The Biggest Digital Assets Opportunity Nobody Is Talking About

**Robbie** (0:00)
Friend of the show, been on several times. Absolute pleasure, as always, to have the man, the man.

**Andy** (0:06)
What's up, Santi?

**Robbie** (0:06)
The inverter.

**Andy** (0:08)
How are you, buddy?

**Santiago Santos** (0:09)
I haven't died. You guys still haven't, you know, gone tired of me.

**Andy** (0:14)
No, I know.

**Robbie** (0:15)
I bring you the coffee so that I can enjoy it every time.

**Andy** (0:17)
I think we're trolling you a little bit today. I think the marketing team put the headline as, is Santiago the biggest crypto bear on the planet?

**Robbie** (0:27)
The biggest crypto bear in crypto.

**Santiago Santos** (0:28)
I've heard a lot of things. I have not heard that.

**Robbie** (0:30)
Okay.

**Andy** (0:31)
Well, today you have no angel checks this year. Tokens are not going to perform as well as equities. The once prominent angel investor sitting in front of us is at DAS, not wearing a suit.

**Santiago Santos** (0:45)
Not wearing a suit.

**Andy** (0:46)
I mean, what's going on, Santiago? How are you, man?

**Santiago Santos** (0:49)
I'm sort of like a chameleon. You sort of constantly re-invite yourself so that no one can just pin you down. Look, I've survived this long.
But no, I'm not a, I don't know what you guys want to talk about, but I'm not a pyramid bear. I continue to believe a lot of tokens are just uninvestable. But that doesn't mean that there's a ton of adoption. I came in yesterday at 9 a.m. There was a line that looked like TSA, and there was a lot of institutional crowd. I can tell you, how many of the folks here do you think is their first time attending a crypto conference? Yeah, right.

**Robbie** (1:23)
Decent chunk of them. Yeah.

**Santiago Santos** (1:25)
I mean, I'll tell you, that to me is like, the sign of the times is we look across the room. There are a lot of people here that are coming here not to buy a token, not to understand what token to buy, but more so the CEO of their company told them, guys, you got to get your shit together. I mean, just at the CEO of Western Union, you know how I feel about Western Union, and I was like, how real is Western Union about stable coins? And I think if you heard him on stage, it would be something along the lines of, it feels different than a pilot. And from what I've been told is, I'm excited to see how they report that through their P&L over the next year. I think they're going to save a couple billion dollars on the float. I think they're going to, which is crazy, because you would have heard the CEO go back to call transcripts as early as two quarters ago. He was like, I don't believe in stable coins. I don't think it's real, very different.

**Robbie** (2:16)
What do you think changed his mind?

**Santiago Santos** (2:18)
Probably the competitive landscape.

**Robbie** (2:21)
The institutional FOMA.

**Santiago Santos** (2:22)
I mean, he's looking at Visa, jumping the space. He's looking at MasterCard, do you want a larger acquisitions? BlackRock.
So I did an analysis in looking at every single stock, the day that they started talking about crypto, and then when they implemented it. If you look at the stocks that are, most of those early adopters were founder-led companies. Generally, founder-led companies just do well, better than the traditional company. But that basket of public company stocks has vastly outperformed the S&P. Yeah.

**Andy** (2:56)
Since we last spoke, there was this really interesting integration in the S&P 500 with Hyperliquid and Trade XYZ. This is kind of like the one token that you keep leaving out of your kind of basket of bearishness.
I don't mean to put you on the spot here. But what do you make of this kind of 24-7 tokenized trading growth? Like, is this something that you think is an accelerant to bringing new assets on chain, trading on chain? Like, how do you reason about this trend and then investing into this kind of inevitability, it feels like?

**Santiago Santos** (3:36)
Well, I remember sitting down with you guys, DAS, like in Brooklyn. I told you guys I was long volatility. I continue to be long vol. So how do you express that thesis? Crypto sits at that intersection. Young generations want to trade. They want to trade all the time. Prediction markets are just one expression of that, right? The second of that is, when you say, we've always had this like 24-7, 365 DeFi market, but the reality is not everyone wants to trade your tokens. But they want to trade commodities because they see Stan Druckenmiller go up and say, you got a long copper, and then silver did what it did a couple of months ago, and now oil is front and center, given geopolitical tension. So hyperliquid has just become that venue, and I haven't seen the numbers, but I'd be really curious. I could probably say the amount of volume that's coming in. There's now over 1.3 billion of open interest on commodities after HIP3. Super impressive. I think that 10x or 100x in a year.