Is Crypto Security at 'Max Vulnerability'? Chris Perkins Thinks So

Austin Campbell (0:00)

Yeah, it's creating this framework where you need to have bet not just on something on the frontier, but the right thing on the frontier, because I see a totally plausible future where five years forward, OpenAI is bankrupt, Anthropic is bankrupt, and AI is taking over the world.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Bits and Bips, where we explore how crypto and macro collide one basis point at a time. We're here today to discuss the latest stories in the worlds of crypto and macro. But before we begin, a quick commercial break.

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Austin Campbell (1:27)

All right, welcome back. I am your host, Austin Campbell, High Scholar of Zero Knowledge Group, here with my co-host, Chris Perkins, the golden hand of Franklin Crypto. We'll see if Ram is joining us today or not. And before we begin, as a reminder, we have our own channels now, sign up for those. So Chris, let's start with Token 2049 You were there, here's what I saw from the outside. 25,000 attendees, day one was very crypto native, day two, much more tokenization, news that came out of it. Tom Lee said he won't hold more than 5% of ETH supply, currently he holds about 4.9%.

That could have some implications. Polymarket floated an on-chain asset tied to its economy with quote, real programmable utility, no ticker launch date though. Token2049 is coming to the US next year, June 16 to 17

Coinbase, fully integrating Deribit, it is now Coinbase Global Exchange, a 30 billion BTC options market eligible to US institutions via Prime. There was a tokenization panel with Fidelity, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, ICE, Bitwise, Franklin Templeton's own Jenny Johnson opened the day with Binance's Richard Tang. OKX and ICE were talking about their SEC filing. So this is a lot going on.

I wanna just throw it over to you to have a discussion about what were you seeing there? What was important there? What was going on? What was most interesting?

Chris Perkins (3:13)

Yeah, Austin, for those of you who have never been to Token 2049 before, it's like no other conference. 25,000 people all in Singapore. And remember, there was also Milken going on at the same time. You had the F1 going on. So it was just like, I think BlockWorks had an aside event. There were, I think, a thousand side events.

So it was just like massive and overwhelming in many cases. As you go into the conference, it's like literally like this humongous conference center in Singapore, five floors, the main events on the fifth floor. You got to fight your way up to the top. There are booths everywhere. And so Crypto is alive and well. There's incredible energy. I think during the Gensler era, that event really took on a lot of product market fit because everyone realized that a lot of the activity was offshore. So it just started like building and building. And so it really attracts the who's who of Crypto. You mentioned Tom Lee. I did a panel with him and Jenny Johnson, guys like Arthur Hayes, like the who's who of the Crypto industry shows up. So the first thing about it is energy is as high as ever, a lot of excitement, a lot of just mass focus, right? I was walking through Jenny Johnson with her and she's like, this reminds me of mutual funds when they first came on the scenes like way back decades ago. That's how it feels. It feels like innovation, right?

Key takeaways, you mentioned tokenization.

There was an absolute convergence happening.

Everyone's talking about tokenization. I was talking about tokenization. Bloomberg was there, so you have this convergence theme that's continuing to go very, very strong. Tom Lee was there. He said, it was pretty funny. He's just like, yeah, I'm almost there to my 5 percent. You're like, why aren't you going to go higher, Joe? He's like, well, the EF doesn't want me to go higher. But then you talk to some very serious people in the Ethereum Foundation and they're like, you know what, we don't mind if you go a little higher. So we'll see what happens there. He had a pretty big bullish call to like, he remains bullish as ever, so he was in good form. But there were just so many other people, Arthur Hayes out there talking about flop, his new thing, but the HUSU folks were there.