the state of Hyperliquid Strategies?

**David Schamis** (1:01)
Yeah. So I think everyone knows, or at least some people know, Hyperliquid Strategies were the largest debt for hyperliquid. We own something like 18, a little more than 18 and a half million tokens right now. That number will be growing over time. And we got involved in this about a year ago, a little less.
So my career has been almost entirely financial services, private equity, completely TradFi, with one exception, which I'll get to in a second. But, and I'm the co-founder of a firm called Atlas Merchant Capital. Bob Diamond, the former CEO of Barclays, is the other co-founder. He's the CEO on the CIO. About, call it 10 months ago, we got turned on to hyperliquid by some friends of ours, partners of the firm. And the real argument they came to us with is that the world probably doesn't need another Michael Saylor knockoff, right? Bitcoin probably doesn't need another debt. But look at hyperliquid, it actually kind of needs a debt.
The world needs it. There's a scarcity value. We can go through this in more detail if you want, but hyperliquid at the time and even still now is not easily traded in the United States. It's only really traded on chain. And for people that look at it and it's sort of equity-like features that it has, and again, we can get into that, there's a real need for a debt. There's a real need to be able to simply buy the token or the equivalent of the token in a regular way equity account on your Fidelity or Charles Schwab or Robinhood. So we spent kind of May and June sort of investigating that and really figuring out if that was true and how we felt about that. All the while, we learned more about hyperliquid. We got ourselves more excited. Along the way, we had heard through some reasonable sources that Paradigm was looking to do the same thing. We got introduced to them. It was kind of a match made in heaven pretty quickly. The things we lacked, they were really long in, and the things they lacked, we were really long in as far as partners together here. We went from sort of shaking, meeting for the first time, to shaking hands, in two weeks, three weeks, not a long period of time.
We set out in mid-June to raise $300 million for this idea. By early July, we announced a deal of $888 million. So obviously, a very successful fundraise when you're almost triple what you expect. I think that proved to us at least that others besides just us believed that the world needed a Hyperliquid debt. We closed in December. You'll notice a long gap between Sony and closing. And it was a different kind of structure. Lots of people contributed hype tokens to us, not just cash. We did that in a tax-free exchange. I'm not going to bore you with the details unless you want to hear it. But the big difference between us and most other debts is because we had that long period of time between Sony and closing. Once we closed, we didn't have that crazy unlock where the stock gets clobbered because all these people get to sell their shares. The day we closed, everyone's shares were already fully tradable. And that drama didn't happen. So we never had to go through that.